Hi all I'm currently stuck with i7-960. Wanted to upgrade. 4-core, 6-core or 8-core? I was thinking that 6-core at higher OC would be better than 8-core at lower OC? Since I don't do video editing or anything do I really need 8-core. Plus can't afford it, would rather get more ram etc. Cheers for your comments. Nate
If you're just gaming, the i5-6600K should be more than enough for your needs. Benchmarks have shown almost no difference in gaming performance between 6600K, 6700K or 5820K.
Go for 5820k. Socket 1151 will end this year with 4 core Kaby Lake while 2011-3 got 22 cored Xeon and will get 10 Core i7 in June. 6700k is pointless , 6600k makes perfect sense if you're short on budget. Both can be clocked easily at 4.5Ghz and 6cores are already at use in some games
I have almost never heard of anyone reusing their motherboard and getting a newer same socket CPU for it, so it doesn't matter if Intel phases out Socket 1151 after Kabylake. Every real world game at the moment shows virtually no performance difference between a 6600k vs 6700k vs 5820k. Saying getting a hex-core+ for future-proofing is like saying back in the Core 2 Duo days of getting a Core 2 Quad to be future proof. By the time Quad cores mattered, everyone dumped their Core 2 Duo systems for Sandybridge 2500K/2600K systems.
Quad cores have held the market for 10 years now. An affordable 6-core sounds like a nice plan now, doesn't it? DX12 feeds all those cores pretty well. Granted, we have more to worry about than core usage with current (disastrous) DX12 titles, but the time will come. It's not like 5820K + X99 + 2x DDR4 RAM sticks is much costlier than an i7 6700K + Z170 + 2x DDR RAM sticks. Compared to the i5 6600K, that's another story; the i5 is much more affordable and offers, and should offer for the forseeable future, the same gaming performance. I say 6600K + Z170 or 5820K + X99 are the most sensible options currently.
Yeah I agree, I'll opt for 5930K + X99. (I need the extra pci bus because i'm going SLI 2 X pascal, when they come out). Thanks for the advice
No real game is better for hex core u say ? well look at this CPU intensive bench http://playwares.com/gamereview/44403718# Its from Black Desert which is essentially best looking mmo out there I currently have old like hell E5450 from 45nm era and 2xOpteron2380 in ancient XW9400 workstation and both of them can run modern games at pretty nice details though its not 60fps ofc. Same games on 2 core cpu from that era are unplayable or barely playable. So there might be future-proofing in multicore CPUs. Witcher 3 on my XW9400 loads all 8 cores with something like 80% average and gtx580 with 99% while running something like 30+fps with medium detail lvl.
Yeah, I'm basically assuming here that 4 sticks are more costly than 2 and that instead of buying 2 sticks for dual-channel on Skylake, one could use that same RAM in dual-channel on Haswell-E. But now there's pretty much price parity between 4x and 2x so one might as well just go 4x on X99 and not save even if tight on budget.