CPU upgrade for son's gaming PC

Jason56d

Morning all. My son has been slowly upgrading his PC for gaming over the last 6 months or so. Now is time for a new CPU.

He currently has an i5 4690K (Haswell), but my other son's newer i3 6100 (SkyLake?) performs better when they both play the more cpu intensive Battlefield. For other games such as COD, Fortnight and CS Go, they are about equal. They both have Windows 10, and a GTX 1060 with 16GB RAM.

Told him I thought he was mad upgrading it for the sake of 1 game and I suggested he save up and buy a brand new PC in about a year, but he will not be told!! So he will be asking everyone for money at Christmas this year to get a CPU, motherboard and RAM.

I read that the i3 8100 is a decent all round CPU and is by far the cheapest option, but he has set his mind to a new i5. The 8400 gets good reviews, but obviously the 8600 would be best, but is at least £50 more expensive, which is a chunk towards the other bits? And yesterday I saw an 8500 for sale in the classifieds on here.

So, any suggestions which would be best for him? Would he notice a big difference with an 8400 over his current one? Is the 8600 noticeably better? I know more expensive i7's would be better (one of his online gamer friends has recently got a i9 9900, I told my son to dream on!) and newer Gen 9 etc, but he will have a limited budget (£400-450 in all I think for all 3 parts) and wants the best possible.

Thanks

EndlessWaves

From a practical perspective they're all much the same, the only time you're likely to see more than around 1.3x the performance is in the rare game that can use six cores (although the latest Battlefield is one of them I believe).

Does he have a high refresh rate monitor? If he's only running a 60hz monitor then the benefits are going to be even more limited. Presumably it's not a variable refresh rate screen on an nVidia card.

Are there any other pieces of equipment that need improvement? Does he have a cheap desk or chair? Is he using onboard audio and a cheap headset?

Jason56d

See, that's the issue, it is Battlefield that's the problem. The only problem! Everything else he plays, he is very happy with the performance.

Only got him a new desk and chair about 18 months ago. He already has a very good headset that is perfect for him audio wise.

I was going to get him a new monitor for Xmas, but he is adamant he would prefer a new cpu & bits instead. Monitor can come later.