So I play very CPU intensive games. Like BF. Basiclly I hardly stress the GPU at all and the CPU is always maxed out. This is due to the low settings for everything but mesh which is ultra which kills the CPU. I don't care much for visuals only bc sweetfx and I have pretty hit market colors. But frames I care about. If I could get 400fps I would. As it stands right now it's anywhere from 120 to 150 on a full 64 player cancer explosive sever. On other stuff like TDM it's higher clearly. 144hz 1440p monitor is a pretty good investment since it might be awhile till I'm running at 144hz plus at 1440p at high settings. The point is my CPU needs a little more beef to her.
As of right now I have a 4690k. I have four options in my eyes. The first is get the 4790k. The second is to go to kaby lake. The third is to go to ryzen and the fourth is to see what the new intel stuff is. Since they are putting out the i9 and cannon lake I think coffee is the U stuff for laptops? Whatever the next one is. I doubt I'll go i9 since the motherboards will be ridiculous. Here is the other thing mini itx motherboard which sucks right now. I'm really not in a rush but I'd like to have at least some thought about it. I'm not sure if more cores are going to be better or faster cores are the way to go. Clearly right now the 7700k at 5ghz is the best for gaming no doubt but will it start to favor more cores over speed. BF games I'm pretty sure have always liked more cores but idk.
A 4790k with a nice overclock is going to be a nice little bump for you. It makes the most price sense since you won't have to invest in a new motherboard or new ram, which really makes any other option twice the price of the 4790k. Another thing you could look at is ram overclocking. The battlefield games do like the ram OC's actually. It can help to raise your average and minimums by a couple fps.
Already at 2000 6-8-6-24 timings for the ram. Pretty sure I can't get better than that. But yes the 4790k does make the most sense cost wise. Just wondering if actually going up to the next platform is going to make more sense core count wise. Since cannon lake is going to have 6 core i7 pretty sure.
The next intel desktop line is Coffee lake, but yes this is long-time rumored to bring the 6 core to the desktop, small socket platform. That's going to be later in 2017 according to what Intel has said today at Computex. They're claiming 30%+ gains, so I suspect that'll be on the back of a 6 core desktop part.
Honestly, I would go 4790k. I'm on a Xeon 1231v3, which is a non-overclocking and slightly lower clocked 4790k, and it does an okay job keeping up with a 980 Ti at 1080p. If you step up the resolution, the ram speed, and the cpu clock speed, it should be more than enough. Hey maybe you update to coffee lake or Ryzen latter on, the 4790k and mobo will still hold their value pretty well, and it should really suffice whatever your going to be running in terms of graphics card for a while.
30% is nothing to scoff at. If intel keeps a higher clock with the same amount of cores AMD is screwed. So might as well wait then. Besides they come out in August that's not too far off.
Guaranteed they're claiming 30% because they're going from 4 core to 6 core, but they will have a stock clock speed lowering because of the higher core count and tdp targets. Regardless if your fine waiting until those parts release, go for it. Either you can pickup an interesting coffee lake part, pickup a ryzen part, or maybe just settle on a cheaper 4790k solution. Good luck
While my ryzen system worked I looked at CPU usage and it is pretty depressing. Games like Civ V where running loads of 150-200% On linux load of 100% is one core. So on an 8 core 16 thread 1700 I could load a process to 1600% and blender would do that.
Every game I tested that I play barely got more than 2 cores. Sometimes the peak CPU load was loading a saved game not actually playing the game.
Even City Skylines only uses 4 threads under load.
So for older games its Ghz > all.... New games I hope will be actually really multithread to the point of more than 4 threads.
This is true which is why I'm wondering if waiting is worth it. 4790k is just shy of sky lake and kaby lake. The reason BF games are CPU intensive is bc of 64 players, bullet physics, and tick rate. BF1 64 player on 60hz is crazy. Other than player count and physics bc of the tracking aspect every 1/60 seconds for bullets and players everything else like the actual render is done by the GPU. I guess the thing is you are probably going to see more benefit out of higher clocks bc most of the game runs on the GPU anyway.
As a 7700k owner. I cant get anywhere near 5ghz without thermal throttle. The best I've gotten without crazy temps is 4.7. Unless you win the silicon lottery hard core I cant see it hitting that without needing to delid to replace the TIM. For reference I'm running the H100i GTX. Its still a great step up from the 6600k I was running before. I was getting choppyness from the 6600k in some VR games but the 7700k cured that.
Having said that I would wait to see what comes out of intel for the new socket because if you invest in the 4790k youll be at the end of your upgrade path. It would be more expensive to go with the new platform but you will at least have some kind of upgrade path. OR you could go for ryzen and get a socket thats going to last you even longer. Its not as great in the single threaded speed but when a game supports multithreading youll find it performs identically. IIRC AMD is cheaper across the board except for the 1700x vs 7700k which are roughly the same price/performance (for now at least). If you're banking on better multithreaded support in gaming AMD would be my go to.
I moved over from a 4690K running at 4.5 GHz to a Ryzen 1700, and was pleasantly surprised to see that even at stock clocks (3.2 GHz boost on all cores) the CPU bottleneck I was seeing in BF4 / BF1 practically disappeared. I too was playing with relatively mundane graphics settings except for wanting to have Mesh Quality on Ultra in those two games. Even at 4.5 GHz the poor 4C/4T i5 cold not keep up on all maps.
Now i don't have a true monster graphics card by todays standards (R9 Fury) and am gaming at 1440p, but at least in BF4 I can top the displays 144Hz (I hate tearing so I don't let it go beyond) most of the time. A Ryzen 1700X would do nicely at stock clocks, staying easy to cool compared to an overclocked 7700K. It would at least not be a bad option.
I think the 4790K makes more sense as an update and will get you pretty close to the 7700K performance with a good overclock without the TIM issues (they had to fix it on the 4770K so it's good on the 4790K). I don't know how much get to a lower clocked Ryzen CPU (you're most likely get to 3.8GHz on those chips, more than that I think it's luck of the draw). Also consider the price of updating to a whole new platform. If you're already on a good mobo I think a new platform is a waste.
