Upgrading from i7 4770 to i5 8500, Worth It?

Homr on 20/09/2020 - 14:34
Last edited 20/09/2020 - 14:47

Hey Ozbargainers,

I'm currently on a lookout to upgrade by current desktop which is a i7 4770, 16gb ram

I found this system which is a HP Pro desk 600 G4 which has an i5-8500 8gb ram, 256gb M.2 and its selling for $400. Is it worth the upgrade and would I get much performance increase going from i7 4th to i5 8th gen. My current i7 has 4 cores 8 threads while the i5 has 6 cores 6 threads.

If I do get the i5 system I'll also be adding another 8gb ram to make it 16gb and 1650 low profile GPU

Thanks all.

Computing

Comments

  • RobBoss on 20/09/2020 - 14:40
    +2

    Benchmark wise, the upgrade will yield a difference in performance. The biggest upgrade you’ll get from this is the transition from DDR3 to DDR4 though. Quick note, cores and threads isn’t the sole indicator for performance. i7-1065G7 has 4 cores and 8 threads, but it is by no means a power house.

    https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-4770-vs-…

    • Kangal on 20/09/2020 - 19:36
      +2

      This.
      Though it's finally good to see the wheels in motion, as the industry starts getting more competitive again. That HP system sounds okay for the price, but I doubt OP would see much of a huge upgrade. We desperately need to get over the old Core-i systems, it's been 10 years man!

      The industry has been stagnant for awhile. Some people snagged a really cheap deal with the GTX 670 and Core i5-2500k back in 2012. And others did great too with the Core i7-2600k and the AMD HD7970. These above systems aged very very well (for their time).

      There wasn't really a need to upgrade from those… for a long-time. Well, not unless you jumped to the 2014 GTX 980 and the Core i7-5960x. This combination was also great, and aged okay.

      Or if you were a little more patient, there were slightly more refined options for the system. Such as the 2016 system with GTX 1080 and the Core i7-6900k. Or a year later to the equivalent 2017 Ryzen r7-1700 and Vega64. Both of these are "future-proof" systems, in the similar vein to the 2012 units.

      Now?
      Competition is starting to heat up again. If the rumours are true (and they sound probable), we could see the Ryzen r9-4950x offering up another +15% or so of IPC, plus another +5% frequency. So that in 2021 would be actually worth upgrading to from a r7-1700/6900k. On the GPU front, both GTX 1080 and Vega64 have aged very well, and aren't worth upgrading to any cards in 2020. But for 2021, it would be worth upgrading it to an AMD RDNA-2 card (RX 7700XT ?) or to an Nvidia RTX 3080-20GB. Again, this would be a system designed for longevity, perhaps not as good as the 2016 system was for its day, and definitely not as good as the 2012 system for its day.

  • garetz on 20/09/2020 - 14:43
    +5

    You will be getting a roughly 15% performance increase, doesn't seem worth it to me. I would want at least a 30% bumb to justify an upgrade thats worth doing.

    • Homr on 20/09/2020 - 14:45
      +1

      Thanks. I'm surprised to see how a 6yr newer processing only yields 15% increase on my current CPU. The 4770 must've been a monster when first released.

      • Hybroid on 20/09/2020 - 14:50
        +3

        You're comparing a once-high-end to a mid-CPU at different price brackets.

        4770 vs 8700K is around 30-40% increase in performance.

        https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-4770-vs-…

      • garetz on 20/09/2020 - 14:50
        +2

        There may be 4 generations gap, but you are also going from an i7 stepping down to an i5, if you went to a 8600k, which is also overclockable, the difference would be at least 25-30% more performance.

      • Mitch889 on 20/09/2020 - 14:53
        +1

        Intel hasn’t made substantial gains in IPC in years. If you’re not taking advantage of the extra cores, you won’t see much of a gain.

        https://cpugrade.com/articles/cinebench-r15-ipc-comparison-g…

        $400 sounds pretty good for that machine though. The one on gumtree?

      • MagicMushroom on 20/09/2020 - 16:24

        Yep Intel is currently stuck

        • AlienC on 20/09/2020 - 19:09

          Can't wait for the next cpu breakthrough.

          That will be my next potential buy but not before then.

          The 3090 looks nice but the cpu performance maximum atm does not feel high enough to compete with the great gpu gains.

          If tech has told me anything it is if you can wait and there is no rush it is always better to wait.

          If you can predict hardware shortages or a disaster that is the only time to preemptively buy some hardware like the natural disasters that affected ssd and mechanical storage supply years ago last decade.

  • abctoz on 20/09/2020 - 15:16

    no your 4770 is more futureproof

    4/8 is similar in performance to 6/6 but with 2 extra threads

    • Homr on 20/09/2020 - 15:17

      Cool thanks, I might hold on to my 4770 for another 2yrs

      • abctoz on 20/09/2020 - 15:18
        +1

        if you like tinkering you can look into something like this:

        https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/542349

        ~$300 for 8/16 cpu/mb/ram, a budget ps5 imo

        • Homr on 20/09/2020 - 15:19

          Thank but I'm looking for a SFF Build thats why the HP Pro desk caught my eye.

          I regards to the 4c/8t vs 6c/6t, I thought more cores the better compared to threads.

          • abctoz on 20/09/2020 - 15:24

            @Homr: more cores is better but you need enough threads, games increasingly use more threads and if there isn't enough the OS "emulates" extra threads by loading/unloading instructions each time the thread gets called and that can really kill performance, where as with physical threads the instructions are readily available so you skip the loading/unloading

  • scrimshaw on 20/09/2020 - 16:20

    Double your core count or nothing. IPC wise your Intel is still decent so for any sort of improvements I would look at increasing the number of cores / threads

    If you are looking at the secondary market, in a couple of months people will be offloading their older generation Ryzen 3000 CPU's on ebay, in order to purchase Ryzen 4000 / 5000 parts.

    System integrators who still have Ryzen 3000 stock will also be pricing their stuff for much, much cheaper

    • Homr on 20/09/2020 - 16:21

      oh cool thanks, yes I'm looking at secondary market. I'm mainly after a prebuilt SFF build so buying individual CPUs is not very ideal for me.

    • Homr on 20/09/2020 - 16:27

      What CPU should I be aiming for my next upgrade? Looking for price vs value aswell.

  • AndyC1 on 20/09/2020 - 16:23

    What are you using the desktop for? Surfing, programming, graphics or playing games or work? (Work === MS Office/Libreoffice etc).

    Depending on what you are using it for then it may be worth it or you may see no improvement, but I think the improvement would not be worth the cost. Put the cost towards a new AMD desktop when the 4xxx's become widely available in OZ.

    • Homr on 20/09/2020 - 16:28

      Mainly surfing and home use and some gaming if possible.

      I have already purchased a dell vostro 5490 for work use.

      I don't feel any slowdown from my current machine but I just want newer features like USB-C, M2 etc

      • AndyC1 on 20/09/2020 - 17:18
        +1

        Some things about the new features:

        • USB-C - buy a PCI-e card as it's way cheaper. Be aware that most USB 3.x USB sticks are so slow that that I have fast 2.0 USB sticks that work allot faster. Save your money for a SanDisk Extreme Pro USB stick (not the Pro go!!!!) and you will be happy. Check out the USB speed results at https://usb.userbenchmark.com/

        • M2 - IMHO in 99% of cases you will not see any speed improvement in Surfing or normal home use if migrating from a SATA SSD to an M2 SSD. The exception is in movie editing or editing large multi-MB graphics files.

        I would still save the money and wait for a better increase in performance for the money.

  • Richardc on 20/09/2020 - 18:27

    I would buy new, as the i5-9400 Is less than $200, you should be able to get cpu mb ram ssd for less than $500.

  • backpaqer on 21/09/2020 - 08:47

    I've got an i7 2600k and couldn't justify an upgrade to an 10th gen i9 or i7. The performance boost on a single-core basis isn't that massive. I spent some $$$ buying a decent cpu fan and overclocking the cpu to 5ghz. Using cpuid benchmarking it against every other rig of any other config it was still better than average. Though I think the gtx1080 video card is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

    • Homr on 21/09/2020 - 09:34

      I'm now looking at the techfast deals as some of the deals come with a SFF case which suits me.

      https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/563237

      I can't overclock my CPU as its a non k.

      If I do get a new system I'll be selling my i7 4770 system for around $400 and it will come with 16gb ram, 1050ti, 256gb SSD.

      • [Deactivated] on 03/10/2020 - 14:45

        What's your 4770's idle temp?

        Mine is at 32 degree celcius with air/room temp at 26. 64 degree celcius, or 83 degree celcius with IntelBurn Test (maximum) under load… using CPUID HWMonitor. Stressing with CPU-Z benchmark tool.

        • Homr on 03/10/2020 - 18:26
          +1

          Idle temp is around 45 - 50 degrees. Under load it reaches around 80

  • elhanm2004 on 21/09/2020 - 10:30

    I have HP Pro Desk i7 1nd gen machine for nearly 7 years now and still very happy with it. Has recently installed an SSD and extra 8g RAM which boosted the performance significantly. Maybe you should just upgrade the hard drive?

  • dec1an on 21/09/2020 - 15:58

    Still happy with my 10 year old i7 4770k rig. I built it as a photo and video processing rig and it's never let me down. Useful thread to confirm how marginal the gains seem to have been in recent years.

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