I’ve a four year old system with a Z77 motherboard, 8gb of RAM and a 3570K CPU running with a year old 980ti card. Both my missus and I are keen gamers so I’m thinking of upgrading to a new motherboard with a 6600K and 16gb of RAM.

Mhz and whatnot isn’t necessarily a reliable indicator of performance, so will we notice a significant boost with newer hardware?

I’d be checking task manager/resource manager (& or equivalents) & some sort of graphic card monitor util, to see what is being maxed out during your game usage. Then make a better informed purchase based on that, as not only are mhz not a great indicator, neither assuming that a newer family of cpu’s are hugely better than the old ones (though a 3rd to 6th gen probably would be noticeable)

Not worth it at all in my opinion. The 6600k is ~15% faster which is unlikely to result in much difference to anything from a gaming perspective.
16gb of RAM is also still in the realms of future-proofing as 8gb is more than enough for most situations.

IMO, you would not necessarily notice a massive increase in performance.

save your cash and clock your system

those 980’s are pretty brisk, but the 1080 is a noticable step up, so p’raps a new gpu would serve you better.

What monitor do you have? 1080 GTX is aimed at 4k 60fps or 144hz@1440p

Id say get a 4770/4790k CPU and 16gb of ram. The 980ti is still a very good performer. i5’s are seeing noticeable FPS drop over i7’s on the newer games so this is why the 3770

What games do you play?

BTW – I have 2600k and 780 GTX and play at 1440p and have no issues playing anything, BF1 for example runs 60fps but I’m at high graphics not ultra.

My 3570K is clocked to the highest it’ll reliably run at 4Ghz, so there’s no more headroom there. As for my screen, I’m about to upgrade – I’m using an HD plasma but I wanted some growth room with an eye on a new screen at some point.

I’ve been looking at I7 systems on Scan – the top end I7 for a Z170 is still four cores as opposed to the base spec I7 for an X99 system which is six. The price for both setups (16Gb, I7 and motherboard) is exactly the same.

So, I guess it comes down to X99 vs Z170?

The difference in performance you would get from upgrading your CPU/motherboard/memory wouldn’t justify the cost to me over your current platform. 10-15% at best but in real world usage you’d barely notice a change.

Buy a 2nd hand i7 CPU and another 8Gb of RAM for your current platform and if feeling flush get a 1080 GTX. That’s 3/4 years worth of 4k@60FPS gaming for not much more than a whole platform upgrade that keeps the 980ti.

Oh and 4.0ghz overclock?

Either you’ve been really unfortunate with silicon lottery or you are not doing it right. (possibly CPU cooler not up to the job)

What makes you say 4.0Ghz is the highest it will run?

What makes you say 4.0Ghz is the highest it will run?

If I clock it faster, stuff crashes.

A few things on OC’ing:

What voltage is the CPU at?
What memory profile is set? (XMP best)
What temp does the CPU reach?
What CPU cooler? (if std then there is your issue)
Also what PSU and motherboard do you have?

God I could go on, must remember this is not a PC forum

Oh and edit from previous post, CPU you should get is 3770k as 4xxx is not compatible