Intro I recently retired my AMD FX 8320 CPU and upgraded to an i7 7700k. I did some benchmarks before and after, and i thought why not look at performance Star Citizen too? I was generally expecting a much more stable experience, but no significant FPS gains. Naturally, i did not upgrade my system to be able to better play Star Citizen - that'd be just silly at this point. Nevertheless, here we go! System Components before/after upgrade CPU: AMD FX 8320 @ 3.8GHz-> Intel i7 7700k @ 4.8GHz Mainboard: ASRock 990fx -> ASRock Fatal1ty Z270 RAM: 16GB DDR3 1300 -> 16 GB DDR4 2600 GPU: R9 290X @ Stock Drive: 256 GB SSD Results The improvised benchmarks were performed at 1080p with the "Low" preset and no custom user.cfg. While you are reading my comments, i invite you too look at some frametime graphs i created: http://imgur.com/a/9boGz Persistent Universe: On my improvised benchmark route (Olisar -> Yela asteroid belt -> Covalex Walkthrough on a moderately populated server), the 7700k managed to produce significantly less hiccups, although the performance was still not good. This is well known in the community - the netcode and lack of optimization prevent higher framerates. Pirate Swarm (Offline): Both times, i killed the first wave of enemies for the benchmark. I saw much less stuttering while turning the ship on the 7700k, although explosions were still choppy. The Frametime graphs show the trouble that even the 7700k has with explosions. Star Marine Elimination (moderate server population): The big one for me. Since I play alot of FPS, i was excited to jump into some Star Marine, but I could never play more than a round because it performed absolutely horribly. After the upgrade, the framerates smoothed out and I achieved almost double the average FPS. In conclusion, I got what i expected. Improved 1% Low and 0.1% Low framerates, yielding a smoother experience, but no significant gain in averate FPS. An exception was Star Marine, which netted me a whopping +40fps on average. It seems that the 8320 really was choking up in many situations and giving me lots of lag-spikes. Since I am pretty sensitive to stuttering, my SC experience is much better now. Do you guys find anything else to interpret from these numbers?