i7-4790 with RTX 2060 or 2070?

Phil87 · 21 Mar 2020 at 14:54

I'm helping my brother with some PC upgrades so he can play some new games, his motherboard is a H81 (MSI H81M-P33) so I thought an i7-4790 would be a good replacement for his i3-4130. This is the list of upgrades I've come up with:

CPU: i7-4790 (to replace i3-4130)
GPU: RTX 2060 6GB (to replace GTX 1050 Ti 4GB)
RAM: 16GB DDR3 dual channel (To replace 8GB dual channel)
SSD: 480 GB SanDisk SSD PLUS (For OS and games instead of existing 1TB HDD)

His PSU is a Corsair Builder Series CX 500W V2. Am I right in thinking the 4790 is a good match for the 2060, and would it be likely to bottleneck anything faster e.g. a 2070?

EsaT · 21 Mar 2020 at 17:34

Hopefully you didn't pay that much for that CPU.
Every quad core is real low end by today's standards and bottleneck in heavier games.
Some games can already scale past 8 cores.
Certainly better make sure of good case cooling with that very minimal two phase CPU VRM of that market PC level motherboard.
While claiming support on paper those cheap crap boards just aren't built to actually support top CPU models.
Suspect that will limit CPU.

So no sense to spend on any high price GPU.
Especially if monitor is also 1920x1080 something like Radeon 5600 XT would be more in line.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/powe...ddr6-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-19l-pc.html

Also spending for 16GB of memory, which can't be reused in anything new...
If that motherboard had been decent you could have gotten another 8GB for less money spent on dead end hardware.

And that PSU wasn't exactly great.
More precisely it's 15 years old low end design and not exactly built to last.
How much of use it has seen?
Hour or two per day at most, or lot?

Phil87 · 21 Mar 2020 at 18:29

You make some good points EsaT.
We've not bought anything yet, but the CPU is £80.
I'm hoping there will be little or no bottle-necking based on my experience with 3770 & 1070, these are very close to the parts mentioned in performance. I saw a little bottle-necking in SotTR but nothing noticeable.
Good point about weak VRMs on cheap boards, I didn't think of that. We'll be adding a 120mm fan to the rear, maybe another on the front. I was going to suggest a Cooler Master Hyper TX3 EVO but may go for a downward blowing cooler to help out the VRMs.
He's using the PC with a 4K TV at the moment, so hopefully going for higher resolution and lower FPS which should help out the CPU.
That 5600 XT is the same price as the 2060 and I think a little slower.
The RAM is about £60, but you're right it could be wasted money on an old system. Or we could go 2nd hand for that and some other parts.
I'm hoping the PSU will be ok becuase it will barely hit 50% load, and no chance of overclocking, but again you're right it's not great.
It's been used quite lightly over the years.

EsaT · 21 Mar 2020 at 20:34

Would consider £50 as max for such upgrade to already low end CPU, if purpose is to play current and coming games and not older/lighter.
With next-gen consoles approaching, more of coming games will no doubt be able to use more cores.
Really only reason why core utilization of games stalled completely for so long was Intel's greed.

Phil87 · 21 Mar 2020 at 21:19

Yeah I think you're right, new games will start to take advantage of 8+ cores properly and anything with 4 cores will start to struggle.
We could get an i5-4690 for £45, but I've seen the different hyper-threading alone can make going from 3rd gen i5 to i7, it changed SotTR from laggy to playable. At least with the i7 we would be getting the best out of that system without a complete rebuild.