Hoping that the forumites can answer this one…

I’ve a Z77 motherboard with a I5 3570K CPU and 8gb of RAM which is approaching it’s fourth birthday. Over the years, I’ve upgraded the GPU, but I’m wondering whether it’s time to upgrade now that Skylake is widely available.

Given that I’ve already got a very pokey GPU in place, am I going to notice much of a difference when gaming if I swap to a Skylake motherboard and an I5 6600K?

Shirely it depends on the games your playing, some are CPU intensive other aren’t.. What are your system resources saying when you play your current games?
Follow that through, it might be worth upgrading your GPU instead, even on older unit like yours
Skylakes performance over the previous 5th series (or the more available 4th series) wasn’t that huge, going by reviews.
Not to say you wouldn’t see any improvement by going skylake with your current GPU, but whether it would be with the money it’d cost, I very much doubt it.

nvidia’s pascal due second half of this year, may be worth holding fire, but then that’s always the case with pc stuff eh? 🙂

A silly question perhaps, but what tools should I be using to monitor gaming performance and identify any bottlenecks?

http://www.pcgamer.com/will-your-cpu-bottleneck-your-graphics-card/

Windows Performance monitor or even task manager ( CTRL + SHIFT +ESC ) would be a good start. It is a while since I used it, but Sissoft Sandra will give you information on things you didn’t know your computer could measure.

@retro83

Thank you, that is absolutely what I’m looking for.

I have a pretty pokey GPU (980ti), so my worry is that I’ve somehow installed a Ferrari engine in a Mondeo chassis. I’ll run the tests and see how my CPU keeps up.

MSI Afterburner is a good monitoring tool, gives info on FPS, CPU and GPU usage, RAM usage, temps etc.

I’ve been toying with the idea of an upgrade but get good enough gaming performance from my i5 4950 and a GTX 970 although I am yet to try anything above 1080P

Surely SSD would help more?

^ No he needs Linux

I have a pretty pokey GPU (980ti), so my worry is that I’ve somehow installed a Ferrari engine in a Mondeo chassis. I’ll run the tests and see how my CPU keeps up.

A CPU upgrade would be a waste of time unless you are doing stuff other than gaming e.g. rendering. You have an unlocked CPU so you could always overclock.

Your money would probably be better spent on a new monitor, especially if you are still gaming on a single 1080p screen @ 60Hz.

Wouldn’t bother, largest performance increase is going to be a decent SSD and then GPU. Intel have the market corned and just offer incremental upgrades in performance over previous generations. I’d wait another generation or three.

Toms Hardware CPU hierarchy chart sums it up pretty well

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/cpu-hierarchy,review-33355.html

SSD won’t help gaming that much unless you are low on ram and it’s paging a lot. Ram, cpu, and gpu is the holy trinity of high end gaming.

Granted the game will load into ram a lot faster, and will boost general tasks but anyone serious about pc gaming will have an SSD anyway, but once it’s loaded, the drive becomes much less significant in terms of game performance.

That said, most recent pc games are half arsed console ports anyway, so anything reasonable is good, as long as your graphics card supports the latest dx

Further amendments.. Running games at 1080 res on a single screen works great, if you bump the res up further, it will really caine your system unless you want to spend serious money, not worth the money.

Hmm from that hierarchy I may as well go for a Skylake 6600K and future proof with DDR4. Price is nigh on the same as 4690K.

(From a QX6850 FWIW)

SSD generally only improves load times, not actual gameplay- though it can still affect hte game experience.

I probably wouldn’t bother with the processor unless it’s definitely an issue. I recently went from a G3258 to a devil’s canyon i7 and I have literally one game where it makes any difference whatsoever. I didn’t get it for gaming reasons and pretty glad of that! OK, so I’m on old board architecture but basically the point here is that almost all modern processors kick an astonishing amount of arse, and there comes a point where the arse is just kicked well enough.

If you’ve not already, I would have a crack at overclocking that i5. Free powah.