Upgrade motherboard or CPU?

[marmoro]

Sup folks,

I posted a thread couple days ago on regarding GPU upgrade and I made my decision to go with EVGA GTX 780. Simply worth every penny I payed for!.

But then I realized that I may have a bottleneck (CPU load 97-99% with HT off) since my CPU is running at clock speed. My setup as follows:

ASUS P8B75-V
EVGA GTX 780 SC w/ ACX Cooler
Intel i7 2600k stock cooler and speed
1 stick of Kingston 8GB RAM DDR3

As you can see the chipset I have doesn't allow overclocking but I can increase BCLK frequency from ASUS AI Tweaker in BIOS (I increased up to 103.0 once without realizing for a couple months) but I heard it's not safe.

So I had these choices:

(Cheapest) Easy route: Buy an aftermarket cooler and raise BCLK frequency up to 103.0-106.0 or until its safe
(Affordable) Logical route: Buy a Z77 motherboard and an aftermarket cooler and overclock as usual.
(Worth it?) Hard route: Buy a new motherboard (Z97), a new CPU (Haswell) and an aftermarket cooler.

The thing is I don't want to wait for new products to come out (Haswell-E) to play the games I have right now.

Apologize for the long post. :ninja:

 

[AllWhacked]

In all the reviews I've seen where they've compared the same CPU at various clock speeds running at 1920 x 1080 resolution, typically the results are pretty much dead even between stock speed vs overclocked. I've seen this on i7-3770K and i7-4770K ranging from stock up to 4.5GHz. In the few titles that do benefit, I've seen maybe an increase of an extra 1-2 FPS per 500MHz increase at the most. I think you're fine with what you have.

 

[marmoro]

In all the reviews I've seen where they've compared the same CPU at various clock speeds running at 1920 x 1080 resolution, typically the results are pretty much dead even between stock speed vs overclocked. I've seen this on i7-3770K and i7-4770K ranging from stock up to 4.5GHz. In the few titles that do benefit, I've seen maybe an increase of an extra 1-2 FPS per 500MHz increase at the most. I think you're fine with what you have.

1-2 FPS? That's not worth the risk for me ^_^

Actually I ordered Coolermaster TX3 Evo which is very easy to install in place of Intel ugly cooler.