I think I'm already pretty set on what I want to get, but I just want to post first and make sure there's nothing else/no glaring issues. Playing GTA 5 lately, I get some hefty FPS drops around heavy traffic. My framerate will drop from around 80FPS to 40-60, which is a big drop. It's a pretty big sign that my i5 3570 is a bit overstressed, so I want to buy a new CPU. Naturally, I looked at the fastest current Skylake CPU, the i7 6700: http://www.ebuyer.com/722916-intel-...-1151-8mb-l3-cache-retail-boxed-bx80662i76700 But my current motherboard is H61 and doesn't support Socket 1151 CPUs, so naturally I looked for a motherboard that fits that and my size requirement, mATX: http://www.ebuyer.com/719648-gigaby...dmi-7-1-channel-audio-matx-ga-z170mx-gaming-5 But my current RAM is DDR3 and this only supports DDR4, so naturally I looked for DDR4 memory and decided on two of these for 16GB: http://www.ebuyer.com/722965-hyperx-savage-black-8gb-ddr4-2800mhz-memory-hx428c14sb-8 I'm budgeting for £500 and those items (with two sticks of memory) come to £494. Is there anything better I can get out of £500, like an older series but faster CPU?
Which GPU are you using? I had hefty drops when Gras set to high on my GTX 780. Put it on normal and the drops where gone. Now with the AMD Fury there isn't even an issue anymore with the Gras even set on Very High.
Might as well go for X99 and get a 5820K. It's actually £10 cheaper, and you can get mATX X99 boards for £160-170. It would cost a bit more, but 2 extra cores are worth it. A Skylake CPU will need DDR4 RAM too so there's no extra cost on that. https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/asrock-motherboard-x99mextreme4 https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyte-motherboard-gax99mgaming5
The only 5820K I can find on eBuyer is £30 more than the 6700 I linked. Good suggestion though, I think with modern games it might actually be worthwhile sacrificing the extra single-core performance the 6700 has for the extra two cores. I just need to find it somewhere more reasonably priced. EDIT: It seems that the only X99 boards available are DDR4 as well. GTX980Ti. The problem isn't grass. Anything driven by the GPU runs perfectly, it's traffic that causes my problems.