Older Haswell rig upgrade

Hardware Build a PC
1

I have this old rig with an i5-4590 lying around. I haven’t used it since I upgraded to a Ryzen 3600, but I now have an opportunity to trade the i5 from the old rig for an i7-4770 and pay extra $70 for it.

I kinda wanna do it because it’s in my nature to want to maximize performance of any rig, as long as it’s financially reasonable. But I’m not 100% sure what I’m gonna do with it. I’ve been thinking about maybe giving it to someone as an entry-level gaming rig, since the PC is equipped with 16gb of RAM and a GTX 970, so it can definitely play most of the titles on the market today at 1080p. Or maybe I’ll just keep it for a rainy day, in case something happens to my main rig.

So from a performance per dollar standpoint, does it make sense to spend $70 for an older i7 for something that will probably become a gift or collect dust until needed?

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what motherboard do you have and what motherboard will you be getting

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The Haswell rig already has a motherboard. It’s a fully built PC that I simply don’t use anymore. The motherboard is ASUS H97m-E.

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I know but I was wanting to compare motherboards, for example some don’t support overclocking
or one would have a better VRM

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I’d say unless you’re upgrading the GPU on it, or using it for something other than gaming it’s a waste of money to go from a Haswell i5 to Haswell i7.

Yeah, sure its an upgrade, but the 970 isn’t really strong enough to make the CPU the limiting factor IMHO.

I mean it’s a cheap upgrade, but… if the machine isn’t already SSD you’d probably get better improvement by switching from spinning disk to an SSD (or just adding an SSD) for your $70.

I’ve actually done haswell i5 to haswell Xeon 1231v3 (basically an i7 with no iGPU in it) and the difference was… meh, outside of some cpu benchmarks. And that was with a Vega 64 in it.

I still have that machine actually, as a secondary PC.

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I agree with @thro here. You may get a few frames here and there, but I’m not entirely sure it’s worth it. The SSD upgrade will make everything faster and snappier, and you even have an M.2 socket, that supports PCIe drives. A fast boot drive for the OS and basic software will make the user experience much better than extra 4 threads from 6 years ago.

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Even if you already have an SSD in it, maybe get another one and ditch the hard drive (if present) if possible.

Having a boot drive on SSD is nice for reboots and updates, but games definitely load a shitload faster off proper storage as well.

All my desktops/laptops are 100% SSD now, spinning disk is relegated to archive/backup storage :slight_smile:

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Doesn’t make any sense at all to make that trade.

Build a nas with the old box or something else.

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It’s got an SSD. But you guys are right. I never even used that M.2 slot. That’s a fine idea.

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