Global Conflict

so, US tax returns being what they are I've decided to get rid of my old fx8350 and redo everything but my video card (gtx970). unfortunately I haven't had a good handle on the whole hardware scene since about august other than noticing prices of DDR4 memory has gone down significantly since the last time I had a chance to screw around with pcpartpicker.

is it worth it in terms of future-proofing to spring for a i7 6700k, z170 mobo chipset, and DDR4? or is that stuff still needing some polish before it's worth it over an i7 4790k, z97 chipset, and DDR3? the only thing I've decided I'm not upgrading (other than peripherals and monitors) is my video card and power supply. power supply because it's more than enough to handle what I would be upgrading to (with plenty leftover), video card because the 970 is treating me fine and I also read that the next architectures are due out in roughly april so I don't see it as being worth upgrading yet anyways. everything I'm seeing in terms of benchmarks has the 6700k winning by negligible amounts for the most part but if someone has any opinions regarding what's coming in the future I'm all ears. been too out of touch with what's going on to form a good opinion for myself.

also if I did end up going for a 6700k, I've noticed that it doesn't come with a stock cooler, so any advice on CPU coolers would be cool as well since I never really bothered with anything but stock in the past (and never had any problems). up for just about anything barring crazy liquid helium bs, air or water. I'll be getting a new case with some more room in it anyways so I'll fit the case to fit whatever I get here.

tl;dr I'm looking at upgrading my mobo, CPU, and RAM, and budget isn't a huge concern. enlighten me as to what I've missed out on in the hardware world in the past roughly 6 months.

I've heard that skylake doesn't support well with DDR3.
Makes me sad, I was planning on getting a i5 6600k

For future proofing with an 6700k, I wouldn't know. Buuuuut if you're going from a 8350 and not really doing any hardcore computing, it would seem like it's worth it to me. But again, I don't know what's going on with intel in the future.

As for cooling, a hyper 212 evo is very good for the money, unless you'r planning on doing some serious overclocking.

AMD is supposed to release new CPU and GPU architectures later this year (Zen and Polaris) although no set date yet for either. The GPU line is supposed to be available before September and the CPU around Q4.

nVidia is also expected to release a new GPU architecture (Pascal) presumably around April.

Interesting results for those interested in upgrading their old CPU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frNjT5R5XI4

My son's new gaming rig has the i7 6700k, z170, and DDR4 you mention.

And he also went with the hyper 212.

Here's his PC Part Picker Save List: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Noahriffe/saved/

He went with the While/Black theme...

So far he's happy with the performance. I don't have a PC Part Picker for our first gaming rig, but it was an AMD FX6300. So, it appears his was a larger boost up than what you're potentially considering (at the risk of showing my ignorance).

x99 costs more but it's worth it considering the issues with 170

Nix wrote:I've heard that skylake doesn't support well with DDR3.
Makes me sad, I was planning on getting a i5 6600k

the skylake stuff is on a new socket (LGA1151) from previous offerings so you'd be buying a new mobo anyways to get the 6600k. DDR4 is basically at cost parity with DDR3 for similar performance, with 16gb of DDR4 3200 CAS 16 is barely more expensive than 16gb of DDR3 2133 CAS 9. the DDR3 in that example is slightly faster (due to the lower CAS) but DDR3 is going to get phased out sooner rather than later. so depending on what you currently have it may be worthwhile to save the extra cash and do the upgrade.

RazY70 wrote:AMD is supposed to release new CPU and GPU architectures later this year (Zen and Polaris) although no set date yet for either. The GPU line is supposed to be available before September and the CPU around Q4.

nVidia is also expected to release a new GPU architecture (Pascal) presumably around April.

Interesting results for those interested in upgrading their old CPU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frNjT5R5XI4

definitely doing the upgrade before zen or the next intel offerings are out and already noted the GPU stuff, although I didn't know that AMD's new GPU stuff was supposed to be out before zen.

also cool vid for those who still have the i5 2500k. really shows how big of a mistake I made when I put together my current system 4 years ago . hopefully AMD steps their game up with zen/polaris so intel/nvidia stop having basically little to no competition and we can all benefit as consumers.

TechX wrote:x99 costs more but it's worth it considering the issues with 170

what issues with z170? I haven't seen anything regarding major problems and I've deliberately not looked at the x99/haswell-e stuff because I don't plan on doing any major SLI/crossfire things, so I don't see the need for the extra PCI lanes. why would I want to spend the (admittedly not a lot all things considered) extra on a 5280k/x99 rig against a 6700k/z170 rig if I'm not doing lots of encoding or other highly parallelized tasks (for the extra cores) and not planning on ever doing more than 2 card SLI? am I missing something in the bit of research I've been able to do?

matsif wrote: ..
also cool vid for those who still have the i5 2500k. really shows how big of a mistake I made when I put together my current system 4 years ago . hopefully AMD steps their game up with zen/polaris so intel/nvidia stop having basically little to no competition and we can all benefit as consumers.
..

I'm still rocking my 2500k. Not that my rig struggles to run or play anything I'm currently doing, but new job + 5 year old system = itch to upgrade, so there's a decent chance I'll be piecing together a new rig at some point in the next year. Some competitive mid-high end options from AMD would be nice.

I'm still running Bloomfield I7 930 Overclocked to 3.5 ghz from stock 2.8 ghz. I've too have been trying to decide if just upgrading my Nvidia 670 gtx to a 970 gtx (or wait till the next gen comes out) will be enough of a boost to my system, or if I need to bite the bullet and upgrade to skylake too. I've only got 6gig of triple channel 1600 ram in my system and have considered dropping the $140 to get 12gig of 2000 triple channel but I am hesitant because I don't know if I'd see any improvement and why drop money on old tech.

I was having to O/C my video card to have a chance killing people for the last 6 months but the heat throttling kept getting me killed. (fps would drop all of a sudden as the cards thermal safeties kicked in)

thoughts from any of you gear savants?

Ghoul wrote:I'm still running Bloomfield I7 930 Overclocked to 3.5 ghz from stock 2.8 ghz. I've too have been trying to decide if just upgrading my Nvidia 670 gtx to a 970 gtx (or wait till the next gen comes out) will be enough of a boost to my system, or if I need to bite the bullet and upgrade to skylake too. I've only got 6gig of triple channel 1600 ram in my system and have considered dropping the $140 to get 12gig of 2000 triple channel but I am hesitant because I don't know if I'd see any improvement and why drop money on old tech.

I was having to O/C my video card to have a chance killing people for the last 6 months but the heat throttling kept getting me killed. (fps would drop all of a sudden as the cards thermal safeties kicked in)

thoughts from any of you gear savants?

you're probably in a similar spot to where I am considering the age of the i7 930 and that you've already overclocked it to about its limit considering heat. just getting a newer video card would help the most in your case but the 930 would likely be a bottleneck with a newer video card even with the OC from what I've been looking into.

InsanityRocks wrote:My son's new gaming rig has the i7 6700k, z170, and DDR4 you mention.

And he also went with the hyper 212.

Here's his PC Part Picker Save List: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Noahriffe/saved/

He went with the While/Black theme...

So far he's happy with the performance. I don't have a PC Part Picker for our first gaming rig, but it was an AMD FX6300. So, it appears his was a larger boost up than what you're potentially considering (at the risk of showing my ignorance).

Thats a pretty good list of components. I would have gotten pretty much the same parts if I had decided to replace my current system when I was considering a new build a couple months ago but since I only play BF42, an 8 year old cpu still does it for me. I would probably get a ROG series mobo, the Ranger or Hero because of some of the features I feel would benefit me.
From experience future proofing is hard cos stuff gets outdated so quickly and sometimes parts become unavailable or really expensive after a couple of years. I was searching for some first gen DDR3, which has higher voltage, to no avail. So I would just get best of current gen, DDR4 has dropped some in price and you can get 16 gigs for 80$. I'd get another 16 GB within a year before the same ram you get now becomes unavailable. SSD wise I have experience with a couple of Intel and Crucial ones, they all work at 100% health, some older than 4 years.

170 cpu boards are thinner and have had issues with being damaged by some coolers. Many have said the issue was purely with the cpu coolers but none the less, they are thinner/weaker boards. The other issue with skylake is running something like Prime95. Some programs end up crashing due to the flaw. It will not happen with most programs so it's not a major issue. Both these issues with skylake have been confirmed by intel.

As far as I'm concerned, the only option is x99