Hi all, It's time to upgrade my 2600K rig, in the past I've never looked at the Enthusiast range of CPU's due to their cost but the Skylake CPU's are crazy money at the moment and don't show any signs of coming down in price which makes the 5820 a more attractive choice as it's actually cheaper at the moment. So which one should I go for? I do everything on my PC, work a little gaming not my top priority at the moment so I need an all round powerful PC to replace my trusted Sandybridge. My questions are assuming I went down the X99 route Which motherboard to go for I am a big fan of Asus and I'm totally brand loyal on that one (just my preference) and on the X99 chipsets is there a benefit to going quad channel on RAM or is dual channel ok like it is on Z170? Thanks
Personally I'd go down the X99 route. Dual channel memory will be fine on it. As for the motherboard, what's your budget and what features do you want?
Just as a point of note - X99 has a flakey memory controller and memory speeds above 2133MHz aren't officially supported.
I actually made the exact same choice as you recently. I've never owned anything past an i5 but as Intel have jacked the crap out of the prices of Skylake, I went X99. Skylake might have slightly better IPC than Haswell-E, but honestly 6 cores vs 4 cores for future proofing is the way to go in my opinion. The only thing I had to spend extra cash on vs Z170 is the board, but if you've got a Z68/Z77 board you can sell it for such a ludicrous price on ebay, that its actually not too painful.
Any particular reason for X99? I don't really have a budget I'm going to spend what I need to get the system I want as I don't do it very often. Feature wise I need the board to support DDR4 which is a given. M.2 PCIE SSD because I want a Samsung SM951 or 950 (Another decision to be made there) USB 3.1 and type C connectors as this will inevitably become the norm Nothing else particularly special, I like the motherboard to have as many expansion slots and SATA connectors as possible as I always reuse my equipment in other builds when I upgrade so having lots of expansion slots means I can keep the board relatively up to date through out the years.
Flakey as in can't be guaranteed to be 100% stable 24/7 above 2133MHz - it's an Intel recommendation no less. Whilst the chipset does support it (in a manner) and board manufacturers will sell it as such it's an inherent known issue which is the one chink in X99's armour and the reason I opted for Skylake which has no such issue.
The Z170 boards seem to be a little more up to date with being a newer design but I do like the idea of 6 cores. I still don't know what to do...
Upgrade paths.. If you rock the 5820k you can upgrade to the 5960x 8 core. Intel are going to release Broadwell E soon and that will come with 8 core and 10 core CPUs. All of which will work on X99. Skylake comes as a quad core 8 thread. I would imagine it will get a refresh (similar to Haswell-Devil's Canyon) but will probably not be any more than 4 cores 4 HTs. So yeah, IMO X99 has a far broader upgrade path than Skylake. Plus X99 is more of an enterprise set up so has extra options (quad core memory for example).
I'll never spend £800 on a CPU, being able to upgrade to Broadwell E is a plus though but if Skylake is anything to go by the prices on those CPU's will be astronomical.
A point against X99: unless you go for the 5930K and overclock it (or one of the E5-16xx series overclockable Xeons), a stock 6700k will thrash it soundly in single-threaded workloads. An overclocked-to-the-limits 5930K will juuust about match a stock 6700k, while an overclocked 6700k will rule the roost. This means that for every game so far (DX12/Vulkan may change these, but not for a few years yet) the 6700k is a better choice if gaming is your main use case. In terms of future-proofing: X99 will (probably) get Broadwell-E support, but Skylake-E will have a new socket and chipset. Z170 will support Kaby Lake, though probably not Cannonlake. Either will lose out on Optane, but you can plop your Skylake CPU in a Z270 (or whatever it gets called) board which won;t be the case for Haswell-E/Broadwell-E.
I'm running a 6600K at 4.8GHz with 2666MHz memory clocked at 2800MHz with a 970 Strix - I've benched it with the CPC Realbench and the old CPCBS 2007, it leaves 4770K's and 4790K's in it's wake; for Gaming and general usage it's a win over X99. Parge and I did a 3Dmark comparison fairly recently and my setup was a mere 266 points behind his 5820k/980 combo.
Don't know if it is just me but I read tons of people having motherboard related problems with X79/X99 setups. It would be the route I would take but it would worry be a little.
I was tempted by 6700k setup for the additional features. But the price of the CPU is unreasonable. I'm going to wait it out with my 2700k and buy a second hand setup when they come up. So that I'm not the one stomaching Intel's marked up price. Up until either of the titled CPU, I was perfectly happy with my moderately overclocked 4GHz 2700k.
It's still a coin toss which setup gets my cash. X99 doesn't have USB 3 type C connections but I guess if that becomes an issue an add in card will solve that and the motherboards are about £70 more expensive so overall when it's all said and done a X99 setup is a little more expensive than a Z170. What progrmas take advantage of the 6 cores? I guess this may be the decider because if in the vast majority of programs run faster on the the Skylake that will be a big factor.
Had a similar decision to make back in September and went for the 5820k for £290 and it is worth every penny. The chipset on skylake IMO isn't good enough to justify the price compared to X99.
