My i7 2600 is 3.4ghz with hyperthreading. The i7 7600k is 3.8ghz with hyperthreading. I don't overclock, I buy enough power and have it run quietly. Aside from the instructions that aid with transcoding - that I don't do anyway - what's the real gain here? Is it worth dumping ram, motherboard and cpu and heat sink just for TDP to drop from 95w to 91w? Nope I'll get a new graphics card. As I said in my last post though, 50% extra cores is gonna be noticeable. Might wait for the 9-series, might be able to afford it by then...
Intel is finally moving on from 4C/8T top consumer part to something worth upgrading from overclocked Sandy i7! Looking forward to upgrading my aging rig
If you're not arsed about integrated graphics or intensely hyperthreaded work - if you're an i5 gamer, in other words - there still seems no compelling reason to upgrade past generation 3. Most VR gamers I know are using repurposed 3rd-gen i5 builds and they seem to handle it fine. I'm still waiting for a game engine that makes upgrades beyond that point compulsory. Well...'waiting' is the wrong word. I really hope nothing like that comes out soon, because I reeaally like how affordable and jack-of-all-trades 3rd-gen i5 is right now. edit- Got a spare PCI-e x4 slot? Welcome to the plateau. There is now no reason to change your board! That'll do you up to 2GB/s each way, by my calculations (I was debating this same situation last week), which will barely cap the peak read of a Samsung 960 EVO. So I'm thinking, I get one of those, I'm very affordably ticking all the boxes for another couple of years. (Faster M.2 SSDs will come out of course, but I think I can live with 2GB/s...)
I've never had a problem with using other cards in a PCI-E slot. Ryzen also does not have "noticeable" lower IPC over Intel. It's time to check your facts. With fast memory, it is actually almost on par with Broadwell-E... more comparable to Haswell which is only about 6% slower than their current Kaby chips (just a Skylake chip after all, absolutely nothing different...).
In terms of CPU performance maybe, but the older you get the more fartarseing is required to get USB performance up to acceptable levels on older chipsets (and worse if USB3 is provided by an ancient 3rd party controller rather than from the PCH itself). Even just in terms of CPU performance though, moving tom ore recent chips may not a;ways net a huge gain in peak FPS but it does give benefits in minim FPS and frame delivery consistency, and consistently low frame times are the vial metric for VR.
