What should my next upgrade be

[illuzions_za]

I have an i7 870 with 8gb ram and a gtx 1060 3gb, im stuck on getting maybe an rtx 2060 super or i5 9th gen upgrade kit, all i do is game very rarely stream or anything so im not so worried about multi tasking just what would end up improving my gaming the most

 

[Oussebon]

Just to check, you have an i7 870 from 2009? Not an i7 8700 from ~2017?

What games do you play and what performance difficulties are you having?

What monitor are you gaming on? A 1080p 60hz one?

 

[illuzions_za]

yea its the old one from long ago, and i play any game a lot of say rainbow six siege and world of tanks, i dont play games like COD or anything.
I just would prefer a smoother experience and be able to play games on higher settings without getting only 40 fps and such on some of them

 

[Oussebon]

I wouldn't buy a 9th Gen i5. Because AMD have the R5 3600 which is near enough as good (better than some i5s) but better value, because Intel have 10th Gen i5s, and because AMD are about to launch new CPUs on 8th October.

But before buying anything, I'd suggest establishing what is limiting the performance. It could well be the CPU, but best to be certain before spending money.

You could use MSI Afterburner to monitor CPU usage and GPU usage. if you see extremely high CPU usage and lower GPU usage it could mean you want to get a new CPU. Make sure to monitor the CPU usage on each core, not just total CPU usage.

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[illuzions_za]

Ok will do, Thanks so much for the quick reply!

 

[illuzions_za]

i was running watch dogs 2 at high settings with each core going at around 55 to 65% usage while my GPU was running at 80 to 90% and above, Im guessing it would be better for a newer gpu or should i still wait for the new CPUs to come out?

 

[andrewmac]

don't buy 20 series instead go with 30 series which was launched few days back.

 

[Zoid]

First of all, congrats on still rocking the i7-870, that's a venerable old processor

i was running watch dogs 2 at high settings with each core going at around 55 to 65% usage while my GPU was running at 80 to 90% and above, Im guessing it would be better for a newer gpu or should i still wait for the new CPUs to come out?

What sort of performance were you getting in Watchdogs 2 when you were measuring this? As an added experiment, what happens if you turn all of the graphics settings down to the lowest they go (taking the load off your GPU as much as possible). Do you see performance go way up, or is it still trundling a bit?

If you turn the graphics settings way down and performance doesn't improve a whole lot, then that's a good indicator that your CPU is holding you back.

Whatever you decide to upgrade, I would recommend waiting until this holiday season if it's feasible for you. Of course there's always that next release you can wait for, but in this case we have new Ryzen processors coming out in a couple weeks, we have new AMD GPUs coming (likely end of October), and we're hot on the heals of the RTX 3000 series release. Even if you don't buy any of the newly released hardware, I expect we'll see some appealing clearance deals on previous generation hardware around Black Friday this year.