I'm currently using a Radeon 9070 XT with an i7-12700K, MSI PRO Z690-A DDR4 motherboard, and 32GB of DDR4 memory. In PUBG, I usually get around 140–240 FPS depending on what's happening, but during intense fights it can sometimes drop close to 100 FPS. I'd like to improve my frame rates without spending too much. Since my current motherboard doesn't support Ryzen, I've been considering an i7-14700K or i7-14700KF. Would that provide a noticeable improvement, or would another upgrade make more sense?
4 Answers
Before buying a new CPU, check whether the processor is actually limiting your performance. Use a monitoring tool such as MSI Afterburner to track your average FPS, 1% and 0.1% lows, per-core CPU usage, CPU clocks and temperatures, GPU usage and clocks, plus RAM and storage usage. Check what changes when the drops happen. If one CPU core is saturated, the CPU is overheating or its clocks are dropping, then a processor upgrade or better cooling could help. If the GPU is already at full usage, a faster CPU won’t improve those moments.
A newer 3D-cache gaming platform would likely offer a bigger improvement, but that would mean replacing the motherboard and moving to DDR5. If keeping costs down is the priority, I’d measure the bottleneck first rather than upgrading immediately.
A 14700K would give you a higher boost clock and some extra cores, but don’t expect the overall gaming improvement to match the clock-speed increase. For PUBG, the gain may be fairly modest compared with the cost of changing CPUs, especially since your current frame rate is already high. Also make sure your motherboard BIOS supports 14th-generation processors before upgrading.
If you do decide to stay on that platform, a 14600K or 14600KF is probably the better value choice. In games it should perform very similarly to the 14700K while costing less, and it should be plenty for a 9070 XT. Just remember that the KF model has no integrated graphics.
That makes sense. I mainly want to improve the drops during combat, so I’ll monitor the CPU and GPU usage before deciding.