Upgrading

[kyrcy]

What are the gains of upgrading from a 4th generation processor/motherboard to a 7th/8th generation? Does a similar speed, but newer generation processor perform noticeably faster?

[KarMa]

Maybe you can be more specific about which processor you have and which you are looking at.

And newer processors are able to do more computations per cycle. Mhz and Ghz are not a great way to measure processing speed. And newer chips support newer types of low level assembly extensions which can speed up things greatly in video compressing (like AVS, SEE, and so on). Not to mention all the cores you get with newer chips.

[kyrcy]

I am not asking about specific processors, but generally about choosing between same core (i3 or i5) and speed of different generations.

[KarMa]

Guess I was not entirely privy to the marketing of Intel chips, with Haswell called 4th generation and Coffee Lake being called 8th generation. If you are wanting to buy an Intel CPU new, I'd just wait for Ice Lake (I assume to be gen 10) when they come out with a new architecture. As the last architecture released was generation 6, Skylake; which was in 2015. So with gen 7-9 it's just optimizations of generation 6 Skylake. Unless you really can't wait another year or find a good deal somewhere on current hardware.

Again with newer chips you will get more instructions per cycle, better performance per watt, possibly a better Intel Quick Sync video encoder/decoder, maybe more assembly extensions, maybe more cores.

[kyrcy]

I don't think it's wise to buy a new processor with the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities and as far as I know all processors currently available are affected.

[KarMa]

I don't think it's wise to buy a new processor with the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities and as far as I know all processors currently available are affected.

That too, allegedly Ice Lake is being built to mitigated those.

[SameSelf]

Whether to upgrade a processor is very case dependent cuz very few programs are cpu bound since SB/IB. Ask yourself when was the last time you throttled all 4/8 cores on your machine? Only you can answer through performance profiling where the bottlenecks are in your workflows/system. Coming here asking for general advice is all wrong. No new cpu for you my friend.

[kyrcy]

I am still trying to find an excuse to upgrade, but I am not sure about the gain. To be more specific I am currently using an i5-4690K (which I never overclocked). What would be a worthwhile CPU upgrade?

[jagabo]

IPC has only gone up by about 5 percent between i5 4690K and an i5 7600. You'll need to go up in clock speed and core count to get significant speed increases. You'll gain hardware h.265 and vp9 video encoding if you use an editor that supports it.

[joeandmarg0]

If you do not have freezing,stuttering or any other video problems and your Reliability History and/or Event Viewer aren't showing any problems,then you haven't any excuse for change,other than boredom and too much spare cash.
I can help with the latter!.

[kyrcy]

What could speed things a little? I already have 8GB RAM and a SSD.

[KarMa]

What could speed things a little? I already have 8GB RAM and a SSD.

16GBs of RAM helps me a lot but my usage is going to be different than yours. You have not really said what you do with your computer.

[sophisticles]

I am still trying to find an excuse to upgrade, but I am not sure about the gain. To be more specific I am currently using an i5-4690K (which I never overclocked). What would be a worthwhile CPU upgrade?

If the app uses AVX2, you will see some significant speed ups from Kaby Lake and especially Coffee Lake cpu's, the move from DDR3 to DDR4 will help with certain workloads; as has been pointed out the addition of hardware HEVC and VP9 encoding, especially HDR encoding support in Coffee Lake has the potential to be a game changer though I have yet to find any test of Kaby Lake's and newer encoding quality.

Keep in mind that prices of ram have gone up and don't seem poised to go down any time soon; the Kaby-Lake G with AMD Vega gpu and HBM vram makes a very tempting choice, especially since it supports BOTH AMD's AMF encoder AND Intel's QS encoders.

[jagabo]

If the app uses AVX2, you will see some significant speed ups from Kaby Lake and especially Coffee Lake cpu's

Only if the software you are using supports AVX2.

[kyrcy]

16GBs of RAM helps me a lot but my usage is going to be different than yours. You have not really said what you do with your computer.

I don't think I am running anything that is very demanding in resources. It's mostly internet browsing, office applications, photo editing, watching movies and video encoding. At times, I notice some slowdown, probably because of running several tasks simultaneously. I rarely seem to need more than 8GB RAM (windows never complaint of disabled virtual memory).

[jagabo]

Run your video encodes at low priority and you won't even notice they're running in the background.