Question What is a reasonable intel gaming cpu ?

[you2]

I've not been following cpus for a couple of years now since my machine was fine (I had an i7 haswell refresh (lga 1150). Recently the system ceased to post; I suspect it is the mother board though I suppose it might be gpu. I had replaced the 10 year old psu about 1 month ago and all was fine until this afternoon. Anyway the system won't even post (I removed all disks); so I want to upgrade the motherboard/cpu and then reuse my old disks (including boot disk which has windows 10).
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I'm really unsure which intel generation and cpu i should go with - the motherboard will have to be an itx. A bit of googling suggest maybe z490 board with 10th generation i5 or i7 of some variety but intel loves marketing and has too many variations. I will not bother with over-clocking but want something at least on par of the linear speed of my current cpu (not even sure if that is an i5 or i7 ). Once i know which cpu to get i can find a motherboard that will fit it.
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I considered getting a replacement mb for my haswell refresh but why ?

 

[igor_kavinski]

Are you a human?

www.newegg.com

https://www.kingston.com/dataSheets/KF432C16BB1K2_32.pdf

CL16 or even CL15 if you settle for DDR4-3000.

 

[Leeea]

What is a reasonable intel gaming cpu ?

Anything 10, 11, or 12 series with at least 4 high performance cores and 8 threads. If you have the money, 6 or 8 high performance cores is a nice upgrade.

All you need is 16 GB of ram right now. The speed of the ram does not really matter all that much, 3200 xmp is good enough.

The biggest thing will be the video card, and you will want at least a rtx3050 or rx6700.

 

[you2]

For whatever reason I buy gskill memory for the past 10 or so years. They do sometime fail but their support has been extremely good and so i reward company that has good service with future purchases. As for fast vs fast enough - am happy with fast enough and faster is just more $$$ (this is a comment on cpu) . My haswell refresh i7 (i7-4790k?) has been plenty fast and i rather spend $200 for 40% faster than $400 for 60% or 80% faster since 0% faster is already fast enough. I would not buy a 3050 as an upgrade to my 1070. My 1070 is getting a bit old and i think i will upgrade min to 3070 (or equiv) but more likely 3080. However I'm not sure today is the best time to upgrade the gpu. Tomorrow (assuming i fall back to sleep tonight); I will pull the gpu from my current system and make sure that is not the reason the machine won't post. That might cause me to upgrade the gpu today instead of just the motherboard.
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I think a 3050 is too slow for a 1440p monitor which is what i have settled on being unhappy with 1080p and finding 4k not necessary. The only thing that would make me go 4k is if a nice 27 inch oled hits the market and it is only in 4k. Sadly 27 inch oled at reasonable price has not happened and anything larger than 27 inch is too big (there should be a bunch of 32 inch oleds soon but not sure they will be very good for gaming and of course they are too large).
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There are a lot of very nice recent graphic cards announced - however all these new launches seem to be paper only since they are either unavailable or not price effective.
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A comment on future proof - i don't really future proof anymore. It never works out. If i future proof the memory they change standard. If i future proof cpu they change connectors or cpu socket. My ddr3 memory is now not so good on new mbs; my cpus are no good on new mb; they even are changing bus type of gpu. When i upgraded a gpu i discovered that new standard of pcie was not supported by my old mb (this was around 2016 or 2017 when i upgraded to 1070 gpu). Standard use to change fast; now they change faster. We used to be happy with usb 2.0; then were happier with 3.1 now we have usb standards defined that haven't even been released yet with new connectors yet to be introduced because the latest new connector hasn't yet become mainstream. These changes used to be every 3 or 4 or 5 years; now they seem like every 6 months. Why buy extra ddr4 (the asrock takes ddr4 instead of ddr5) when next year we will be up to ddr27 and all this old memory will be useless because a new mb is needed to connect the new disk drive that has a new interface making all old disk drives useless

 

[lakedude]

I agree that there is no such thing as future proof, however AMD has typically done a better job of providing an upgrade path without the need to buy a new main board. This may come with a price in that by reusing a board you might miss out on some new features available with a new board. The is not a new issue but the result of steady progress in the industry for the last decades.

I have a 10th gen Intel CPU and it is fine but in the past few years AMD has had the better CPUs for gaming up until Intel 12th gen came out. Would not recommend 10th or 11th gen Intel at this date. Get 12th gen Intel or AMD or better yet wait until you can get your hands on a decent video card. Do you have a laptop or something to get you by while your system is down?

Some Samsung phones 📱 can be used as just like a computer with a monitor, keyboard and mouse using a DeX. Cool device, it might be enough to keep you going while you pray for a deal on a GPU.

 

[lakedude]

A 3050 is not an improvement over a 1070...

Please click the green human to continue - UserBenchmark

gpu.userbenchmark.com

 

[Tech Junky]

@lakedude

AMD is a bit of an envy when it comes to using the same socket for so long but, are you said new boards = new features.

Intel sticking with a socket foe a couple of generations is a double sided sword. 390/490 compatibility (pcie 3) and then 590 for 10/11th gen (pcie 4) and 690/790 (pcie 5) / LGA1700.

For intel it's more of polishing the rock with refinements for ~2 gens before moving to new architecture.

Admittedly though I haven't been following AMD as closely but, they seem to be on the brink of their own ADL type revolution with their new socket/chipset coming at the end of '22. AMD seems a little hesitant when it comes to some of the newer features but, with Intel opening the door to TB with USB4 w/o the royalties it might be a good time to reconsider them to be apples to apples again.

DDR/PCI 5 coming with the newest option.

It's fixing to get interesting to see them go head to head on a level playing field again and see what kind of innovations they come up with to ne up each other moving forward. TB5 / WIFI7 / PCI6 / etc.

 

[you2]

I think the problem with the current board is that there is some sort of short; but it is intermittent. I managed to post it twice but the other times the power button (on the case) would flash and then it would shut down. At first I though tit might be the new psu but went through the head-ache of hooking up the old psu with the same results. Then i thought maybe the on/off/reset switch dongle got stuck or the wire was crossed but it wasn't. Anyway i ordered the asrock/i5/16gb and it will have to do - i mean all i want to do with this system is play games; not any real computations.
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I like amd but for various reasons but i would say that their chipset still has issues. To be honest I'm getting too old for this stuff. I mean when i was younger everything just worked and that was great but now nothing seems to work quite right.

 

[Tech Junky]

asrock/i5/16gb

What did you end up ordering?

 

[you2]

What did you end up ordering?

Intel Core i5-12400 - Core i5 12th Gen Alder Lake 6-Core 2.5 GHz

G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200

ASRock Z690M-ITX/ax LGA 1700 Intel Z690 SATA 6Gb/s DDR4 Mini ITX Intel Motherboard

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I took a look at the msi itx board; it looked pretty decent but then when i added in ddr5 ram it raised the price 1.5x more which seems excessive for a slight boost in speed. ddr5 ram is a bit more than 2x ddr4 and i wasn't in love with the options (vendors). I guess crucial would be my go to when gskill not available but even then it was looking a bit flaky in addition to the higher prices.
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I'm not in love with this asrock board; the sata options are rather limited with 4 sata and 1 nvme - not sure why they don't have more nvme (technically they have two nvme but one is tied to the sata port which makes it no good). Also the sound chip is pretty lame. Even my asrock from 7 years ago had a better sound chip.
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I mostly like msi, asus and asrock bios - not a fan of gigabyte bios - too messy. asrock i hear has gone down hill a bit but they used to pretty good bang for the buck. Msi was always weird with some truely great boards and some not so great boards. One thing is they support them forever. I had a 12 year old board from them and they released an unofficial bios for it when some standard changed on the pcie bus. Was a pia to install and didn't have a gui interfaced but it fixed the pcie bus

 

[Tech Junky]

Well, the NVME slots beyond 1 need to steal PCIE lanes from somewhere. It's just something to deal with and 4x SATA on a mini-ITX is more than enough due to the size of the case.

DDR5 value for performance when factoring in price + MOBO change doesn't add up to more value at this point as you saw. Wile technically you get dual channel on a single DIMM.

Just make sure you have good cooler contact with the appropriate mounting base for the ADL CPU. They're different from prior gen's and will get cooked w/o the proper mount.

 

[you2]

Well, the NVME slots beyond 1 need to steal PCIE lanes from somewhere. It's just something to deal with and 4x SATA on a mini-ITX is more than enough due to the size of the case.

DDR5 value for performance when factoring in price + MOBO change doesn't add up to more value at this point as you saw. Wile technically you get dual channel on a single DIMM.

Just make sure you have good cooler contact with the appropriate mounting base for the ADL CPU. They're different from prior gen's and will get cooked w/o the proper mount.

Well haswell refresh was one of the hottest running i7s; i'll use the intel stock cooler for now. Not quite ready to take the nh-u95 cooler off my old mb - want to run some more tests with it.
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I presume these cpu still have auto shut off when they get too warm; there are some tests that indicate with stock cooler it only peaks at 64 which isn't too bad but not sure they ran prime95 which seems to make just about any chip run hot.
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If i remember correctly at one point intel messed up the thermal on these chips - maybe that was haswell refresh? - not sure if they ever fixed them - something to do with how they were bonding the encasement to the package but i forget the details - kind of never cared 'cept for the fact that it ran hot.

 

[you2]

Not sure i understand this logic; the itx board should have the same number of pcie lanes as any other board; and since they only have 4 sata connectors on the board that should leave more pcie lanes free for nvme - right ? So they should be able to 'steal' the sata lane from an unimplemented sata device instead of stealing it from an implemented sata device Or phrase another way they should plenty of free pcie lanes available for nvme without using implemented sata ports. Guess they were lazy

Well, the NVME slots beyond 1 need to steal PCIE lanes from somewhere. It's just something to deal with and 4x SATA on a mini-ITX is more than enough due to the size of the case.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Intel's stock cooler is more than sufficient for your purposes. A 65W CPU doesn't need a heavy duty heatsink.

The Laminar cooler bundled with i5-12400 is supposed to be a significant improvement over prior stock coolers.

Check this out: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/quick-and-easy-intel-stock-cooler-mod-uses-a-paper-insert

 

[Thunder 57]

Anything 10, 11, or 12 series with at least 4 high performance cores and 8 threads. If you have the money, 6 or 8 high performance cores is a nice upgrade.

All you need is 16 GB of ram right now. The speed of the ram does not really matter all that much, 3200 xmp is good enough.

The biggest thing will be the video card, and you will want at least a rtx3050 or rx6700.

A 3050 is not an improvement over a 1070...

Please click the green human to continue - UserBenchmark

gpu.userbenchmark.com

Beat me to it. In what world is an RTX 3050 even close to an RX 6700? That's either a typo or NVIDIA bias. From Tomshardware: "Slower than RTX 2060 and RX 5600 XT". That means they are not even in the same league,

Spoiler: 7 Game Average

 

[Shmee]

The 12400 should be a decent upgrade over your Haswell chip. However, I would have gone with more RAM and a faster Alder Lake chip, like the 12700. Now, your GPU will likely be the next upgrade. I suspect a 1070 may have some difficulties at 1440p, especially a smaller/mini version. Also, please tell me you are at least booting off of some kind of decent SSD.

 

[igor_kavinski]

He was fine with his previous setup. He "had" to upgrade coz his Haswell wouldn't boot anymore. I understand his situation perfectly. I can throw money on a 12900KS or a 5950X but I ask myself why? My rig is for entertainment purposes only and it doesn't help me make any money. I can't justify the expense.

 

[you2]

The 12400 should be a decent upgrade over your Haswell chip. However, I would have gone with more RAM and a faster Alder Lake chip, like the 12700. Now, your GPU will likely be the next upgrade. I suspect a 1070 may have some difficulties at 1440p, especially a smaller/mini version. Also, please tell me you are at least booting off of some kind of decent SSD.

system has 4 ssd no hd. I've been using the 1070 with 1440p for 5 years; it does ok with most games like tomb raiders reboots and days gone; witcher 3 and such. However other than doom 2016 i haven't played a lot of pure action games in a while - mostly because of all the new sign up for our platform to play single player crap. I was looking at gpu and not sure i want to pay $800 for a 3070 ti right now. The 6700 xt seems like a modest upgrade and it is $650; I would think i want min 3070 ti or 6800 xt. maybe during black friday or something if there is stock this year.

 

[lakedude]

I think the problem with the current board is that there is some sort of short...

Typically when people say short they really mean an open, however you really might have a short.

One troubleshooting technique is to take the main board out of the big shorty metal box, inspect it for damage/metal things that could be causing a short and then run the computer in a minimal configuration outside the case on some non-shorty cardboard. Sometimes little screws, wires or other conductive metal can fall between the board and the case causing a short.

 

[jpiniero]

12900KS

 

[lakedude]

12900KS

OP already has a 12400...

 

[you2]

Typically when people say short they really mean an open, however you really might have a short.

One troubleshooting technique is to take the main board out of the big shorty metal box, inspect it for damage/metal things that could be causing a short and then run the computer in a minimal configuration outside the case on some non-shorty cardboard. Sometimes little screws, wires or other conductive metal can fall between the board and the case causing a short.

It was behaving flaky before i moved it to the new case; i had assumed it wsa the 12 year old psu - i put a new psu in the new case. One of the sympton is the power light was flickering on and off and the fan would stop and start - which seems more like a short. I might play with it later but right now it is a bit of pia - lack of good work space. I might bring it over to my parent house where i have more room to spread things out - I also have a larger case somewhere which would give me more room to play with the thing - i don't have a good foam to try to boot outside the case and the itx cases I have are quite cramp.
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Also the system was running fine for a month (in the new case) and then suddenly shutdown after several hours of use - so if it was something falling onto the mb not sure where it came from...

 

[igor_kavinski]

Also the system was running fine for a month (in the new case) and then suddenly shutdown after several hours of use - so if it was something falling onto the mb not sure where it came from...

Cockroach poop? Tiny cockroach babies? I lost a perfectly good PS3 that way. And I was almost like 70% into the game Catherine. Imagine my rage at cockroaches.

 

[you2]

Cockroach poop? Tiny cockroach babies? I lost a perfectly good PS3 that way. And I was almost like 70% into the game Catherine. Imagine my rage at cockroaches.

No cockroaches here - but i do have a dust issue.

 

[igor_kavinski]

No cockroaches here - but i do have a dust issue.

Dust + humidity can give rise to greenish mold growth. My i486DX2-66 died that way.

 

[epsilon84]

For current gen Intel CPUs, I'd say the 12400F strikes the ideal balance between price/performance.

Anything else above that and you quickly run into the law of diminishing returns, especially if you game at higher than 1080P or use mid range GPUs:

Now, if you are talking previous gen, then the 10400F is as low as I'd go. It's like a poor(er) mans version of the 12400F. It has has the same core/thread count but is on an outdated 14nm process/architecture so is slower and runs hotter.