Should you upgrade your GPU or CPU for faster gaming? We tested many hardware combos to find out
Your once-great PC is feeling a bit long in the tooth and can no longer handle the games you want to play — we've all been there. It's time for an upgrade, but you're not sure if you need a completely new PC build or if you can make it another couple of years with a few judicious component upgrades. Many users will upgrade their GPU with one of the best graphics cards and leave everything else in place. But would they get more for the money if they spent it all on a CPU instead? And what about some combination of hardware? In a perfect world, you'd have a massive database of performance testing at your fingertips and you could simply plug in any combination of CPU and GPU to see how it would perform. Tools like 3DMark try to provide that sort of service, but given the myriad combinations of hardware, not to mention the fact that 3DMark isn't actually a game engine, you end up with many gaps in the knowledge you seek. Today, we're going to fill in some of those gaps by putting four different CPUs and GPUs to the test — mixed and matched so we'll test every GPU with every CPU. This is by no means an exhaustive selection of hardware, but we'll use our full current GPU test suite of 19 games at four different settings/resolution combinations. That gives us 16 total reference points showing how different hardware combinations stack up. That should be sufficient to help you plan for your next PC upgrade.
2023 PC AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D ASRock Z670E Taichi G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 2x16GB DDR5-6000 CL30 Crucial T700 4TB SSD be quiet! 1500W Dark Power Pro 12 Cooler Master ML280 Mirror Windows 11 Pro 64-bit 2022 PC Intel Core i9-13900K MSI MEG Z790 Ace DDR5 G.Skill Trident Z5 2x16GB DDR5-5600 CL28 Crucial T700 4TB SSD be quiet! 1500W Dark Power Pro 12 Cooler Master PL360 Flux Windows 11 Pro 64-bit
