4930K vs 8700K Upgrage Opinion

[Sevilla]

I used to be the guy who after every new generation of CPU/GPU, I'd upgrade everything, motherboard, GPU, CPU, RAM, etc. Eventually I became an adult (though to be fair, I was an adult back then, but finances became clearer) and I stopped upgrading every year. I decided to be a bit more sensible and began upgrading GPUs every other gen, but felt my CPU/mobo/RAM would suffice for a good 3 to 4 years.

Well here we are 4 gens later and I am sitting with a PC with the following specs:

i7 4930k 6 core
16GB of 2400MHz G.Skill TRIDENT DDR3 RAM

ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition
GTX 980

I won't list the rest of the components because the cooling/PSU/HDD/SDD setup are trivial in this.

I am considering moving to a:

8700k 6 core

16GB of (insert MHz here) DDR4 RAM

(insert board here that will cost me around 100-150ish)
GTX 1080

 

Back when I built my machine in 2014 I had a pair of 780 TI Classified cards (not sure why) but I gave them up for a 980 which has server me well for years.

So the question is would you upgrade? Why or why not?

Before everyone says "Bruh that CPU won't bottleneck your GPU AT ALL" know that I have been an enthusiast for eons, and have overclocked all hardware I've owned and I'm not a novice at this--so try to be kind and not berate with the Captain Obvious hat. I am merely asking for opinions. All benchmarks I've seen of older CPUs (usually 4 core 2nd gens) usually are lower by a few frames here and there, and even so I don't game/nor plan to game at 4K anytime soon.

I know upgrading it to just a 1080 would probably be comparable for the most with an 8700k, but given how old the system is, and given how I can probably make some decent cash by selling most of my components (though i'd still probably lose 200 to 400 depending on how kind buyers are) is it worth it to upgrade or would it be wiser to wait another year and upgrade then?

Some things to keep in mind:

1. I am not a pro-gamer, but game many hours per week. Mostly WoW/Overwatch/Heroes/GTA5/other games.
2. I am a sysadmin and run my own homelab, so any heavy workloads I typically offload on my server, this PC is 100% for personal/entertainment use.
3. I am not a content creator/streamer (which is why a 6 core is/was overkill, but I'm a PC guy, I don't have a fancy car, but I like having a fancy machine).

4. I run triple 1080p panels, at 60Hz (feel free to laugh at me). I don't intend to upgrade them anytime soon.

What I am MOSTLY looking for is some sound opinions because my system has served me well for almost 4 years now. Should I pull the trigger on upgrading now and build for another great 4 years (except the GPU getting upgraded maybe 2 years after), or wait for next gen GPUs and overhaul the entire thing?

Most* feedback is welcomed!


*except trolls
 

[Crunchy Dragon]

Are you having any problems with your current PC? If yes, then upgrade to an 8700K. If no, stay where you are.

 

Also it is true that your CPU wouldn't bottleneck a 1080 at all

[bakidota]

4930k is bad for gaming im sure 4770k beats it from the same generation, yeah get an 8700k and experience them huge gains at 1080p gaming

[Projex]

1080 will help you with your triple monitor-ness, but your current system is fine since you will be using 60hz monitors

[3 Lions]

1 minute ago, bakidota said:

4930k is bad for gaming im sure 4770k beats it from the same generation

The 4770K is based on Haswell but the 4930K was based on Ivy Bridge-E  

[Sevilla]

Just now, bakidota said:

4930k is bad for gaming im sure 4770k beats it from the same generation, yeah get an 8700k and experience them huge gains at 1080p gaming

I actually originally had a 4770k for gaming when I overhauled my 2600k build, but back then I was a bit more ambitious and after owning a perfectly good 4770k/board combo and went for the 4930k. I benchmarked them both and I got some significant gains with the 4930k but obviously in the CPU-intensive department of all benchmarking software. Gaming-wise it performed near identical if not pulling ahead by a frame or two.

[Crunchy Dragon]

2 minutes ago, bakidota said:

4930k is bad for gaming im sure 4770k beats it from the same generation, yeah get an 8700k and experience them huge gains at 1080p gaming

Same generation, different platform. The 4930K is on the X79 platform, 4770K is on Z87

[Brooksie359]

Honestly the 8700k would last a very long time for a gaming pc before it starts to bottleneck. Even then I doubt that it will ever have a hard time hitting 60 fps. That being said your current cpu probably doesn't have an issue hitting 60 fps in games so I am unsure if you need to upgrade now.

[3 Lions]

2 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Same generation

Wrong...

 

4770K: Haswell

4930K: Ivy Bridge-E 

 

Remember extreme editions use older generation micro-architectures

[Crunchy Dragon]

1 minute ago, LinusTechTipsFanFromDarlo said:

Wrong...

 

4770K: Haswell

4930K: Ivy Bridge-E 

 

Remember extreme editions use older generation micro-architectures

Oh shoot that's right I totally missed that lol.

[Sevilla]

To reply to a couple of questions:

Yes, my current machine is running perfectly fine. 0 issues as of right now.

The only thing I wish my board would support is m.2 PCIe drives, but it doesn't. Dual RAID 0 SSDs are hitting 1000/1000 speeds so it's not too bad.

Also, I'm more considering the upgrade for "future-proofing" it for the next 3 years (yes, I said that bad word that shouldn't be said in the world of PCs).

[Crunchy Dragon]

2 hours ago, Sevilla said:

To reply to a couple of questions:

Yes, my current machine is running perfectly fine. 0 issues as of right now.

The only thing I wish my board would support is m.2 PCIe drives, but it doesn't. Dual RAID 0 SSDs are hitting 1000/1000 speeds so it's not too bad.

Also, I'm more considering the upgrade for "future-proofing" it for the next 3 years (yes, I said that bad word that shouldn't be said in the world of PCs).

1: No reason to upgrade then

 

2: I'm pretty sure you can find PCIe to M.2 or SATA 2.5" to M.2 adapters.

 

3: If that's your only reason for upgrading, it's not a really good one Your current rig should last another couple years(although you could certainly upgrade the GPU)

[Sevilla]

My board doesn't support the use of PCI-E M.2 adapters...already looked into this.

[Noshido]

This thread is old, but I wanted to help any with this question now. I have both a 4930k and a 8700k. I have done a ton of bench marking with both of them and in games they are hardly any different at all. Both systems running 32gb of memory, both on SSD's, both windows 10 pro and both using the GPU. That said I am running a 3440x1440 res, so the cpu is almost never the bottleneck anyway. If your running less than that on these chips your not going to be having any issues either though. Both systems are using 1080 ti's so the gpu isn't exactly much of a bottleneck either. Yes the 8700k is faster, but only by a tiny margin in real world performance. Synthetic bench marks tell a different story, but I find them to be completely irrelevant when the real world results are exactly the same. There is zero reason to upgrade from the 4930k. 

[MegaTechPC]

On 1/2/2018 at 1:07 PM, Sevilla said:

-snip-

I know this is an old thread but here's my opinion despite the fact that you probably already pulled the trigger by now.  I too have an OC'd 4930K (4.6 GHz) with 16 GB of DDR3 2133 MHz and I have still to this day failed to find a reason to upgrade my platform/CPU.  My 4930K simply still does everything I need it to do and more, and I have suffered no significant performance issues that would cause me to want to spend the money to upgrade to a new platform.  Now let me say that I am still currently rocking a pair of OG Titans (pretty similar to your original 780Ti's but free of memory limitations) and I'm using a couple of 27" Korean IPS 1440p monitors so I realize that CPU bottlenecking should not be an issue in the first place given my personal setup, but I really feel that a 1080 would not massively cause CPU bottlenecks on this 4930K either given its robust 4.6 GHz OC (though I could totally be wrong about that, in my own testing I have confirmed that these SLI Titans at my OC of 1300 MHz are still mostly faster than a single 1080 in most all of the situations where I'm not suffering from SLI-scaling issues or lack of support).  In fact I feel that the move up from 2133 MHz DDR3 to 3000+MHz DDR4 would probably net more significant gains than simply the switch from 4930K to 8700K.  

 

All that said, there is no question that a similarly clocked 8700K is definitely much more powerful than a 4930K which is obvious.  My point is that I've always felt that you should never feel a need to upgrade a system until there is an important task (be it gaming, editing, etc) in which your current system simply doesn't provide satisfactory performance.  As I said, that is still not the case with my setup, so I have not been compelled to consider an upgrade yet, even though I understand that the newest hardware is certainly faster.

[gbergeron]

On 1/2/2018 at 1:07 PM, Sevilla said:

-snip-

It will be a nice upgrade on the cpu and the gpu

Depends on if you feel you are lagging with your setup and need to upgrade or if you just dont care about the cash go for it

[rukspuks]

If I were you, and I'm not you off course haha, I would not have upgraded that system. You have fast 6 cores running perfectly. I would wait till ice/tiger lake and re-assess my chances. The only reason you would want to upgrade is that of lower power consumption which I don't think you care about.

[Rambo]

I would, and did upgrade to a GTX1080 and an Ultrawide 1440p G-sync monitor. I have a 3930k clocked at 4.2 GHz. 

[Sevilla]

On 6/16/2018 at 9:01 PM, MegaTechPC said:

I know this is an old thread but here's my opinion despite the fact that you probably already pulled the trigger by now.  I too have an OC'd 4930K (4.6 GHz) with 16 GB of DDR3 2133 MHz and I have still to this day failed to find a reason to upgrade my platform/CPU.  My 4930K simply still does everything I need it to do and more, and I have suffered no significant performance issues that would cause me to want to spend the money to upgrade to a new platform.  Now let me say that I am still currently rocking a pair of OG Titans (pretty similar to your original 780Ti's but free of memory limitations) and I'm using a couple of 27" Korean IPS 1440p monitors so I realize that CPU bottlenecking should not be an issue in the first place given my personal setup, but I really feel that a 1080 would not massively cause CPU bottlenecks on this 4930K either given its robust 4.6 GHz OC (though I could totally be wrong about that, in my own testing I have confirmed that these SLI Titans at my OC of 1300 MHz are still mostly faster than a single 1080 in most all of the situations where I'm not suffering from SLI-scaling issues or lack of support).  In fact I feel that the move up from 2133 MHz DDR3 to 3000+MHz DDR4 would probably net more significant gains than simply the switch from 4930K to 8700K.  

 

All that said, there is no question that a similarly clocked 8700K is definitely much more powerful than a 4930K which is obvious.  My point is that I've always felt that you should never feel a need to upgrade a system until there is an important task (be it gaming, editing, etc) in which your current system simply doesn't provide satisfactory performance.  As I said, that is still not the case with my setup, so I have not been compelled to consider an upgrade yet, even though I understand that the newest hardware is certainly faster.

Sorry for reviving this old thread, but wanted to get a few replies in:

For starters, yes, I pulled the trigger and upgraded my entire system. Everyday performance is the same, gaming is a bit better I guess? But by far the most important thing I gained from swapping things was power consumption/heat generation. My old system was chugging power, I think I'd go to almost 400W+ if I was playing Overwatch or anything mildly intense.

With my current 8700k system with GTX 1080, I consume maybe 220ish watts total? The reason why this mattered is because I work/play (mostly work) on my desktop daily. And the lower generation of heat and less power consumption was huge for me.

It was worth it for me, and the silver lining was I managed to gain back roughly 80% of my expenses to buy the whole new system by selling my old one. 

[Coaxialgamer]

Honestly you won't see a very significant difference by upgrading . A 1080 would not be limited by that cpu.

Plus an OC would basically bridge that gap.

[Sevilla]

1 minute ago, Coaxialgamer said:

Honestly you won't see a very significant difference by upgrading . A 1080 would not be limited by that cpu.

Plus an OC would basically bridge that gap.

Performance difference was negligible, i'm a sysadmin and don't do any sort of video production so I doubt I'd ever feel the net benefit from the newer CPU. I've ran the 4930K OC'd but the heat generation and power consumption were always a problem.

Gaming was similar, I gained roughly the same about of FPS I expected from upgrading a 980 to a 1080 on both machines.

[gbergeron]

Wait for Intel's new line up

 

8 core 16 thread

 

 

Not worth to upgrade now your system is fine

[DarkSmith2]

From someone who upgraded from an i7 2600k i can say, man it was a huge jump for alot of stuff to get the 8700k. didnt expected such gains since most revisit videos and reviews are showing that an i7 2600k is still fine for gaming though, also people in forums tell the same shit they see on youtube.

 

But reallity is that in CPU-Bound titles like close to every online multiplayer game its just FPS x2. And there is a huge really huge improvement in stuttering/frametimes. An indepth frametime analysis shows a massive difference in architectures before and after Skylake. I dont know what else to say about neglible performance increases over the past years and the general opinion that CPUs doesnt improve much over time. Sorry but most people are so wrong including techtubers.

[Mattias Edeslatt]

14 hours ago, gbergeron said:

Wait for Intel's new line up

 

8 core 16 thread

 

 

Not worth to upgrade now your system is fine

 

Nothing personal to you, @gbergeron, but why don't people read before they answer, @Sevilla has already bought new parts, he is merely reporting back and let us know and to share his thoughts on the upgrade, if it was worth it and so on. All respect to @Sevilla for following up. Wish more would do that.  

[gbergeron]

14 hours ago, Mattias Edeslatt said:

 

Nothing personal to you, @gbergeron, but why don't people read before they answer, @Sevilla has already bought new parts, he is merely reporting back and let us know and to share his thoughts on the upgrade, if it was worth it and so on. All respect to @Sevilla for following up. Wish more would do that.  

my bad buddy, well said I should have stfu

 

cheers