The only way to keep the current motherboard is 7700K, but that’s reall not worth the upgrade over 6700. You will need a new motherboard. You can get intel 12 and 13th gen or Ryzen 5000 and still use DDR4 RAM, but only if your RAM is at least 3200MHz CL16. If your RAM is slower, then you would’ve be getting the full potential of the new CPU. And in case you need to buy new RAM, you might as well get DDR5 since it doesn’t really cost much more than DDR4, and you can get Ryzen 7000 series CPU.

If you’re getting intel 13th gen, make sure you pick the correct motherboard with the right RAM support, while CPUs support both kinds of RAM, the motherboard will only support the one kind it’s designed for.

I disagree with the other user that you HAVE to get DDR5. You probably don’t. It really depends on what you want your computer to do and your budget. But it is true that to upgrade your CPU you will probably have to upgrade your motherboard and likely your PSU. If you’ve ever been riding the line of hitting the max wattage on your power supply, you will need a new PSU. This is a problem that I ran into when I looked to upgrade my computer because modern CPUs tend to have a lot of power-suck potential.

The real question you should be asking is why you want to upgrade and what you’re going to use that upgrade for. After that, you can start looking at your budget and trying to figure out what you’re going to buy. If you want to stick with older generations or sockets like you have, you’re also going to have to keep in mind that you’ll likely be buying used as almost no one keeps new old stock of these things. That comes with a sharp drop in price, which is great especially since it often provides the best dollar-to-power ratio. But it comes with drawbacks like the risk of faulty parts and no warranty.

If you insist on sticking with the LGA-1151 motherboard that you have, do know its limitations in excess of which CPUs are compatible with it. It can’t run DD5, but you probably don’t need it to. DDR5 is still pretty young and pretty expensive. Its raw clock speed is impressive, but you’re going to be getting worse timings unless you make some sacrifices. And a lot of users won’t be taking advantage of that extra speed anyway. Do know if it can handle M.2 chips because if you ever want to upgrade storage, they’re getting to be the best deals around with SATA SSDs often having similar longevity, similar capacity, and sometimes even similar prices, but far lower speeds. And hard drives are becoming less and less reasonable unless you NEED a lot of relatively cheap, slow storage right now like for a NAS. Even then, SSD NAS setups are becoming more reasonable and already are more reliable. That isn’t important to everyone, but it’s something to keep in mind.

If you want to stick with your LGA-1151, I’m not sure which revision your board/socket is, you can look that up, but that means you’re dealing with your same sixth-generation CPU’s siblings or their seventh-generation cousins. It’s possible that your board might support eighth-generation, but I doubt it as the socket went through a minor revision, and the new one often only supported eighth-generation. This really limits your ability to upgrade. It’s likely that if your budget is tight you’ll want to upgrade to 10th- or 11th-generation CPUs if you’re sticking with Intel or look at some AMD CPUs and see what your options are in your budget range. You might even be able to get a 12th-generation build done for a reasonable price. I recently did a 13th-generation build for myself and kind of regret it. The price-to-performance difference between 12 and 13 is not great and the most recent components have been seeing a higher failure rate, possibly due to changes brought on by the pandemic.

All this can get overwhelming, I know, I’ve been there. And it takes some time for all the information to start sinking in and making sense. But in truth, it all comes down to asking that initial question: Why do I want to upgrade? If you want to upgrade just to play games, well, firstly, what kind of games? Most games are not going to bottleneck at the CPU, even with one as old as yours, though there are some CPU-intensive titles and genres. If you want it to be a slightly better but not state-of-the-art workstation, what kind of work is it going to be doing? Programmers and accountants are going to want beefy CPUs to process lots of data (more and faster RAM isn’t a bad idea for either of them) whereas video editors and graphic designers are probably going to want mid-tier ones and spend the extra on a better GPU and RAM. And a million other use cases. It can be hard, especially if you’re just starting out, to actually answer these questions honestly. But I know from experience that if you don’t take the time to, you will end up with buyer’s regret. I won’t be able to answer a lot of your questions, but if you want to ask me anything more, feel free to.

You need a new motherboard. The changes with Intel gen 10 and above are substantial. The entire reason Windows 11 exists is because the CPU scheduler had to be completely rewritten for Intel’s asymmetrical cores that started in gen 10. Linux also takes advantage of the core configuration with Intel stuff.

You have reached the limits of what the Skylake platform offers. You don’t have Windows 11 support and your only choices will soon be running Windows 10 unpatched after 2025, or switching to Linux. Modern 2C4T processors are faster in games than your setup. You should think about a platform upgrade.

Obviously your budget will be a key aspect of this, but some pointers in general:

1. Make the jump to 32GB of RAM. Many games are able to take advantage of more than 16GB of RAM and that’s mostly due to how they are streaming assets and optimising performance.

2. SSD storage should be the default. This applies both for primary and secondary storage. A 2TB SATA drive for extra games or hosting media or things like that is always going to be faster than spinning rust, so don’t buy a hard drive for secondary storage unless you need more than 4TB of space for media.

3. Quad cores still have limitations. People buying Core i3 processors are still limiting their performance if there’s even a slight hint of multi-tasking. Only consider this if your budget is really low but even then, the Core i5-12400 is difficult to ignore.

With that said, here’s some options to think about:

Intel Core i5-13400 + ASRock B760M Pro RS/D4 + 32GB DDR4-3600 CL16 memory of some description

Intel Core i5-13400 + Gigabyte B760M AORUS ELITE AX + 32GB DDR5-5600 CL36 memory of some description

AMD Ryzen 5 7600 + ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2 + 32GB DDR5-5600 CL36 memory of some description

Platform costs are more or less the same between the Intel and AMD option, and slightly cheaper on the DDR4 front. For longevity you want at least two M.2 slots and front-panel USB Type-C support if you also upgrade your case. You have some leeway on the budget for the CPU on the Intel side, as the Core i5-12400 is cheap and still very good.

Either of these setups will serve you a very, very long time. Likely just as long as your Skylake chip has already done (almost ten years!).

You have to build a new computer. You have to change to DDR5, which means a new motherboard and processor. If it was built 7 years ago, how confident are you with that power supply given the power demands from new hardware? You are building a new computer.

So I almost have the identical set up here. Can confirm that we have to update the motherboard and cpu. I don’t really want to upgrade my RAM too as I have DDR4 and is compatible. But yes. It’s close to upgrading time.

For reference I have an intel i5-7500 and the same motherboard. 16gb Corsair DDR4 ram Rtx3050 dual oc 550 w power supply