Folding Forum

Currently running a 9600K box with 2 RTX GPU's folding. But I'm considering upgrading my mother's PC, which has a Pentium Gold G5400 in it. So if I give her my 9600K, and put the G5400 in the folding machine, would it affect folding performance at all?

Note: G5400 is a 2C/4T CPU whereas the 9600K is 6C/6T.

Likely that you will see a drop off in performance as only 2 cores and each GPU really needs one, plus capacity for the OS, the HT may offset this so the drop may not be significant.

No you won't.
I've successfully ran RTX GPUs for years on the exact same CPU.
The boost speed of 3,7Ghz is sufficient to run up to two RTX 3060Tis (provided your motherboard can split the PCIE lanes to x8, and if you run Linux, it could push three GPUs.
A PCIE x4 slot can really only push a 2060 or 2070 max.
Because my motherboard and case, I could only run 2 DGPU, and the internal IGP, before the CPU was saturated.

Most motherboards allow you to run the CPU 100 to 200Mhz overclocked, in case you want to run a 2080 Super to 2080Ti, or 3070 to 3080, as the Pentium doesn't have turbo boost, and GPUs from that caliber really need higher CPU frequencies (4Ghz preferred).
To do that you must swap out the stock heat sink for an aftermarket one, as in my scenario, the CPU ran at 90C with stock cooler (at 100% load and 100% IGP load).

Well, I did the swap and haven't noticed any drop in performance. The motherboard does run the cards in x8/x8. All seems good.