CPU upgrade

[KarolisLTS]

Hello, I'm currently using i5 6600 (non K) with GTX 1080, that I've bought almost a year ago. I've been pretty happy with this build, but in some big AAA games like AC Odyssey, GTA V, BF5, there was slight bottleneck. It wasn't groundbreaking or something like that, but at some CPU intensive moments it was pretty irritating. And with new generation of games coming, I've been thinking about upgrading CPU. There were few choices, but the most eye-catching was AMD Ryzen 5 3600X which in my opinion is pretty good in performance and price (about 200 dollars). But the problem is, that my motherboard is ASUS B250M-PLUS, which is pretty old and doesn't support the newer CPUs, so the only way to properly upgrade CPU is to upgrade MBD too. So I've started checking for those and most popular that popped up were MSI B450 Tomahawk Max and Asus ROG Strix B450-F. My questions would be, if it's worth upgrading CPU to 3600X, and which MBD would be better? And overall is it worth to upgrade those thing at all at the moment?

 

[Oussebon]

I'd suggest waiting for the Zen 3 CPUs and the Ryzen 5 4600(x) that will presumably launch with them.

While a 3600/x would be an upgrade at least for some titles, the next gen is expected to bring a fairly decent gaming performance uplift based on some of the revisions that have been rumoured, plus the usual IPC and/or frequency improvements. It will make it a more meaningful upgrade and hopefully the '4600' will launch for a similar price to what the 3600 did.

As for motherboards, I'd wait and see what the availability is like when the new CPUs are out. You might want to consider B550, however, so as to get PCIe 4.0 - which the CPUs offer but B450 mobo's don't support.

You may also want to factor in new RAM. Depending on your current RAM.

Both Intel and AMD CPUs can benefit substantially from high RAM frequency. If you're using 2133MHz, moving to 3600MHz especially given the relatively low RAM prices currently could be worth it.

 

[KarolisLTS]

I'd suggest waiting for the Zen 3 CPUs and the Ryzen 5 4600(x) that will presumably launch with them.

While a 3600/x would be an upgrade at least for some titles, the next gen is expected to bring a fairly decent gaming performance uplift based on some of the revisions that have been rumoured, plus the usual IPC and/or frequency improvements. It will make it a more meaningful upgrade and hopefully the '4600' will launch for a similar price to what the 3600 did.

As for motherboards, I'd wait and see what the availability is like when the new CPUs are out. You might want to consider B550, however, so as to get PCIe 4.0 - which the CPUs offer but B450 mobo's don't support.

You may also want to factor in new RAM. Depending on your current RAM.

Both Intel and AMD CPUs can benefit substantially from high RAM frequency. If you're using 2133MHz, moving to 3600MHz especially given the relatively low RAM prices currently could be worth it.

I've thought about next get CPU too, but as far as I've seen with 3700x or 3800x there is a slight GPU bottleneck, so wouldn't it be even worse on new 4600(x)?

 

[Oussebon]

Yes, but that's actually the whole point

Bottleneck as a term gets thrown around way too much. Your performance is always going to be bottlenecked by something, right? Or else you'd be running at an infinite framerate.

Let's not call it a bottleneck but instead think of it as a limit. The limit to performance will come from something, which could be the CPU, the GPU, your monitor (why run Witcher 3 at 100fps on a 60hz screen for instance), even the game engine itself, or something else (memory, storage perhaps).

As a gamer you want 2 things:
1) the GPU to provide the performance you want
2) nothing to get in the way of that.

Therefore you want to be GPU limited (aka GPU bound) as long as the GPU is capable of providing the performance you want. This is the ideal state of gaming.

A more powerful CPU will mean that future GPU upgrades, or future games which require more work from the CPU, will be less constrained by the CPU - letting you get as much potential performance out of your GPU as possible.

This is why you are upgrading your CPU now - to stop it from being a limit to performance. The better the CPU - within reason - the further into the future until it hinders performance.

Does that explanation make sense?

I might be reading too much into it, but did you go on a website that claims to identify bottlenecks between various hardware combinations? Which site?

 

[KarolisLTS]

Yes, but that's actually the whole point

Bottleneck as a term gets thrown around way too much. Your performance is always going to be bottlenecked by something, right? Or else you'd be running at an infinite framerate.

Let's not call it a bottleneck but instead think of it as a limit. The limit to performance will come from something, which could be the CPU, the GPU, your monitor (why run Witcher 3 at 100fps on a 60hz screen for instance), even the game engine itself, or something else (memory, storage perhaps).

As a gamer you want 2 things:
1) the GPU to provide the performance you want
2) nothing to get in the way of that.

Therefore you want to be GPU limited (aka GPU bound) as long as the GPU is capable of providing the performance you want. This is the ideal state of gaming.

A more powerful CPU will mean that future GPU upgrades, or future games which require more work from the CPU, will be less constrained by the CPU - letting you get as much potential performance out of your GPU as possible.

This is why you are upgrading your CPU now - to stop it from being a limit to performance. The better the CPU - within reason - the further into the future until it hinders performance.

Does that explanation make sense?

I might be reading too much into it, but did you go on a website that claims to identify bottlenecks between various hardware combinations? Which site?

I checked https://pc-builds.com/calculator for combinations and various forums from Tom's Hardware and reddit.

 

[Oussebon]

Websites like PC Builds and every other thing claiming to offer a so-called "bottleneck calculator" are dangerous garbage and should be avoided like the plague. They are useless at best and misleading more often than not.

i.e. in your case making you concerned about GPU bottlenecks when a GPU bound gaming scenario is what you're aiming for.

As for reddit and TH I've no idea what people there said but if they said to artificially impose CPU limitations they're out of their tiny little minds. But I doubt they said that.

 

[Zoid]

websites such as [bad site] have excellent articles on bottleneck by CPU and GPU for example -
[bad link] and [bad link]
and
[bad link]

There's lots of information out there on the web. Parsing through it all and determining what is and isn't worth trusting can be hard. I'd like to kindly steer you away from these articles. These are algorithmically made articles designed to get clicks and make ad money, but are based on no real-world test data whatsoever.

Some clues you can use to determine this for yourself:

• The "About Me" section purporting to be about the "author" just lists "John Doe" with standard lorem ipsum filler text.
• The article doesn't list any numbers, metrics, or testing methodology. No test data to back up their claims.
• They make broad, sweeping, incorrect statements like saying the Ryzen 5 3600 is "Not suited for streaming while gaming," saying the Ryzen 7 3800X "Cannot multi task while gaming," and saying the Ryzen 9 3950X "Heats up after a few hours of use" among many, many other factually incorrect nonsense.

You should try to stay away from any articles that claim to identify "bottlenecks" in this fashion, especially if they don't have any real metrics to back them up.

*Quote edited to remove bad faith links

 

[Oussebon]

@Zoid It was a spammer, I reported them and they've thankfully now been deleted. Could be worth deleting the links from the quote in case someone still manages to get suckered by this trash despite the clear warning!

 

[Zoid]

@Zoid It was a spammer, I reported them and they've thankfully now been deleted. Could be worth deleting the links from the quote in case someone still manages to get suckered by this trash despite the clear warning!

Done! Figured it was either a spammer or someone woefully misguided. Figured I'd try to be helpful in case it was the latter, but glad these posts have been deleted given it was the former. Good looking out!