Not been on here in ages! I've been mostly using a laptop/consoles for the last 4-5 years, so I've been neglecting my desktop systems, which are currently rather old:- 1. Q6600 + Gigabyte DS3 mobo, 4GB DDR2, XFX Radeon 7950 DD in an Antec P182. 2. MiniITX P8H61, Pentium G620T, 2GB DDR3. I'm looking to make a decent desktop I can leave on most of the time (running VMs), hopefully with some decent gaming potential. The Q6600 parts I think I can pretty much ignore, except the 7950. The 'obvious' solution seems to be upgrading the G620T to a 3770K and combine it with the 7950, moving the P8H61 into the P182 case. Although quite an old CPU, it seems the main limiting factor has been the GPU in the last few years, not the CPU, so I could look at a future GPU upgrade. Slightly complicating factors is that I'd want to upgrade the RAM to 16GB (so buy 2 x 8GB DDR3). By the time I've bought a 3770K (which isn't particularly cheap) and RAM, I might as well go the whole way and spend the extra £120-ish on a new mobo and just get Skylake. Skylake would mean Z170, but X99 is quite highly rated for multi-threaded stuff, which is partly what I'd be looking to do.... However, a lot of the stuff I've read lately basically says any sandy bridge CPU onwards is decent, which is making me reconsider the 3770K. Not too bothered about OCing, been there done that. Budget wise, I’d consider up to £400-ish if it was going to last a long time. Any thoughts?
If you do have £400ish, then it doesn't seem to make sense to invest in any old hardware. You'll need a lot of RAM for VMs usually. Not much you can do about thread counts at lower budgets (maybe AMD?), but you could do something like the below. Disclaimer: I haven't looked at specific reviews for these products, and just threw it together, so don't just go and buy it . It is for illustration only. I presume you're keeping your existing storage/PSU/case/etc. You may need a new CPU cooler, but can go easy on that.
Yeah something like that is what I had in mind, keeping the storage/case/PSU. I keep looking back at Haswell-E as I'm considering VM's and multi-threaded applications. Asus X99-S + 5820k + 16GB DDR4 is £590. Completely blows that budget out of the water, but is it more future proof? Compared to £370 above, but what sort of performance difference would I see... To be fair, the above is a bit apples and oranges. The nearest equivalent Skylake (6700K) is a similar price (~ £570) I think I need to decide exactly how much I want to spend on this...
Indeed - budget is the deciding factor. Spending more = faster The CPU per core / per thread performance difference isn't massive. You get two whole additional cores on the 5820 however, so you can expect somewhere in the range of 35% CPU performance increases (at full utilisation) going with the 5820k in multi-thread, depending on very many factors. I've not seen any suggestion that Skylake will ever go 6 cores+ so you do end up slightly stuck. There are some differences in overclocking potential and stock frequencies, so dig through that a bit. I do also think it's worth seeing what an AMD build might look like for your use cases. I don't dig around them much, but think that there's probably a good value heavy-core-count build available there.
I probably should consider AMD, but I'd just prefer to stick with Intel, no real rational explanation Turning the question around slightly, if I wanted something that would last 4-5 years, should I go for X99 (5820k) or Z170 (6700k), ignoring budget (within reason...)? If it'd been earlier this year, I think X99 would have been the clear winner, but now, with Skylake having just been released. Something suggests to me that more cores/threads (X99) will be better in the long-term rather than the newest and greatest Skylake, particularly if games move towards multi-threading, but does that justify the cost...
Do you know if that Giga board is a decent overclocker? I've been trying to do so using an MSI G41 on my Mum's Q6600 but it's pants. According to some of the responses I had to my thread on here, it's a complete no-go. If the condition was good and the price right, I might be tempted to take it off you = money off your next build...?
Skylake is newer, but X99 probably has the greatest longevity (in my opinion) due to the additional core counts. Multithreading is getting better, and could be expected to get better over time, so 6 cores / 12 threads sounds like a long-lasting CPU (ignoring budget). I jumped onto X99 just 2-3 months ago. I don't like coming late to a party, but that's where the power was.
