Thinking of upgrading CPU (Current CPU is an Intel Core i5 6400 at 2.7 Ghz to 3.2 Turbo)

[Iggy Wolf]

I had bought my PC as prebuilt 5 years ago when the 6th generation Skylakes were coming out. So my motherboard is limited to H110 chipsets. Now, at the time, the i7 6700(K) was considered its i7 counterpart and came out at the same time. It's the only CPU I can actually upgrade to right now without changing my motherboard. It currently costs $300. Is it worth upgrading? And if yes, then how?

I've never changed out my CPUs, only GPU, and I know CPUs are more complicated and may or may not require a 3rd party cooling fan in case stock fan is too weak to cool. Also, I've never removed current CPUs before (taking off the fan, wiping off the thermal paste and taking out the CPU chip). If I upgrade, will I see much of an improvement with the i7 6700 (since it's also 5 years old now) and is it compatible with my motherboard (motherboard came with the ASUS M32CD desktops at the time). My rig specs:

i5 6400 2.7 (3.2 Turb)
RTX 2060 Super 8 GB VRAM
16 GB DDR3 RAM
Windows 10 Home Edition

[L37]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Autumn:

Little funfact, the difference between v1 and v2 is the swapping of two pins and you can solder/connect the two pads and use a 8th gen i7 in a Z170 board, so long as you use a BIOS with the CPU microcode, and you would be able to overclock in it and it function fine.
Though I would never recommend trying to do anything like that, it's just fun to learn, and funny to see how Intel rips people off, lmao.

Even more fun fact - at least some 8*** chips can work with ddr3.
I've played around with cheap discounted/used h110 board and i3-8300 - it is funny, one can get system with modern CPU really cheap this way.
Also there is a reason why they do it, apart from "intel rips people off" - they have attempted maintaining compatibility for a long time with lga775, they did not like it. Too much issues, too many annoyed customers. When they intentionally lock it they loose those sketchy compatibility when it sometimes works but sometimes does not, but they also make sure that users will not run into compatibility issues, need to update bios etc.
Motherbards are really cheap compared to cpu-s anyway, i honestly do not understand why people make such a big deal out of it.

[Zireth]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Autumn:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Iggy Wolf:

My OEM motherboard doesn't support chipsets higher than 6 series. I guess that's the price to pay for buying prebuilt PCs with OEM motherboards. Believe me, if it supported it, I would gladly spend the $300 on an i9 instead.

The chipset is on the board, it's the CPU it doesn't support, because it's a different socket.
6 and 7th gen are LGA1151v1, 8 and 9th are LGA1151v2.
Your motherboard would support 7th gen so long as you updated BIOS. Then you could run an i7-7700k.

Little funfact, the difference between v1 and v2 is the swapping of two pins and you can solder/connect the two pads and use a 8th gen i7 in a Z170 board, so long as you use a BIOS with the CPU microcode, and you would be able to overclock in it and it function fine.
Though I would never recommend trying to do anything like that, it's just fun to learn, and funny to see how Intel rips people off, lmao.

What about 9th gen, same situation?

[hawkeye]

Here is a comparison of the 6400 vs the 6700k, The two figures to look at are the single-thread speed and the multi-thread speed.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-6700K-vs-Intel-i5-6400/2565vs2578

Based on the figures there is a large difference in performance.

Let's see if this is true -
https://www.gpucheck.com/en-usd/compare/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2060-super-vs-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2060-super/intel-core-i5-6400-2-70ghz-vs-intel-core-i7-6700k-4-00ghz/high/high/-vs-

In Metro Exodus, due to the gpu there isn't much of an average gain but the minimum fps is much higher.

My assessment would be don't upgrade unless you really, really want to. Not because of the boost in cpu performance but the use of ddr3 ram and that the cpu will still bottleneck the gpu.

It's usually better to have the gpu bottleneck the cpu as this helps create smoother performance. If you want to try something, limit the gpu performance using the software that came with the gpu.

By the way a ryzen 2600 will still bottleneck a 2060 super and would only be a small improvement over a 6400.

Average 1600 ddr3 has a speed of 15 GB/s vs ddr4 2133 of 17. So using the ddr3 loses about 10% in performance. Modern cpus use ddr4-3600 which scores about 25.

There is an i7-6700. It usually is only a few bucks cheaper than the 6700k but has less performance (about 10%). And as you are trying to boost cpu performance to match the gpu, it's probably an avoid. But if you can find a cheap one, consider it.

[Autumn_]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από ЯΣП:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Autumn:

The chipset is on the board, it's the CPU it doesn't support, because it's a different socket.
6 and 7th gen are LGA1151v1, 8 and 9th are LGA1151v2.
Your motherboard would support 7th gen so long as you updated BIOS. Then you could run an i7-7700k.

Little funfact, the difference between v1 and v2 is the swapping of two pins and you can solder/connect the two pads and use a 8th gen i7 in a Z170 board, so long as you use a BIOS with the CPU microcode, and you would be able to overclock in it and it function fine.
Though I would never recommend trying to do anything like that, it's just fun to learn, and funny to see how Intel rips people off, lmao.

What about 9th gen, same situation?

Considering that 9th gen is just 8th gen with a 'new coat of paint', yeah, so long as you have BIOS with supporting microcode, don't see why not.

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από L37:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Autumn:

Little funfact, the difference between v1 and v2 is the swapping of two pins and you can solder/connect the two pads and use a 8th gen i7 in a Z170 board, so long as you use a BIOS with the CPU microcode, and you would be able to overclock in it and it function fine.
Though I would never recommend trying to do anything like that, it's just fun to learn, and funny to see how Intel rips people off, lmao.

Even more fun fact - at least some 8*** chips can work with ddr3.
I've played around with cheap discounted/used h110 board and i3-8300 - it is funny, one can get system with modern CPU really cheap this way.
Also there is a reason why they do it, apart from "intel rips people off" - they have attempted maintaining compatibility for a long time with lga775, they did not like it. Too much issues, too many annoyed customers. When they intentionally lock it they loose those sketchy compatibility when it sometimes works but sometimes does not, but they also make sure that users will not run into compatibility issues, need to update bios etc.
Motherbards are really cheap compared to cpu-s anyway, i honestly do not understand why people make such a big deal out of it.

I swear I've seen an 8th gen board that supports DDR3, so it doesn't shock me, still somewhat silly they'd still support it though.
Yeah, I know there's the whole compatability thing, but in the current generation, they swapped 2 pins, and it's already been proven that it works, so why did they do it? The only reason (I can see) is profit.
It does confuse people too, becuse there is no distinction between them, often times I've seen people ask if an i7 8700k will go in a z170 or z270 board, why gove the added confusion? Just make a new socket or something.

And, AMD proved that it can work, we've had 3 generations, soon to be 4, all on the same platform, working fine on most of the boards put there.
Even older boards are getting support for the new features.
So, there's no reason why Intel can't do it.

That said, I don't have an issue with Intels boards myself, since I know the difference. Though it does confuse me why they took the path they did.

[L37]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Autumn:

I swear I've seen an 8th gen board that supports DDR3, so it doesn't shock me, still somewhat silly they'd still support it though.
Yeah, I know there's the whole compatability thing, but in the current generation, they swapped 2 pins, and it's already been proven that it works, so why did they do it? The only reason (I can see) is profit.
It does confuse people too, becuse there is no distinction between them, often times I've seen people ask if an i7 8700k will go in a z170 or z270 board, why gove the added confusion? Just make a new socket or something.

And, AMD proved that it can work, we've had 3 generations, soon to be 4, all on the same platform, working fine on most of the boards put there.
Even older boards are getting support for the new features.
So, there's no reason why Intel can't do it.

That said, I don't have an issue with Intels boards myself, since I know the difference. Though it does confuse me why they took the path they did.

There is no doubt they did it incompatible intentionally, another question is why they did it. Honestly i do not think i is about money, at least not directly. Chipsets are cheap compared to cpu-s, very cheap.
I think what they want is to avoid situations when people buy something that is theoretically compatible and it does not work because it has old bios or something. It happens with AM4 and it happens a lot.
As for names yes, i agree here. No idea why they went with whole "v1" "v2" etc terminology. It is confusing for many people, even 1155/1151/1150 are similar enough to be cofusing. Should have used some sort of generic names, not even based on pin count, IMO. And it is even worse in server market, where one cpu model has like 6-7 versions and they require different sockets which have versions too. Like E5-2650/E5-2650v2 will work on LGA2011, E5-2650v3/E5-2650v4 will work on LGA2011-3, etc.
Most annoying thing i had to deal with recently was - motherboard died in a server. Lenovo(ibm) sent replacement. It turned out to have old bios which does not support v4 cpu-s which were installed in the server. The board has the ability to update bios through imm without working cpu, but it turned out while you can flash it, to complete the update system has to pass post, which it does not because cpu does not work =\ Had to wait for them to ship v3 cpu which i had to use for update to complete...

[Iggy Wolf]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από emoticorpse:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Iggy Wolf:

Yeah, I turned that off. It would noticeably lower my FPS down to 50 whenever too many watchmen or humanimals were present. And I have an i5, so I have no HP anyway. The only thing I haven't tried so far is changing my API to DX11, and that's because on DX11, Raytracing gets turned off.

Well, it shows people on Youtube playing fine with the same cpu as yours. Good luck figuring it out. I have to get some rest. Will check back in the thread later to see what else happens.

I was actually wondering. In RDR2, the game had a problem upon launch in which it would stall every 30 minutes for like a whole minute. Apparently, the game was overloading 1 CPU core instead of spreading the load, causing it to reach 100% CPU usage. This problem was mostly on all i5s because they lack hyperthreading, and the game would cause 1 of 4 cores to reach 100% usage.

A solution was to use a program that limits your CPU usage to 95% so that it never reaches 99-100%. I wonder if using it for Metro Exodus might help. If I limit the core usage to 95%, it can never reach 100%, and therefore cannot stutter due to maxing out core speed.

[Sid1701d]

This is the price I get from amazon for a motherboard 172.00
Intel i5 9600 at 230.00 and some good ram 90.00.
You can have a new computer and some good ram for 492.00 and third party heat seak coolers for the unlock is around 40.00. Most dedicated video cards can be transfered to a new motherboard.

The motherboard I have that I am going to build is a Asus Prime Z390 A which is around 172.00

Its better to spend just a little over budget than to invest 300.00 older technology. When a older processor is higher than the new processor there is something going on. Its called price guggin because intel stops making it at some point and people buy up a lot of them to sell at sites to make a profit on the online market. I found GTX 660 for $600.00 on E-Bay not going to buy that. The card ain't even worth that. Intel duo core 2 they want 200.00 dollars for. They become collectors items after intel stops making them.

[_I_]

non k isnt worth it, go intel k with z board or ryzen

[hawkeye]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Iggy Wolf:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από emoticorpse:

Well, it shows people on Youtube playing fine with the same cpu as yours. Good luck figuring it out. I have to get some rest. Will check back in the thread later to see what else happens.

I was actually wondering. In RDR2, the game had a problem upon launch in which it would stall every 30 minutes for like a whole minute. Apparently, the game was overloading 1 CPU core instead of spreading the load, causing it to reach 100% CPU usage. This problem was mostly on all i5s because they lack hyperthreading, and the game would cause 1 of 4 cores to reach 100% usage.

A solution was to use a program that limits your CPU usage to 95% so that it never reaches 99-100%. I wonder if using it for Metro Exodus might help. If I limit the core usage to 95%, it can never reach 100%, and therefore cannot stutter due to maxing out core speed.

Try it and see what happens.

RDR2 was designed for consoles. Being online it might require more cpu than offline as well. "Thread deficit" cpus also known as "narrow" don't do well. Skip to 18 min mark in this vid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_ty-gajwoA

Metro Exodus can stutter too. Skip to 22 minute mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY2g9f7i5Js

If you want good performance you need a good cpu. There could be new intels mid-April. Nothing definite yet.

[Vulkan]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Iggy Wolf:

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από emoticorpse:

The recommended cpu for Metro Exodus is a 4770k or higher intel cpu. From userbenchmark, it shows your cpu not too far behind. If there's stuttering it shouldn't be because of cpu. Looks like at some point you upgraded the Gpu which is what should have helped. How did things run before that? How often you get the stutters?.

Pretty sure everyone here doesn't think the cpu upgrade is worthwhile and that's why they jumped passed answering "no" and just told you what move you should have done if you were to do any move at all (which still isn't that smart).

Ok, so the stutters are really weird. Like, I capped my FPS to 60 with Rivatuner, and it sort of helped. Apart from the natural stutter that occurs whenever the game autosaves, I'll have stutters as I move about the world whenever I turn or enter new areas. It seems like the game is loading in new stuff, or at those moments, the CPU usage spikes to 100%.

Now, I can understand a weak CPU struggling to achieve consistent high frames, but in my case, it's always at 60, and during the stutter it can drop to 30 or 40, and shoot right back up to 60. It's almost like the game is struggling for RAM or something in the game taxes the CPU heavily as I move about. I'm pretty sure under normal circumstances, CPU usage should rarely hit 100%, even if it's being more taxed (when Hitman 2 taxes my CPU because I set LOD and shadows to Ultra, it simply lowers my maximum FPS down to 50 or 40. There's no stuttering involved).

Those asset loading stutters are normal for metro exodus unfortunately.