Question HELP!! Upgrade Advice Needed Please!!

[BornAgainPCGamer]

My current rig is made up with an

• I5 4690k
• Gtx 970
• 16gb ram

I am looking to upgrade it just to tie me over until i do a full new build towards the end of the year.

I am unsure whether to buy a 1660ti or a 2060, since they are very similar in price now. I only game at 1080p and amnot looking to go higher until my full upgrade.

I would also like to upgrade the i5 but without having to change the mobo.

Any advice or help from you guys would be very appreciated.

 

[Rensje]

Well, the only real upgrade path left for you on the same socket and motherboard would be the Intel i7-4770k or i7-4790k. Anything younger than that and you would have to replace your motherboard as well, because as far as I'm aware the 4th gen desktop processors were the last to use socket 1150. It wasn't until the 6th gen that Intel started producing actual desktop processors again, and those were socket 1151 chips.

Straight up, I'm not really sure the upgrade from an i5-4690k to an i7-4790k is worth it. Sure, it would be sufficient to run a 1660 Super or 1660 Ti without bottlenecking (much), but it's still a 6-year old quad-core chip with only 8 logical cores. At this point, it probably makes more sense to start looking at an upgrade kit that includes a motherboard, CPU and RAM.

As for what GPU you should get for 1080p, if you want to go Nvidia you should probably see if you can get a good deal on an RTX 2060. If you can, get that. If you can't, don't waste your money on a 1660 Ti, get a 1660 Super instead. The latter simply has a better price/performance ratio. The 2060 is a lot faster, but it's not the best value either. They've gotten more interesting with the release of AMD's Radeon 5600 XT though, so it might still be worth checking out.

 

[BornAgainPCGamer]

If i was to go the whole hog and replace the mobo, ram and cpu, what would you recommend? I be looking for best bang for my buck. Thanks for the reply and any further feedback.

 

[Rensje]

I will take bang for the buck to mean 'budget oriented'. Fortunately, there's some fantastic stuff available for a modest price these days. This is just a quick and dirty selection so I didn't do a fancy PCPartPicker list and I haven't checked prices at different vendors. I also don't know what region you're in, so if any of this is not available in your country we can have another, more detailed look later.

	Part Name	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 1600 AF	$107.99
Motherboard	ASRock B450M Pro4	$74.99
RAM	Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 3200Mhz C16	$79.99
TOTAL PRICE:		$262.97

This set is as low as I would go, price/quality-wise. The Ryzen 5 1600 AF is a 6-core, 12-thread rerelease of the Ryzen 5 1600, now based on the Zen+ architecture and boxed with a new cooler. It's basically a Ryzen 5 2600 for less. It overclocks like a mothertrucker, and the B450M Pro4 from ASRock should let you do just that. It's a pretty decent board for the price, and the VRMs in particular are not bad at all. Finally, the memory is interchangeable with any brand as far as I'm concerned, just make sure you get at least a 3000Mhz kit because Ryzen likes fast RAM. 3200Mhz is as high as the board will go, so don't bother with anything faster.

 

[BornAgainPCGamer]

I will take bang for the buck to mean 'budget oriented'. Fortunately, there's some fantastic stuff available for a modest price these days. This is just a quick and dirty selection so I didn't do a fancy PCPartPicker list and I haven't checked prices at different vendors. I also don't know what region you're in, so if any of this is not available in your country we can have another, more detailed look later.

	Part Name	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 5 1600 AF	$107.99
Motherboard	ASRock B450M Pro4	$74.99
RAM	Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 3200Mhz C16	$79.99
TOTAL PRICE:		$262.97

This set is as low as I would go, price/quality-wise. The Ryzen 5 1600 AF is a 6-core, 12-thread rerelease of the Ryzen 5 1600, now based on the Zen+ architecture and boxed with a new cooler. It's basically a Ryzen 5 2600 for less. It overclocks like a mothertrucker, and the B450M Pro4 from ASRock should let you do just that. It's a pretty decent board for the price, and the VRMs in particular are not bad at all. Finally, the memory is interchangeable with any brand as far as I'm concerned, just make sure you get at least a 3000Mhz kit because Ryzen likes fast RAM. 3200Mhz is as high as the board will go, so don't bother with anything faster.

Woah thanks for the feedback. I'm living in Ireland, by the way

If the prices translate even close to the same for me, then that's a very affordable upgrade. Also, when i said bang for my buck, I just meant i like components that offer the most amount of performance, compared to their price. As i find, just because some pc parts are expensive they dont always give you the best value for their performance.

Again i upgrade my mobo, ram and cpu and gfx card, that's close to a full system upgrade. Maybe i should just hold off until later in the year, when new cards drop. I just wanted to give my system a slight shot in the arm to tie me over but it may not be worth the trouble.

 

[Deviat3]

If you need a quick fix, I would OC that i5 and buy a better GPU. Something like a 1070. That will be enough to hold you over until next gen games appear. Probably even longer. If you wanna go 4k later this year I would buy a 1080 ti. That will be enough for a long time since at 4k the gpu will be the bottleneck long before that i5 will be. AFAIK gta5 is the only game that really wants alot of cores/threads. Other games dont mind as much.

 

[BornAgainPCGamer]

If you need a quick fix, I would OC that i5 and buy a better GPU. Something like a 1070. That will be enough to hold you over until next gen games appear. Probably even longer. If you wanna go 4k later this year I would buy a 1080 ti. That will be enough for a long time since at 4k the gpu will be the bottleneck long before that i5 will be. AFAIK gta5 is the only game that really wants alot of cores/threads. Other games dont mind as much.

Rdr2 seems to want a lot of cores as well i think. I think as game worlds get more complex they will need processors with more cores than my i5. If i could hold of upgrading it for at least 6-12 months I'd be happy to drop the hammer on a 1660/2060.

Also on a side note...i don't know how to overclock the i5. I've never really looked into it. Is it complicated/risky?

 

[Deviat3]

RDR2 might also like more cores, since it is also a rockstar game. But to give you an idea of how much more important the GPU is om high resoluton; i am still running an i7 2600k @ 4,6 Ggz coupled with a 1080 ti @ 4k. I can play almost any title on ultra setting, with a few tweaks here and there.

OC'ing is supereasy if you have the right cooling. A proper aftermarket CPU cooler and a good mobo are required. Lost of guides online to help you.

I also want to wait 6 months to a year before getting a whole new platform. I wanna see how and if the newgen consoles really up the ante and I hope the new generations of nvidia cards are better and cheaper.

 

[BornAgainPCGamer]

RDR2 might also like more cores, since it is also a rockstar game. But to give you an idea of how much more important the GPU is om high resoluton; i am still running an i7 2600k @ 4,6 Ggz coupled with a 1080 ti @ 4k. I can play almost any title on ultra setting, with a few tweaks here and there.

OC'ing is supereasy if you have the right cooling. A proper aftermarket CPU cooler and a good mobo are required. Lost of guides online to help you.

I also want to wait 6 months to a year before getting a whole new platform. I wanna see how and if the newgen consoles really up the ante and I hope the new generations of nvidia cards are better and cheaper.

Cheers thanks again for the reply and advice. I'm also hoping the new cards drliver big performance gains at a far more reasonable cost.

 

[Arma8787]

Well, as of now even 4790k-s are fairly well priced on cpu front, so I'f probably go with that. As for the gpu, I think if the difference between the gtx and Rtx isn't all that big, go with the Rtx