Should I upgrade my PC now or wait for AMD Zen 3 / Intel Rocket Lake?

Chris currently has an overclocked Core i7 6700K-based CPU and wants to know if he should upgrade now or wait.

Question by Chris from United States | Answered by in Computer Systems on

Hey TweakTown, I'm an avid gamer and do some editing with Adobe AE and Premiere. I currently have an i7 6700k overclocked to 4.5GHz, 32GB DDR4 running @ 3400 CL 16, and an RTX 2080.

I have a decent gaming rig, but with the AMD Ryzen Zen 3 announcement around the corner + seeing what Intel can bring to the table soon, I'm torn. Do I wait until my current i7 6700k is no longer keeping up or upgrade now with prices being reasonable for an i5 10600k setup/AMD equal? All I need is a CPU and motherboard.

What would you do in my current position?

Hi Chris,

Sure, I will do my best to help! Are you feeling that your Intel Core i7 6700K CPU isn't keeping up anymore, or you want to stay ahead of the curve?

Should I upgrade my PC now or wait for AMD Zen 3 / Intel Rocket Lake? 1

If I were in your position, I would almost keep that machine until the market unfolds a little more. I'd hate to see you buy into the current Intel platform with 10600K and have Rocket Lake come in the next five months with PCIe 4.0 support and maybe even DDR5, and then you already want to upgrade again.

On the AMD side, it will be more than a motherboard and CPU as you will have to upgrade your memory past 3400MHz or risk losing performance to infinity fabric being lower than optimal.

If you want to go this route, I'd recommend you look at memory at and above the 4000MHz range, at least 16GB per stick that will get you in the better dual-rank memory for AMD.

All the best!

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