In my living room I have a uITX cube who’s sole purpose is to run RetroArch and Kodi. It’s hooked up to a 60" 4k TV and 5.1 sound system. Currently it has a water cooled intel i5-4690k, 16Gb DDR 3 and a 4Gb nvidia GTX 960 graphics card. It’s not overclocked but the water cooling runs quieter than air cooling.
I’ve been thinking about upgrading the CPU/Mb/RAM but since I’m not using the onboard graphics is there anything around that’s significantly better?
There are faster CPUs available but, tbh, you probably won’t notice it unless there’s a specific core/option that you’re getting CPU-bottlenecked on.
This PC has been put together from the left-overs whenever my son upgrades his gaming PC. There’s also an i7-4790k going spare which I believe is the fastest LGA1150 they made. I guess there are faster/newer processors out there but nothing I think that would be worth paying out for a new motherboard and RAM for too…
If you want to run 3D games at 4K native maybe but, IMO, not worth it. I’d rather play at the console’s native resolution with CRT filters.
I have a converted JAMMA cabinet with a 24" CRT for that.
This PC is primarily for family use - competitive 2/4 player gaming. Alas my kids whine about awful graphics if they’re too low resolution… It spends most of its time running N64/Gamecube/Saturn/Dreamcast games which is why I was wondering if a CPU upgrade would be worth it.