Time to retire the 3930k?

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JCD3ntonX

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I have a 3930k on a Rampage IV extreme running at 4.3 ghz, with a pair of GTX 1080 in SLI. Haven't decided what I'm going to do on the GPU front, whether I'll keep the 1080s or go with a 1080 ti (or maybe even two, but I'm getting tired of poor or nonexistent SLI support, especially in VR games and microsoft games like Forza Horizon 3).

Is it time to upgrade yet, or should I be primarily GPU bound at 4K? What percentage gain (on a single core basis) would I get moving from 3930k at 4.3ghz to a 7700k at 5.0ghz taking into account the clock speed increase and IPC? I'm having a hard time comparing IPC across so many generations.

I don't want to upgrade just to upgrade (mainly because the Rampage IV extreme is such a good, stable board and it's always rolling the dice getting something new), but I'll do it if there's a legit gain to be had.
 
JCD3ntonX said:
Is it time to upgrade yet, or should I be primarily GPU bound at 4K? What percentage gain (on a single core basis) would I get moving from 3930k at 4.3ghz to a 7700k at 5.0ghz taking into account the clock speed increase and IPC? I'm having a hard time comparing IPC across so many generations.
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Zero.. at 4K you will have null difference with that CPU at that speed... the main gains you will receive from the upgrade are related to the platform itself, newer features, faster RAM, PCI-E 3.0 for SLI actually matters, but you decide how much of this platform upgrade worth to you.
 
I dont think you maximum fps will be as different as your minimum fps or game play will be affected positively by the upgrade. It's what I've noticed with a lot of the current generation videocards. There is odd stuttering despite great high frame rates on older gen chips and current low to mid end chips with the high powered cards.

So my opinion is you won't see crazy high fps difference but you will have a pleasent experience on general game play
 
There's no real reason to upgrade that yet, or your video cards (unless the 1080TI is /that/ impressive)

You wouldn't see enough difference to matter.
 
Your CPU has more life in it still, you might want to wait for a year or two and just get that 1080ti, I used to be a cross fire user with three 6950's in tri fire and I rarely got the benefit of having multi GPU's in game in many cases the crossfire make thing worst but burdening the CPU with extra workloads and being generally incompatible. So upgrade to a powerful single card solution like to 1080 ti or Titan XP, maybe wait to see what vega has to offer you never know, as for you CPU i would wait for a year or 2 see what happens with Ryzen and the new intel socket coming out i think it was 2066 LGA or something like that.
but that's just my humble opinion.


hope that helps :)
 
I know the pain. I've got a rampage IV, 3960x, and 32gb of ram. I *want* to upgrade, but x99 is too old and Z270 just doesn't have the features I want. Have you tried to push your 3930k any further? 4.3 seems a bit tame. I'd keep your current motherboard / cpu and push your overclock as far as you can. Personally I'd sell the 1080s and move to a single 1080ti, I swore off SLI and crossfire after my R9 290s, I swear 90% of the games I wanted to play disabled crossfire or performed worse if I didn't disable it.

Looking at benchmarks it looks like the added overclocking headroom of sandybridge negates most of the improved performance of broadwell. Most of the results indicated that a sandybridge chip needs 500-600mhz higher clock to hit roughly the same score as a broadwell chip. At any rate, that's the route I've decided to take, though I'm only rocking a single 1080 (and will probably keep it rather than move to the ti). Hopefully x100 / lga2066 / whatever the hell intel calls the next iteration of x99 is released (and worth the upgrade) when I eventually toast this computer.
 
trentchau said:
I dont think you maximum fps will be as different as your minimum fps or game play will be affected positively by the upgrade. It's what I've noticed with a lot of the current generation videocards. There is odd stuttering despite great high frame rates on older gen chips and current low to mid end chips with the high powered cards.

So my opinion is you won't see crazy high fps difference but you will have a pleasent experience on general game play
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What ram speed and how many channels are you running on the rigs you noticed stuttering on?

From my experience, the higher RAM speed and more channels seem to keep the stuttering to pretty much 0.

And that is part of the reason I have kept to the high end setups in the past number of years. x58 and then x79.

Triple channel on x58 was a stutter mess in certain games until you got past 1333. It really, really liked higher though.

And before that I was on an p45 setup. RAM and FSB speeds made a huge impact on smoothness even if it didn't affect the max fps a ton.
 
cyclone3d said:
What ram speed and how many channels are you running on the rigs you noticed stuttering on?

From my experience, the higher RAM speed and more channels seem to keep the stuttering to pretty much 0.

And that is part of the reason I have kept to the high end setups in the past number of years. x58 and then x79.

Triple channel on x58 was a stutter mess in certain games until you got past 1333. It really, really liked higher though.

And before that I was on an p45 setup. RAM and FSB speeds made a huge impact on smoothness even if it didn't affect the max fps a ton.
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Unfortunately I'm trying to find the youtube link where some people have gotten stuttering issues. I believe it started from someone testing a g4560 and noticing that using a higher end gpu like the 1080 created odd hiccups in gaming as the cpu wasn't keeping up with gaming.

On my computer I haven't really experience said stuttering issues unless it's hard drive related, even my 4930k at 4.4ghz on x79 seemed okay when paired with a 980. My current 5960x seems to be fine, but I also play very low end games such as smite.

You might be right concerning memory speed being the factor.
 
No upgrade needed. Spend your money elsewhere. You'll not notice a difference.
 
trentchau said:
Unfortunately I'm trying to find the youtube link where some people have gotten stuttering issues. I believe it started from someone testing a g4560 and noticing that using a higher end gpu like the 1080 created odd hiccups in gaming as the cpu wasn't keeping up with gaming.

On my computer I haven't really experience said stuttering issues unless it's hard drive related, even my 4930k at 4.4ghz on x79 seemed okay when paired with a 980. My current 5960x seems to be fine, but I also play very low end games such as smite.

You might be right concerning memory speed being the factor.
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What is this craziness you are referring to with older chips and stuttering on a 1080? Is this from a youtube video? C'mon?
 
thesmokingman said:
What is this craziness you are referring to with older chips and stuttering on a 1080? Is this from a youtube video? C'mon?
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It started with this video for me -

I was curious how the the little g4560 was doing cause I'm that uncle that buys the nephews their new gaming rig, and was aiming to replace the g3258 thats in my nephews computer. As I watched this review video of the g4560 being used as a gaming machine and the reviewer noticed how the 1080 had stuttering issues when paired with the low end pc.

Unfortunately this lead me into going into forums and stuff and reading more.

Concerning my personal experience with stuttering on high end cards, unfortunately most of it is memories of certain builds that have long ago transitioned away. The lowest end machine I have in the house right now is a i7-2600k and it has a 1050 on it and we don't really game on it. My 5930k with a 1070 on it does sometimes have odd frame drops but I don't think it relates to this.

Going back to the initial posters post, the reason I mentioned the experience might be better is related to minimum framerate. A video like this (please ignore the annoying music) shows that not only are their gains on max fps (which is honestly a useless benchmark imho) but an increase in minimum fps which is important -
 
trentchau said:
It started with this video for me -

I was curious how the the little g4560 was doing cause I'm that uncle that buys the nephews their new gaming rig, and was aiming to replace the g3258 thats in my nephews computer. As I watched this review video of the g4560 being used as a gaming machine and the reviewer noticed how the 1080 had stuttering issues when paired with the low end pc.

Unfortunately this lead me into going into forums and stuff and reading more.

Concerning my personal experience with stuttering on high end cards, unfortunately most of it is memories of certain builds that have long ago transitioned away. The lowest end machine I have in the house right now is a i7-2600k and it has a 1050 on it and we don't really game on it. My 5930k with a 1070 on it does sometimes have odd frame drops but I don't think it relates to this.

Going back to the initial posters post, the reason I mentioned the experience might be better is related to minimum framerate. A video like this (please ignore the annoying music) shows that not only are their gains on max fps (which is honestly a useless benchmark imho) but an increase in minimum fps which is important -
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You realize that is dual core krabby lake pentium, and it is pretty new like 2017? That is the lowest end cpu just about that. Look at the video, the cpu is pegged the whole way thru. There's is no guess work involved. The reviewer says its more prone to stuttering, wtf? Its called a cpu bottleneck, geeze youtube strikes again. With the 1050ti and Pentium, the balance was good, even... with the 1080, the load has shifted to the cpu, hence the Pentium's inability to match the 1080 gpu. Again, this is no surprise.
 
thesmokingman said:
You realize that is dual core krabby lake pentium, and it is pretty new like 2017? That is the lowest end cpu just about that. Look at the video, the cpu is pegged the whole way thru. There's is no guess work involved. The reviewer says its more prone to stuttering, wtf? Its called a cpu bottleneck, geeze youtube strikes again. With the 1050ti and Pentium, the balance was good, even... with the 1080, the load has shifted to the cpu, hence the Pentium's inability to match the 1080 gpu. Again, this is no surprise.
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Note what I wrote ". There is odd stuttering despite great high frame rates on older gen chips and current low to mid end chips with the high powered cards."
 
#1
I honeslty dont get the question about whatever to upgrade CPU is not.

it takkes 5 minutes per game to measure it exactly for your games and ysmte and resolutions.
You would have the exact knowledge before the first person repply with a guest/estimate


simply do this

1: download and run process explorer
2: start your game
3: dblt click your games process in process explore and go in under "threads"
4: go back to the game and paly around keeping an eye on the number in process explorer

if at anytime one of those threads hits 100%/numbers of logical cores. than you have a CPU bottleneck'ing core speed and need a cpu with faster cores
if you dont but you see a total CPU usage on 98%+ than you need a faster CPU in either corespeed or number of cores


Not only do you know if its time to upgrade your CPU this way but also what type of upgrade benefits you
 
SvenBent said:
#1
I honeslty dont get the question about whatever to upgrade CPU is not.

it takkes 5 minutes per game to measure it exactly for your games and ysmte and resolutions.
You would have the exact knowledge before the first person repply with a guest/estimate


simply do this

1: download and run process explorer
2: start your game
3: dblt click your games process in process explore and go in under "threads"
4: go back to the game and paly around keeping an eye on the number in process explorer

if at anytime one of those threads hits 100%/numbers of logical cores. than you have a CPU bottleneck'ing core speed and need a cpu with faster cores
if you dont but you see a total CPU usage on 98%+ than you need a faster CPU in either corespeed or number of cores


Not only do you know if its time to upgrade your CPU this way but also what type of upgrade benefits you
Click to expand...

I'm not entirely convinced that 100% reported usage means you are out of CPU headroom. 100% means different things in different situations. Case in point: Premiere Pro. If you have a dozen cores Premiere will show 100% usage on all of them, but in reality the cores beyond the fifth or sixth one aren't doing any work, and don't improve performance.
 
thesmokingman said:
What is this craziness you are referring to with older chips and stuttering on a 1080? Is this from a youtube video? C'mon?
Click to expand...

Also I don't wanna say my observations are the de facto standard, it's just my observation from building numerous generation builds the last few years because they were here and putting various video cards in it and also casually watching videos that had intriguing insight into differences of using certain gpus with certain cpus.

Like this small snippet in this video - Watch at 4:31



when paired with a 980ti the i7-2600k actually had a dip, with a gain in a ivy lake, and more gains with current gen consumer i7s.

But when the 970 was added all the cpu's levelled out.and all their frames rates were the same.

This doesn't happen on all games, and since I have no idea what games the original poster plays my assessment above might have zero bearings on what he plays.

From my experiences also using higher end gpus paired with older architecture there has been a bigger gap in minimum framerates compared to more current generation systems. Thus the comment above that I don't think the OP's will see significant upgrades to frame rates on the higher end of his fps by going to a 7700k, but I think his game play experience overall will improve the next few years if he moves to k lake. But I will point out also that the differences between 4k and 1080p note that the processers tend to stay within the same level of performance so the whole point might be moot.
 
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bwang said:
I'm not entirely convinced that 100% reported usage means you are out of CPU headroom. 100% means different things in different situations. Case in point: Premiere Pro. If you have a dozen cores Premiere will show 100% usage on all of them, but in reality the cores beyond the fifth or sixth one aren't doing any work, and don't improve performance.
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Well i would love to reply to this but you are beeing very non descriptive in what you are talking about
100% usage on all of them. The core or in the threads? Thats are very different thing to look at and where most people do it wrong.

Maybe a screenshot would make it easier to explain it.
 
I would say frame times are more important then actual FPS. Min frames can be effected by loading at times.
 
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