Upgrade CPU?

[Tuckplace12]

Hi

So I am wondering if I should upgrade. I am thinking yes but I want to hear what others thought. I have a i7-7490k on an ASRock Z97 Pro4 with 16 GB of DDR3, a GTX 1080ti and 4 SSDs. I do a good bit of gaming but I am starting to get very heavy into things like rendering. I do have my CPU on a AIO and I am able to push it to 5GHz. Its not entirely stable there of course so I keep it at 4.7, at which it is very stable. I got a score on Cinebench of 885. It doesn't seem over clocking did much. Is it worth upgrading or should I hold out for something like Zen 2 or buy something like a 1700x or an 1800x and roll with that? I don't have a very large but flexible budget for this. It also, compared to other benchmarks, seems like my CPU is bottlenecking my GPU. Any thoughts?

[Cereal5]

Benchmarks are synthetic and don't put a real-world load on your CPU. The 4790K is still a pretty good CPU and the real world differences between it and Kaby Lake are minimal (Coffee Lake is obviously better only because of core count). I would try to squeeze another 1-200 MHz out of it if you can, depending on temps, and roll with it at least until Zen 2 comes out. No point in buying a 1700X just to get whatever CPU comes out in 6 months. Sounds like a solid waste to me. Zen 1 prices will tank when Zen 2 comes out, most likely, so resale probably won't get you close to what you'd buy it for now.

[Eastman51]

7 minutes ago, Tuckplace12 said:

Hi

So I am wondering if I should upgrade. I am thinking yes but I want to hear what others thought. I have a i7-7490k on an ASRock Z97 Pro4 with 16 GB of DDR3, a GTX 1080ti and 4 SSDs. I do a good bit of gaming but I am starting to get very heavy into things like rendering. I do have my CPU on a AIO and I am able to push it to 5GHz. Its not entirely stable there of course so I keep it at 4.7, at which it is very stable. I got a score on Cinebench of 885. It doesn't seem over clocking did much. Is it worth upgrading or should I hold out for something like Zen 2 or buy something like a 1700x or an 1800x and roll with that? I don't have a very large but flexible budget for this. It also, compared to other benchmarks, seems like my CPU is bottlenecking my GPU. Any thoughts?

If you want to upgrade now, go for Zen+ CPUs, such as the 2600x or the 2700x. But Zen 2 might bring the prices on those down more, not to mention RAM is still expensive. 

Whatever you do, don't go with a 1700x or 1800x (not because they are bad CPUs per say, they are just a little outdated with the launch of the 2700x and such earlier this year).

[Tuckplace12]

1 minute ago, Eastman51 said:

If you want to upgrade now, go for Zen+ CPUs, such as the 2600x or the 2700x. But Zen 2 might bring the prices on those down more, not to mention RAM is still expensive. 

Whatever you do, don't go with a 1700x or 1800x (not because they are bad CPUs per say, they are just a little outdated with the launch of the 2700x and such earlier this year).

Thanks, I saw the ram prices. I knew that they had gone up but not that bad, I really need an upgrade to get work done so I will probably go for the 2700x. I doubt this but maybe I will be lucky and zen 2 will run on the same socket just as the new Rome cpus run on the same one the ones that came before did. So if I happen to need another upgrade I can always jump up. 

[corrado33]

The 4790k is a good cpu, and it has hyperthreading, so better for rendering than a non-hyperthreaded variant. Overclocking should have done a ton. When I overclocked my 6600k I gained ~200 points, which is huge. I'd imagine it'd be more with a hyperthreaded CPU. 

 

Honestly I wouldn't bother upgrading yet. The performance difference between what you have now and what you may buy will not be super significant, unless you spend a very decent amount of money.

[Eastman51]

Just now, Tuckplace12 said:

Thanks, I saw the ram prices. I knew that they had gone up but not that bad, I really need an upgrade to get work done so I will probably go for the 2700x. I doubt this but maybe I will be lucky and zen 2 will run on the same socket just as the new Rome cpus run on the same one the ones that came before did. So if I happen to need another upgrade I can always jump up. 

AMD made a major transition with Zen 1 when they introduced the AM4 socket. Zen+ is still running on it, and its new enough that AMD won't be scrapping it anytime soon. Even if they did, AMD has a history of backwards compatibility so....

[Tuckplace12]

Just now, corrado33 said:

The 4790k is a good cpu, and it has hyperthreading, so better for rendering than a non-hyperthreaded variant. Overclocking should have done a ton. When I overclocked my 6600k I gained ~200 points, which is huge. I'd imagine it'd be more with a hyperthreaded CPU. 

 

Honestly I wouldn't bother upgrading yet. The performance difference between what you have now and what you may buy will not be super significant, unless you spend a very decent amount of money.

I got like 50 Cinebench points to go from stock to 4.7GHz. Only an extra 30 to go to 5GHz but it is only somewhat stable at that. 

[Cereal5]

11 minutes ago, Eastman51 said:

If you want to upgrade now, go for Zen+ CPUs, such as the 2600x or the 2700x. But Zen 2 might bring the prices on those down more, not to mention RAM is still expensive. 

Whatever you do, don't go with a 1700x or 1800x (not because they are bad CPUs per say, they are just a little outdated with the launch of the 2700x and such earlier this year).

Uh... RAM has almost halved in price in the past year. It used to be over $160 for 16GB, now you can get a kit for just under $100.

 

10 minutes ago, Tuckplace12 said:

Thanks, I saw the ram prices. I knew that they had gone up but not that bad, I really need an upgrade to get work done so I will probably go for the 2700x. I doubt this but maybe I will be lucky and zen 2 will run on the same socket just as the new Rome cpus run on the same one the ones that came before did. So if I happen to need another upgrade I can always jump up. 

Just go with a 2700 and spend the extra on a better cooler, you can OC the 2700 to the same as a 2700X. But like I said earlier I think it's best you just wait for Zen 2 to release, because it's been rumored that zen 2 will be 10%+ faster per clock than Zen+ (which was only about 3% increase over Zen 1, though the memory controller issue was the big fix).