Woke up noticing my desktop cpu is 5yr old in 2023.
Now the intel 13gen is out, might upgrade.
Since I missed the big sales all around EOY, what should I do? Is there a sale season early year, or I am happy to wait a little.
I thought I'd go with Core i5-13600KF and keep my ddr4 3200. Just need a MB and we're good.
Need to Upgrade PC - What Timing?
![](https://files.ozbargain.com.au/g/38.jpg)
Comments
My 4790k on ddr3 ram is still going good, even with a gtx970 4gb card
I don't know. Things get slower over time. The passmark is 4x on the 13th gen now, so I figure we'll see some difference.
vid is 3060ti, so it would get a boost from pcie4 on the new mb.Yeah. I have no doubt that it does slow over time. I am looking to upgrade to increase my ram capacity and to get a better gpu. But atm I'm just saying its still running so good i dont feel a need to change it
I have 32 gig of RAM in 4 slots so I can neither add anymore and I don't think I need anymore.
@furyou: I also have 32gb in 4 slots. I can only have maximum of 32gb. So i wouldnt be able to add 4 16gb for example. My motherboard is capped at 32gb, there is a game that i like playing that is hugely moddable if people desire to use mods, there are so many that I'd love to have. But thats the main reason I'd upgrade. Is to be able to use more mods in games.
PCIe4 won't give you any boost, the 3060ti doesn't saturate PCIe3. You could get a faster NVME drive, but they're not noticeably faster.
The only time PCIe3 vs 4 matters is for cheap GPUs where there are only 4 lanes (like the 6500XT), which was just a terrible cost cutting decision by AMD.
I'd keep an eye on whether you're maxing out your CPU in whatever you do. I just got signoff for upgrading my 8th gen laptop at work because it's sitting at 100% for good chunks of time (and running out of RAM, but not an issue for you). But it can sometimes be a good idea to do a bit of tidying first, look at what programs are running at startup, what is using a lot of RAM and making sure everything is up to date. And do a little troubleshooting, I found I was getting stuttering in games when Chrome was open (that was a specific issue with Chrome, Ryzen CPUs and RTX GPUs though).
To answer your question though: Timing doesn't matter that much. CPUs just keep dropping over time, then the new stuff comes out, there's a bit of a price peak and they go back to slowly falling. I've found there's never a perfect time, best to just look for a good sale price at the time.
If possible wait until October - November 2023. 13th gen will see price drops when 14th gen is released at the end of the year. If 14th gen is released then you will see price drops from the 13th gen refresh, though maybe not as steep.
well that's like looking at 12gen now. But 13g still seem better value/$ than 12g. Not sure why this gen has a big jump?
seems like 28%
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4603vs5008/Intel-i5-126…
You need to look at single core performance, in which 12600K is 5.2% slower than 13600K.
In multi-core score it looks like its 28% slower… which is because it has 28% less cores (Intel added 4 efficiency cores). However this doesn't really matter since the vast majority of games and applications cannot utilise that many cores at the same time.
The recent best price for 12600K was $349, and the recent best price for 13600K was about $490. You will find that the price to performance ratio, at least in these few following months, to be significantly in favour of the 12th gen (until 12th gen stock is depleted).
So you need to ask yourself, is the difference between the 13600K and 12600K anywhere near 5% of your total build cost.
I see. That makes it confusing. Single Thread doesn't change much does it.
Is that why people buy i7 and i9sHow much can an Efficient Core do? Eg if I play a video is that on E or P?
E cores did not improve between 12th and 13th gen, there's just more of them. 1 E core is equivalent roughly to 1 single thread of a Skylake 6th gen core.
Anything in your foreground (e.g. watching a video) will first utilise your P cores before E cores. I guess it depends on what kind of video you are watching. Some video codecs will utilise CPU more, while others will be primarily decoded by your GPU. Watching 8K might use more cores than watching 4K.
The 'busiest' my PC gets, I think is running photoshop (which I hear can use up to 8 threads), Lr sitting open, and a h264 or 265 FHD video playing, a few browser windows.
Looking at this maybe a i7-12700 would give me enough P cores for work, and is a better choice than i5 of any gen? But it costs $500 even tho it says it should be less than i5 13
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4603vs5008vs4608/Intel-…Right now on my i5 8gen some of the PS stuff takes a bit of waiting.
@kiitos: Well it ran. But waiting, hence watching videos. Who knows if the ps/lr would run faster with a faster CPU?
@furyou: Oh I didn't know you did content creation in Photoshop and Lightroom. In that case the 13600K would be better than the 12700.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/adobe-photoshop-1…
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/adobe-lightroom-c…
There is always a new tech on the horizon. The new tech is always must have and way better than the old tech. I've bought the best of the best before, paid the premium, and then 6 months later it's old tech and priced accordingly. Now I buy either last gen high end or current gen mid range. Buy it now or you'll always be waiting.
yeah. I guess it's runny now as I can keep my ram, I can use same new MB for 12 or 13 gen.
For 12 gen, eg why is the i7 12700KF vs 12700K vs 12700F vs 12700 are all different scores? Is it just measure error?
Are you having problems playing anything on your current setup ? Even if its 5 years old, i have a 8600k, and it can play anything i throw at it, so why upgrade unless you need to.
Maybe just upgrade the video card.