Do NOT upgrade from i5-8400 to i7-9700KF

Hi guys, do not upgrade from i5-8400 to i7-9700KF. Wait, what? Well, I want to share my experience in upgrading my CPU to i7-9700kf. I will have some benchmarks and slides for you, but also, I will share my own thoughts about this upgrade that are not necessarily reflected in benchmarks I’ve run.

Intro

First of all, i5-8400 is a great Gaming CPU for the price (i paid 166 EUR back in February). It has 6 cores, boosts up to 4 GHz, and runs quite cool, so you do not need to spend a fortune on a CPU cooler. I paired it with GTX 1070, so I had a quite balanced combo for gaming.

In general, I am using my PC for gaming and video editing. Obviously, it was performing well in games, but it took longer times for my video renders, and in some cases, a better CPU would have given even better FPS experience. One more downside of my i5 was I couldn’t play with overclocking much. The only thing I managed to do is to push it to 4.1 MHz by increasing the CPU Base Clock from 100 to 102.5 MHz (since I have z370 chipset motherboard). And since I’m considering myself a PC Enthusiast, overclocking is something I want to play around with.

Anyway, after half a year of use, I’ve decided to upgrade my system starting with a CPU. I’ve ordered i7-9700kf for 379 euros from mindfactory.de. Since I managed to sell my i5 for almost the same price I bought it, my upgrade cost me just over 200 EUR. Why 9700kf? Since I’m playing Apex Legends, I wanted to get the best CPU for gaming. Having in mind that I have a 144 Hz monitor and didn’t want to change my platform to Ryzen yet. And the big brother 9900k was still more expensive, needs an even better cooling solution and not even mentioning I have quite a cheap z370 motherboard.

At a time, I was using Cooler Master Hyper 212 RGB Black Edition cooler. Since I was upgrading to i7, I was not sure it will be enough cooling power. After a few game sessions, I was getting just over 70 degrees celsius, but during stress tests like Prime95 or Auda64 I was reaching high 80s and I was not even overclocking my new toy. I knew one more upgrade is waiting, but let’s leave it for now.

Benchmarks

Comparing my PC performance before and after the upgrade. As I mentioned before, mainly I play Apex Legends and so these were the numbers I was interested in the most. But it’s really hard to benchmark this game since most of the time you land on a different spot with a different amount of enemies and other variables going around you. But I’ve tried my best.

So here are the numbers:

• There was almost no difference regarding average fps, but we had a 4 to 6 percent improvement in 1% and 0.1% lows. It’s no surprise since clearly my GPU is bottlenecking here and MSI Afterburner numbers confirmed that.
• One more benchmark – World of Tanks Encore. Here we see even less improvement – no change in average fps, few fps difference in 1% lows and the most improved part 0.1% lows, around 6 % better.
• In Firestrike we have a 5.5 % increase in score.

As I’ve expected, performance increase in games is not significant, since they are more GPU bound. But man, that’s a good feeling when you get a new CPU anyway.
Even if you didn’t manage to double your performance. Anyway, you might guess what’s the next upgrade I’m planning to go for.

Final Words

I have the same suggestion to you guys – do not upgrade from i5-8400 to i7-9700KF in case you expect better FPS in games and your GPU is not good enough. Upgrade your video card first.

Thanks for stopping by, and checking my post! Check out my video (you will find a link below) and see you soon.

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