Upgrade Advice - 2600K - Can it still cut it?

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Apr 20, 2017
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Hi everyone,

I use to frequent this forum before life took over, kids came along, work and the such.

My old 2600K rig was starting to have some issues with Early Access games I want to get into. Specifically Battlegrounds.

I've been gaming mainly on the PS4 Pro, so Ultra settings aren't really a must to me. If anything I have to lower settings for the purpose of streaming.

Money is pretty tight so I have to be careful.

Current setup.

2600K @ 4.5 Ghz. Idle temps 30C , load around 48C on average. (Noctua NH D14 cooled)
8GB Ram @ 1600mhz - Mushkin Redline
Geforce Titan (the first Gen)
Asus P8 P67 Pro Rev 3
Asus VG236H 120hz monitor
Dell old thing 60hz second display

Win 10 64 bit running off a Samsung 830 SSD.
OCZ Vertex 2 SSD for Steam (Both testing at Good health 99%+ in Crystal Disk Info)


Needing a boost I have just pulled the trigger on a couple of bits.

ASUS STRIX GTX 1070 O8G + DVI to DP Cable
HyperX Savage 16GB (2x8GB) 1866Mhz DDR3 CL9 Ram (HX318C9SRK2/16)

Ram info here: http://www.kingston.com/datasheets/HX318C9SRk2_16.pdf

Questions....

1) Will this breath more life into this rig? 60fps is the mission at 1080p

2) Is the RAM likely to be ok? I can see the single modules for this set work fine with this mobo according to Kingston.

3) Have I made a mistake?

Thank you so much.
 
I think if you're streaming you're going to want more horsepower in the CPU. The 2600k is nice, but it's getting a bit old. If you were just gaming alone, it'd probably be fine for a bit longer. Streaming can be a bit more strenuous though.

Review here: https://www.hardocp.com/article/2017/01/13/kaby_lake_7700k_vs_sandy_bridge_2600k_ipc_review for comparison..

Remember too that a new build will support faster memory, more USB 3.0/3.1 ports, m.2 SSDs, etc. And you'd be able to OC a new chip a lot higher than the 2600k.
 
It appears it will have to wait, and I will need to make do with what I have. Finances are stupidly tight.

More living in hope that this ram kit will work now.

For streaming I will be using a higher bitrate NVENC now that Twitch has loosened it's limitations, and I get transcoding most days.

Hopefully next year the Ryzen platform will be more refined and Intel will fire something beefy back.
 
I made the jump from a 2600k to the 7700 and it totally blew out my expectations... exceeding them. So for me it was worth it.
 
If this article's any indication, playing something heavily CPU and memory bandwidth-limited as ArmA III is going to yield some major improvements coming from Sandy Bridge.
http://techreport.com/review/31410/a-bridge-too-far-migrating-from-sandy-to-kaby-lake

That said, even though you can't justify an upgrade right now, we're coming up to that point where you might want to consider one soon, once finances permit. That goes double if the rumors of the new chipset to go along with those Coffee Lake CPUs finally implements USB 3.1 and other modern platform amenities missing on Sandy Bridge systems (which don't even have PCIe 3.0 or native USB 3.0).
 
Thing is, though, [H]'s own comparison between the 2600k and 7700 show little compelling reason to upgrade. Synthetics are only a 20-ish % improvement, games at low res to make them CPU-bound show even less, and users who've made that upgrade report even less improvement (on high end GPUs playing games at normal gaming resolutions). If Coffee Lake is yet another quad core consumer chip, it may only be worth the upgrade for the amenities you (NamelessPFG) mentioned, not necessarily for the performance boost.

Now, if the rumors that Coffee Lake gives us a 6c/12t LGA 1511 chip... That is likely to be a worthy successor to a Sandy CPU. We won't know until closer to Fall, though.
 
You listed your goal as being 60fps at 1080p. I see no reason why a 2600k @ 4.5Ghz with a gtx 1070 wouldn't hit that. So I'd stick with the 2600k for now if that's the only real goal you're worried about.
 
Thing is, though, [H]'s own comparison between the 2600k and 7700 show little compelling reason to upgrade. Synthetics are only a 20-ish % improvement, games at low res to make them CPU-bound show even less, and users who've made that upgrade report even less improvement (on high end GPUs playing games at normal gaming resolutions). If Coffee Lake is yet another quad core consumer chip, it may only be worth the upgrade for the amenities you (NamelessPFG) mentioned, not necessarily for the performance boost.

Now, if the rumors that Coffee Lake gives us a 6c/12t LGA 1511 chip... That is likely to be a worthy successor to a Sandy CPU. We won't know until closer to Fall, though.
Yeah, and [H] didn't benchmark ArmA III, let alone DCS World, PlanetSide 2, or anything else infamously CPU-limited. The latter two are the wake-up calls that told me a few years back it was time to retire the Q6600, and so here I am with a 4770K.

Then again, I did notice one thing in the TechReport article: that 2700K was only running at 4.2 GHz, well short of what most people claim to be able to push a Sandy Bridge chip to (around 4.8-5 GHz). It's that overclocking headroom that's kept Sandy Bridge viable for so long, and Ivy Bridge and Haswell had noticeably less overclocking headroom despite the IPC improvement. I can just manage 4.6 GHz on a 4770K on water, pushing around 1.4V before the poor thing starts overheating. Maybe it's due for a delid. (And if you think that's losing the silicon lottery, you don't wanna imagine the 4670K I had before that; just 4.2 GHz had me pushing 1.3V or so to keep it stable!)

It's also speculated that ArmA III also benefits from one other thing that yields negligible to no improvement in most other games, and that's memory performance. DDR4 allows for much faster RAM. That could be contributing as much or more to the performance difference there than the step up from Sandy Bridge to Kaby Lake.

Whatever the case, it's clear that at least for a few applications, there are some noticeable benefits to stepping up from Sandy Bridge. Whether they're noticeable enough to warrant effectively spending hundreds of dollars on a new computer is another question entirely.
 
I moved from a 2500K @ 4.4 to a 7700K @ 4.8.

Daily / normal browsing, etc has no noticeable difference. Gaming the minimum FPS seems better and smoother, but I haven't taken any benchmarks or anything, so judge that as a personal perspective data point. Encoding Video, etc is much faster on the Kaby Lake.

Also you have a better (newer) platform with Z270 as well. I haven't purchased one yet, but NVME SSDs are remarkably fast. Yeah, you could get PCIE cards, to add things like NVME and USB 3.1C, but then you are spending $40 for a card here, and $30 for a card there. The money at a certain point is better spent on a new platform.
 
I went from a 2600k at stock speeds with 16gb of ram.. and my gtx 1070 video card to what I have now.. and the performance difference is noticeable.

It was such that I went from 1080p gaming to 1440p just to utilize the extra headroom I now had.
 
The 2600k will do fine if your holding out for something. To be fair, everyone is having issues with "Battlegrounds".

The only time I feel like my processor sucks is for encoding. Most other tasks it handles fine.
 
I upgraded from 3770k @4.7 Ghz to 7600K @5 Ghz and I am honestly happy (I only upgraded CPU+MB+RAM and it cost me like ~50 euros (I sold my system for a lot more than it was worth locally)). I do notice huge difference in emulators (dolphin and cemu and PCSX2 need that single thread performance) and windows boot time and power usage (it is around ~20 watts lower but it may be down to motherboard). Generally I think it is worth it to upgrade now because old intel processors are still sought after and system can be upgraded at minimal cost :)
 
Battlegrounds shits on most systems unless you have a 1080ti. Even then you may still notice dips.

I play on a first gen i7 Xeon x5675 @4.3, 24GB, 1070 and I get 40-60 FPS average. I may peak at 100 at times.

PUBG uses about 4GB of system memory. I see about 9GB total of system memory in use while in game. 16Gb will defiantly help along side a 1070.

I'll upgrade my entire box once Volta comes out.
 
lol i just started playing PUBG with my 1080ti and ive seen about 6-7gb of ram usage for the game exe alone after a good match. usually falls back to 3gb at the menu. But i can tell you it has its choppy parts for me as well. Hopefully they actually keep working on the game and the guy doesnt leave again to make a 4th king of the hill game after making tons of money.
 
It very well may use 6-7 for me too. I just noticed 4GB when alt tabbed at the menu.

Game has made this guy a millionaire, currently grossing $60/million. I see him supporting this game for at least 2yrs before moving onto his next project.

From mod maker to millionaire. FML an congrats to him.
 
I'm still rocking my 2700k @ 4.9 GHz. It has been rock solid at that speed for over 5 years now. I recently got a 1080 ti and it keeps up just fine. I'm not CPU limited in anything I play. I am dying for a new build, but just can't bring myself to spend the money for 20% better benches and negligible gains in gaming.

That said, if the new i9-7820x clocks to 5.0 GHz consistently and is under $750, I'll probably go for it.
 
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Same boat here. 2500K @ 4.3GHZ and 16GB ram at 1600 speeds. With myself gaming less and less I have zero interest is getting a new system. In my entire life I have never had a platform last so long. This mobo and cpu combo is going on 5-6 years now! Sandy Bridge was/is the new Q6600.
 
Tahoe look at the last broadwell chip and then the i9-7820x you will probably have a $750 chip with another $1000 for good measure.
 
I just recently upgraded to a 1700 ryzen from my 4.6ghz 2600k. It is so much smoother and minimum frames are great now, no more hiccups or stutters on my 980ti @ 1400P

7700k isn't that large of an upgrade. going from 4c/8t to 8c 16t is so much more noticeable. Also games will be higher threaded than 4 core, sorry 770k
 
I just recently upgraded to a 1700 ryzen from my 4.6ghz 2600k. It is so much smoother and minimum frames are great now, no more hiccups or stutters on my 980ti @ 1400P

7700k isn't that large of an upgrade. going from 4c/8t to 8c 16t is so much more noticeable. Also games will be higher threaded than 4 core, sorry 770k

Your number of cores doesn't really make it smoother compared to 7700k.
 
I just recently upgraded to a 1700 ryzen from my 4.6ghz 2600k. It is so much smoother and minimum frames are great now, no more hiccups or stutters on my 980ti @ 1400P

7700k isn't that large of an upgrade. going from 4c/8t to 8c 16t is so much more noticeable. Also games will be higher threaded than 4 core, sorry 770k


If you are streaming or doing something else CPU intensive then yes this is an accurate statement. Having more cores available to run multiple multi threaded apps is good. But if you are not.. then 5 years from now that 12 core 24 thread will be the way to go, just stick with 4 core 8 thread for now, AMD or Intel and you will be doing just fine.
 
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