Does i5-8600k bottleneck a 1080Ti?

vlatkozelka

*You can skip to the second part if you hate reading

I know there's a topic saying that even old cpus can support today's gpus. And personally, I never liked Intel i7, I can't get sold on hyper-threadding for an extra 150-200$. -Don't want to go into detail about Intel HT -

So really anytime I build a PC (for myself or a friend) I just go for whatever flagship i5 is present at the time, with a 50~70 series GTX. My last one was an i5-4460, locked! With a 750Ti and later a 970,which lasted me 4 years, and was still going strong until I decided to sell it to limit the "loss" before it would sell for dirt cheap.

But this time around, I had a bigger budget to play with, and I found a 1080Ti selling for a good price. Coupled with an i5-8600k @5Ghz, I'm getting 100+ fps in all games. Except for WatchDogs 2!

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Now I know Ubisoft is arguably not the best developer for when it comes to optimization. But I'm getting 100% on all six cores while my gpu is hanging around 60% ! And when searching, I read that I should've went for the i7, cause more and more games are starting to go that way. But honestly for a game to demand 6 cores 5Ghz is kinda insane, isn't it?

Did I mess up with this configuration? Or is this just one game I shouldn't be freaking about?

tech-guru

vlatkozelka wrote*You can skip to the second part if you hate reading

I know there's a topic saying that even old cpus can support today's gpus. And personally, I never liked Intel i7, I can't get sold on hyper-threadding for an extra 150-200$. -Don't want to go into detail about Intel HT -

So really anytime I build a PC (for myself or a friend) I just go for whatever flagship i5 is present at the time, with a 50~70 series GTX. My last one was an i5-4460, locked! With a 750Ti and later a 970,which lasted me 4 years, and was still going strong until I decided to sell it to limit the "loss" before it would sell for dirt cheap.

But this time around, I had a bigger budget to play with, and I found a 1080Ti selling for a good price. Coupled with an i5-8600k @5Ghz, I'm getting 100+ fps in all games. Except for WatchDogs 2!

*****************************************************************

Now I know Ubisoft is arguably not the best developer for when it comes to optimization. But I'm getting 100% on all six cores while my gpu is hanging around 60% ! And when searching, I read that I should've went for the i7, cause more and more games are starting to go that way. But honestly for a game to demand 6 cores 5Ghz is kinda insane, isn't it?

Did I mess up with this configuration? Or is this just one game I shouldn't be freaking about?

Ubisoft games are badly optimized

~Watch Dogs 2
~Ghost Recon Wild Lands

The i5 8600k is great for gaming coupled with high speed ram ( 3000mhz+) , however in Benchmarks the i7 8700k is more future proof due to HT and higher min and max fps. I would always pick an i7 over an i5 for gaming. The 1080ti is a very fast card , even the i7 8700k might bottle neck it if you are playing on 1080p or 1440p - on 100hz gaming , i7 8700k is better , on 2160p the i5 8600k is sufficient for now. The near future is 2160p 144hz will be pushed , investing in an i7 8700k now is better

vlatkozelka

you see I always thought i7 is a rendering/heavy multi-threadded workload thing. And i5 the gaming, raw power one. And after testing my i5 more and looking at more game benchmarks, I think the game is to blame. It works better on lesser AMD cpus just because they have more cores, while most games profit more from clock speeds.

And I always thought HT was a marketing gimmick. A way to "juice" more cycles from a cpu, just to get some virtual cores that are 10% of an actual core.

Let's just hope cannon lake and later don't ditch the z370 chipset!