Kimberly Gomez34 said:Regarding the CPU, don't hold your breath for a price drop—it's never actually happened. Even the Core i7-7700K is still sitting around $2300-$800 and up... An Intel Core i8 might land at maybe $1333 +/-, but if he picks out some badass 6K monitor, his budget could get hit hard 😬 and honestly, he doesn't even need it.
Agreed. He might as well grab the whole rig right now, just skip the GPU.
You can just order the whole rig without a GPU and start using it right away. Intel processors come with integrated graphics, so you can just pick up whatever card you want from any site whenever you're ready.
Then again, Intel's 9th gen—Coffee Lake Refresh—might be dropping soon, so it's worth keeping an eye on that. Mind you, a killer 8-core chip will probably cost a lot more than the current Core i7-7700K 6-core, so whether it actually fits your budget or makes sense for you is anyone's guess. But either way, it might drive down the prices on what's available right now.
Alexander Moore67 said:It's total overkill for gaming, plain and simple. This isn't even the top-tier 1080 Ti; this one goes for $1,300 because the cooling is better. ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1080
Is a Core i5-2500K overkill for gaming today? No way! It wasn't overkill three years ago either!
When you build a rig without compromises, you expect it to push max FPS for years to come. And by "max," I mean playing at high refresh rates.
Throw in potential streaming or whatever—nothing unusual there. Thinking an i5 is the peak gaming CPU is some outdated mindset from five years ago when nobody knew what to do with extra threads.
P.S.
The guy isn't even sure if he'll overclock. Even at stock, a Core i7-8700 is plenty fast. You don't even need an OC if you have a decent motherboard that holds the all-core turbo.
Larry Ortiz5 said:Look, nobody is saying the Core i5-2500K is a bad processor, but let's face it—time has simply moved past it. I'm currently running a GTX 1070, and my bottleneck is actually an i5 4670K (which is two generations newer than the one you mentioned). I know I’d see a massive jump in FPS if I finally upgraded my CPU generation. Besides, like someone else pointed out earlier, if you've got a couple hundred bucks sitting around, there isn't much point in sticking with an i5, even if it is a 6-core, 12-thread chip.
The 8600K isn't 6c/12t, it's 6c/6t.
Back then, the Core i5-2500K was positioned much closer to the high-end than the 8600K is today, mostly because HyperThreading became way more essential over time.
Alexander Moore67 said:If you think a Core i7-8700K is overkill for gaming, then tell me if a Core i5-2500K can still run every modern title after eight years. And why would I bother buying a motherboard for a Core i7-8700K today if it's only going to matter eight years from now compared to an i5-8600K? Also, please don't call me "buddy"—my buddies are long gone...
It’s already running the most powerful GPU on the market; there's no point in trying to go higher.
The Intel Core i8 is coming out soon anyway. In 2018, putting a 6-thread processor in a $5,000 rig is just insanity.
If we're really going down this road of comparisons... sure, an i5 2500K might technically launch any game today, but a 2600K is significantly more capable and sits at least a generation or two ahead when you actually consider how soon you'll need to upgrade.
Nowadays, the i5 2500K is already visibly struggling to keep up with 4c8t processors in modern titles.
Look, if single-core performance was the main bottleneck, I wouldn't even bother bringing up the Core i3, which handles single-threaded tasks just fine. Back when I was playing this about a year ago, devs had already started optimizing for multi-core setups, but the game was still such a CPU hog that my Core i7 920 actually outperformed the Core i3 3220. Once I swapped that Core i3 3220 out for a Xeon 1245v2 (Core i7 3770), I saw a 10-15 FPS bump during stutters—basically, those annoying drops down to 30 FPS finally stopped happening. And that was just using a Radeon HD 7850. On that exact same rig, upgrading to a Radeon RX 580 basically doubled my frame rate, jumping from around 50 to over 100 FPS.
P.S. Looking at those FPS numbers in the chart you posted, it feels like they were recorded on settings designed to offload work from the CPU, because there's no way those numbers were achievable otherwise.
Adam Moore3 said:Looks like analogtiger19 was right on the money, since overclocking is now an option 😛
As for liquid cooling, I don't think that even makes sense for you. Just grab a Noctua 14 or better yet an Alienware Aurora—you'll get cooling that's just as good, if not better, than water cooling, all while staying quieter and avoiding the headache of leaks and constant maintenance. Unless you really want to mess around with circulating water inside your case, obviously. 🙂
Adam Moore3 said:Wtf? I’m running this at home on an Intel Pentium G3220 paired with a 260X (1GB VRAM) at high settings and getting 60+ FPS. That Intel Celeron G5400 is basically just an old i3 from ages ago.😲
I don't know. Maybe they optimized the game heavily for the CPU, but in my experience, the i3 3220 was already bottlenecking my HD7850 2GB—which is slightly better than your 260X—while the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti is a massive step up.
You could slap a Noctua NH-D14 on there and the CPU won't make a peep. If you really want to push it, you can overclock until the chip hits its limit.
The Cooler Master CM212X should be totally fine for a stock 8700K, though I guess the question is whether you'll mind the extra noise when it starts ramping up.
Look, I hate to be the one to say it, but an Intel Pentium is going to seriously bottleneck a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti when you're playing World of Tanks.
If you've already waited this long, just hang in there for a few more months. You've got integrated graphics on that Intel processor, so you can still get by without a dedicated GPU.
Nvidia should be announcing or dropping their next generation sometime this month, so wait until you see what's hitting the shelves—it might even drive down prices for the current lineup. Plus, once everyone starts upgrading, you might snag a decent deal on the used market. Right now, the second-hand stuff is mostly just junk pulled straight from a coal mine.
It’s totally normal for wattage to fluctuate. Nothing weird there—games never pull a constant amount of power from the GPU, at least not according to what the software shows you.
I guess I don't know if Battlefield 1 is just one of those memory hogs that finally stabilized things by using up all that extra RAM.
Look, at the end of the day, it’s got nothing to do with the analog signal. That’s just the way info gets encoded and sent over. It doesn't mean your TV has some cow's ear listening to an analog frequency and whispering secrets to the cathode ray tube.
John Turner34 said:That’s just not true. All this "digital is better" talk is pure marketing—it's about the money. How did we even survive before this? Biology is still king. Digital can never touch the level of biology or even analog.
Brotherhood
Man, you really went off there. An analog signal is continuous electromagnetic waves; digital is just broken up electromagnetic values. Both are just electronics. What does any of that have to do with biology?
Anyway, irrelevant to the thread. You can always grab an active DVI-I to VGA converter, but personally, I wouldn't waste the cash on an old monitor.
Honestly, that CPU is a massive bottleneck. I wouldn't bother stepping up past 1000-$367, so maybe look at something like https://www.amazon.com/s?k=gtx1050