I bought a half built PC months ago and want to finally put it together. My original plan was to put the same model (minus overclock) CPU that my PC has (it 4690k) but it’s basically the same price as when I bought my CPU years ago, and made obsolete by the cheapest Ryzen CPUs. I don’t really want to spend more than 250 on it.
Should I just rip out the motherboard and go for a ryzen build? I didn’t expect a 5 year old outdated processor to be substantially more expensive than this years (or last years) cheapest AMDs CPUs.
What chipset do you have, and what CPU are you shopping for?
Many old CPUs have seen a large uptick in sales from the recent flood of those versus gaming videos, where a $100 antique CPU is compared to something absurd like a 9900k, and they show same FPS on both.
A year ago I picked up a Xeon e5-2667 v2 for under $200, which cost thousands when it was new.
Surprisingly it matches the performance of a new r7 2700 I bought for the same price. However the r7 uses 1/3 the power, so big improvement there I guess?
Go Ryzen.
If prices are effectively the same, you get much better lifespan out of a Ryzen board.
How many more generations of CPU upgrades will you get out of the 4690k board? Probably none. How many NVMe drives does your Intel board support? A Ryzen probably has more.
You might get PCIe 4 with a Ryzen board, you won’t with the older board.
3 Likes
Any modern CPU would require a new motherboard, and DDR4 ram.
Might be better to get a chip to fit your board you have set up, and look for deals.
Maybe Black Friday / Cyber Monday might have something? or holiday sales is only like 3 months away?
plenty of time to research, and grab a deal?
If you can find a reliable place to buy one used it would be the cheapest route. I have seen them go for well under $100. If that isn’t an option and you have the money to spend, going Ryzen is a great option. It really depends on budget and use case. You could sell the hardware you have to help fund a new build. People are always on the hunt for good Socket 115X motherboards.
1 Like