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Question

Need some help from CPU veterans please.

by Nov 26, 2015 11:40AM PST

Hello C|net's Hardware/CPU experts. I made a mistake, a terrible mistake probably. I paired a GTX 970 with an AMD A10 7850k CPU, well back then I didn't think the bottleneck would be that serious, but on recent games... oh boy! did I think it wrong.

On Fallout 4 CPU usage is 99-100% on cities and populated areas, while GPU usage never reaches more than 70%
On Assassin's Creed Syndicate the thing is even worse, GPU usage never goes higher than 40%
Pretty much every other next-gen game GPU usage wander around 70-92%

Now, what should I upgrade for? Here is what I'm thinking:

i5 - 4590/4690 (non K, because I'm not into over clocking and stuff)
Xeon - E3 1231 V3 (It has 4 hyperthreading)
i7 - Any i7 that sockets on a LGA 1150 slot.

Note: I Already have the motherboard for LGA 1150. Also, no Skylake as I heard.
But the thing is, I'm on a budget, I live by myself, I pay bills and stuff, I pay college, I can't spend much money on PC until 2017 (when I finish my studies), I also live in Brazil so CPU prices here are a bit salty.

So my options:

Wait a little while and get an i5
Wait a little while and get a Xeon
Wait a lot of time and get an i7

My final questions are, is it worth to get an i5 over an AMD A10 7850k? How much of an improvement will I get? Will i5 bottleneck a GTX 970?

Which is better? Wait a few weeks and get an i5? or wait around 3/4 months and get an i7?

Please I'll be really glad if you help me. I've seen benchmarks of i5 4690 vs AMD A10 7850k and the results doesn't seem to be a huge of a difference, but I've heard and seen on YouTube that when gaming the i5 is better than the A10 but how much
better?

Oh! By the way, my specs in case you need:

Windows 10
AMD A10 7850k Overclocked to 4.40GHz
16GB of RAM 1600MHz
GTX 970 "4GB" (3.5GB) This is the reference model, no factory overclock.
120GB SSD
2TB HDD

Discussion is locked

6 Posts
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Answer
2 priors.
by Forum moderator Nov 26, 2015 1:58PM PST
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Thanks for the help
by JawnCabrero Nov 26, 2015 7:28PM PST

Wait a sec, you're saying that if I disable my integrated graphics from the APU, my games will perform better? How much? Also in what tab should I look for on my bios? I found something on "North Bridge" on my Bios settings and saw something like "Primary VGA adapter" it's already set to PCI-Express instead of onboard, also there's an option to change the onboard graphics memory.

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There are priors on this.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Nov 26, 2015 8:00PM PST

But the idea is that the GPU in the APU accesses main memory which drags down the system. As to your BIOS settings, I don't know your board.

A cheap exit might be an AMD CPU rather than the APU. I don't see a make, model, revision, version of the motherboard to see a CPU list.

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Just curious
by Bob__B Nov 27, 2015 1:27PM PST

What do folks flame about?
Other than it does not have an igp it seems like a nice unit.

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Example. You can dig up others.
by r. proffitt Forum moderator Nov 27, 2015 2:07PM PST
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Answer
.
by Nov 27, 2015 12:26AM PST

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