Old i5 upgrade question

[JamesWasHere]

I have an i5 4690k overclocked to about 4.4ghz, but some of the games I like are still being bottlenecked by the CPU. Minecraft with lots of mods, Factorio, 7 Days to Die, and some more. They are mostly single core games. I am looking to upgrade when I have the money but will getting a newer CPU really help when they are only slightly, if any, faster single core? The 3900x is said to top out at 4.6ghz and the Intel CPUs are about 5ghz. I think now that Intel has finally had some strong competition they've been becoming shady and I do occasionally run VMs or do other multitasking stuff so the 3900x is what I'm leaning towards.

How much will a new CPU increase performance in CPU bound games if the core the game is running on is not much if any faster than my current CPU?

Current specs: i5 4690k @4.4ghz, 16gb of 1600MHz DDR3 ram and a 6gb GTX 1060.
Desired specs: 3900x, 32gb 3200MHz DDR4, not sure on the video card.

 

[neeyik]

You have to bear in mind that although each successive CPU generation, from your 4690K to the latest ones today, will be a small, incremental improvement, your current system is 5 generations behind the latest Intel ones.

You can get a sense of the difference in this article:

2nd-Gen Core i7 vs. 8th-Gen Core i7

Today we're dusting off our old Core i7-2600K to see how well the seven-year-old CPU holds up in the latest games against Intel's new Core i7-8700K. We...

www.techspot.com

Intel Core i9-9900K and Core i7-9700K Review

Gaming Benchmarks. Today we can finally show you how Intel's new octa-core 9th-gen processors perform. On hand for testing we have the Core i9-9900K, an 8 core/16 thread processor...

www.techspot.com

Now the second article was done with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, which is notably more powerful than a 1080 Ti, but you can still see that the past 3 generations of Intel processors haven't changed all that much. However, in the first article, a stock i7-8700K is 17% faster than a stock i7-4770K (note that some of this performance increase will be down to platform and RAM differences).

And we have a look at the Ryzen 9 3900X:

AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X Review

It's finally time to review AMD's new 3rd-gen Ryzen processors. The Ryzen 9 3900X is a 12-core, 24-thread processor with a massive 64MB L3 cache. It costs...

www.techspot.com

You can see just how much better the 3900X is compared to the i5-7600K, which is pretty similar to the CPU you currently have.

If you want to see how current CPUs compare like-for-like (I.e. same number of cores, same clock speed) then try this article:

4GHz CPU Battle: Ryzen 3900X vs. 3700X vs. Core i9-9900K

Expanding upon all the testing we performed in our day-one 3rd-gen Ryzen coverage, today we'll be running a clock-for-clock comparison benchmark. IPC can be a good indicator...

www.techspot.com

In short, you're not going to see enormous improvements but you will definitely see some. Whether or not that's worth the cost and hassle of doing a full system upgrade is something only you can decide upon.

 

[JamesWasHere]

Thanks for the reply.

 

[neeyik]

If I was in your position, I’d do the upgrade. Like yourself, I had a 4th generation Intel system (i7-4790K) ran permanently at 4.4 GHz. I replaced it earlier this year with a i7-9700K setup; had I been doing it now, though, I would have spent more and gone with a 3950X or Threadripper, as I’m starting to do more with my PC than just gaming and testing. Yes, it would have been an additional $500 but over the period of time I do full system upgrades (4 to 5 years), it would have been worth it, for me at least. There again, I also want a GPU upgrade in the next 14 months, and that will easily swallow up that difference in cost.