How much better for gaming, overclocked i5-750 vs Haswell

[Deders]

I've just upgraded my monitor from a 1680x1050 LG to the 2560x1080 Dell and in most cases my OC'd 670 is coping well. Even with the most intense games I generally just have to turn AA down from SSAA to FXAA or SMAA if it's available.

But some games it is running a little too close to 30FPS for my liking, Crysis 3 for instance. I'm looking forward to playing the Witcher 3, Arkham Knight and Dragon Age 3 when they come out and would like to keep playing games at full detail, with some form of AA whether it's shader based or not. Arkham City still runs fine with 32xAA btw.

So I have the choice of being able to upgrade either my GPU to a 780, looking at the Asus DCUII OC model, which I may need a bigger PSU to run overclocked and overvolted

or

upgrade to Devils Canyon so new CPU/MB and Soundcard

What I want to know is how much harder does Haswell push Nvidia Graphics cards when compared to Lynnfield/Nehalem?

I'd probably end up going with the i5 unless it's seriously limited compared to the i7.

I know for instance that a stock ivy bridge i5 was 50% faster in Arkham City than my overclocked i5, both with a 670, but I think this was down to how much of a boost the new architecture helped with PhysX so it's a bit of an anomaly, but still relevant for me.

 

[daveybrat]

Since you've already got a GTX 670, i'd upgrade your cpu before i did the GPU.

Today's Haswell is much more powerful than what you have with a motherboard chipset that has a lot of new features including Sata III.

Grab yourself a decent Z97 Chipset board with either an i5 or i7 Haswell refresh cpu and you should be good to go.

You can always upgrade your GPU later as well.

 

[Deders]

Thinking about it, my i5 does everything I need, Sata III would be nice but is fairly irrelevant as at best it would only shave a second or 2 off loading times, I monitor my diskspeeds and it rarely pushes 150MB/s in real world applications or games, usually much less than 100MB/s. It's the 4k read and writes that make it so much faster than HDD's.

Gaming is the only area that could do with improvement due to the 54% increase in pixels it now has to push. If Devils canyon could give enough of a boost to my framerates at 2560x1050 then I would go for that, but obviously I'd want to see some proof of the actual increase before investing in hardware that may be the wrong decision.

 

[Ventanni]

I'd wait for Broadwell, honestly. If you were running your 750 at stock and were unwilling to overclock, then yes, getting a 4670k makes sense. But, you're not. You have it clocked at a healthy 3800mhz, which is nothing to sneeze at. Even despite being several years old now, your Lynnfield chip is no joke. Will you see a performance boost? Yes, of course, but not $350 worth.

Wait for Broadwell.

 

[Deders]

My only other concern would be eventually I'd want to buy a DX12 GPU, which would mean upgrading my GPU twice if I went the GPU route, and possibly leaving me with Lynnfield for even longer if I couldn't afford both, which is quite likely.

Maybe if DX12 is the mantle contender they say they are aiming for, the CPU might not be as relevant by that point.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Hard to justify the upgrade, unless you really wanted the new platform features (native USB3, SATA3, better PCI-E bandwidth, etc.) or more threads (i7 Haswell).

I was in the same boat until I needed spare gaming rigs at the folks for when I visited. That's when I "retired" my trusty old i7 920 @ 4.1GHz on EX58-UD3Rs

 

[ElFenix]

at higher resolutions the CPU is less relevant. your nehalem is faster than the athlons/phenoms:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6985/choosing-a-gaming-cpu-at-1440p-adding-in-haswell-/5

 

[sm625]

Die shrinks on the gpu arent too far off either. I would wait for that. Why use 32xxAA? Isnt that a little overkill?

 

[Deders]

Hard to justify the upgrade, unless you really wanted the new platform features (native USB3, SATA3, better PCI-E bandwidth, etc.) or more threads (i7 Haswell).

I was in the same boat until I needed spare gaming rigs at the folks for when I visited. That's when I "retired" my trusty old i7 920 @ 4.1GHz on EX58-UD3Rs

Don't suppose you had the chance to compare them with the same graphics card?

at higher resolutions the CPU is less relevant. your nehalem is faster than the athlons/phenoms:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6985/choosing-a-gaming-cpu-at-1440p-adding-in-haswell-/5

Unfortunately the only game I would play out of that selection would be Metro 2033, which is heavily GPU limited, most of that selection are known to be GPU limited except for Civ.

Also there is the fact that there are almost a million more pixels at 1440p than at my res which would skew the results to be even more GPU limited

I guess you could argue that it is a trend for a lot of games to be CPU light these days, but the selection of games doesn't really show the potential that the CPU could give.

I do realise that the graphics upgrade would guarantee me better framerates for my res for now, but I still wonder what kind of a boost a haswell chip clocked at say 4.6GHz would give to a 670.

In theoretical terms on MHz alone that is a 21% increase and if you add in a 20% ipc on top of that it's about 145% total, if the 670 could take advantage of that, it would be about the same performance boost a 780 would give me theoretically.

Die shrinks on the gpu arent too far off either. I would wait for that. Why use 32xxAA? Isnt that a little overkill?

Do you have any evidence pointing to when the die shrink would occur, and would that be saved for Maxwell?

I was surprised to find that 32xAA ran so smoothly on this game, it hardly makes a dent when compared to 8xAA in this game, but I guess it is PhysX that is holding framerates back here.

With my old 560TI I had to run the game with FXAA to get a choppy 30-45fps. now that drivers have improved and especially with the latest beta I was still getting an average of 65 fps at 1680x1050 with the absolute highest settings and 32xAA. The extra million or so pixels (53% more) has only made a 10% loss on average in this game with the same settings.

 

[coffeejunkee]

I would set the cpu back to stock speeds. If you still get 30fps it's a gpu bottleneck so a faster cpu would do nothing. Or overclock a bit further to 4GHz if you can manage. If you get more fps a faster cpu will help. If not, a faster gpu will help.

 

[AtenRa]

I do realise that the graphics upgrade would guarantee me better framerates for my res for now, but I still wonder what kind of a boost a haswell chip clocked at say 4.6GHz would give to a 670.

In theoretical terms on MHz alone that is a 21% increase and if you add in a 20% ipc on top of that it's about 145% total, if the 670 could take advantage of that, it would be about the same performance boost a 780 would give me theoretically.

At 2560x1080 you will be 90% GPU limited in the vast majority of games with the GTX670.

Try the following to determine where is the limit in each of your games you play.

Lower the CPU to 2.8GHz default and see how much the performance is decreasing.
Lower or OC the GPU and see how much the performance is decreasing/increasing.

This way you will find out if you will need a faster GPU or CPU. But i believe for your Monitor a faster GPU like the 780/780Ti will be much better, especially since you are using AA filters.

 

[Deders]

These results are interesting, they do seem to show like most people say that at higher res, the graphics card will make the most difference even with a 780TI.

http://udteam.tistory.com/647

I wonder where my overclocked i5 would fit in with these charts.

Comparatively the 2560x 1600 has 48% more pixels than my res,

 

[biostud]

I upgraded my GTX 670 to a 7990, and got ~double fps in games where CF scales well, especially in newer games like Crysis 2 and BF4. So I would recommend getting a video card before getting a new CPU.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Don't suppose you had the chance to compare them with the same graphics card?

I did (had a 7970GE that was used with the 4770K for awhile), but only subjectively.
Hate to sound like HardOCP, but I did not notice any perceptible difference in playability at the same settings.

Was playing Crysis 3 and modded Oblivion around that time.

 

[Deders]

I've gone for the Asus 780 Direct CUII OC now, the clincher was how much more excited I felt after reading the reviews compared to the z97 MB's. thanks for the advice everyone.

 

[Denithor]

Well, I would have suggested just waiting a bit to see what the next GPU refresh would bring, especially as your 670 wasn't slowing you down too much.

But since you have pulled the trigger on a 780 already, hopefully you will see great improvements.

How about updating the thread once you get the new card? It would be nice to see how the i5 750 pushes the 780 in newer games.