Intel Core i7-6950X Broadwell-E has 10 Cores and 20 Threads

Holy shiz Intel, there's overkill and then there are these puppies.

You are mad if you want one for gaming alone. 6 cores/12 Threads is more than enough for most things.

 

GTA V - CPU Benchmark

Note the top of the scale there - the $1000+ 5960X 8 core has just one additional frame per second over the $300 4770K Quad Core.

For game performance, a plain ol' i5 quad core is enough for almost every game on the market, if you aren't multi-tasking. If you want to go overkill, a Quad Core i7 is about the top end of any measurable performance. The only good reason to buy a 6 or 8 core CPU is if you're going to use the machine for rendering, photo work, CAD, etc. or if you are going to have other CPU intensive processes running while playing games.

 

Although to be fair i think 1000$ chip should last you for maybe 10 years or more if you really wanted it to and the lower end you'd be lucky to reach 5 years before it starts getting strained to death.

In computing they say it's best to buy as expensive as you can afford because spending a little more will give you more future proofing and that means money will be well spent either way.

 

Man you should upgrade to aa 6 core Xeon x5650 or x5670 for around 70 dollars, overclocks higher than a 920, temps are lower, less power usage and 2 extra cores one of the best and cheapest upgrades for me in the past few years

 

Yep, but $300 now, and $300 5 years from now is $600 total over 10 years. That's a lot better than $1000.

That only works up to the point of diminishing returns. There comes a point where spending more money doesn't give you additional future proofing. A CPU in a modern gaming PC is a shinning example of that. The top end i5 or i7 Quad Core is the "sweet spot" with the current trends being what they are.

And obviously that may change as DX12 becomes the standard.

 

@Kaarme
for gaming, the pc's are doing better in sales than the consoles together.
might not be enough looking at the pc market as a whole,tho..

 

great now that saw this 6700k or 6800k lol

 

The CPU computing power isn't everything. 10 years is a long, long time. Things like faster RAM, sata, NVMe, new USB versions, etc appear in such a time, or even in shorter. I feel like rm082e's way is better for these reasons as well.

 

Not gonna be huge difference for me I feel...but gonna upgrade in a yr or so.

The general would be proud of me....

 

lol@the general, haha, blast from the past

for very little cash its worth it, if you have that 920 on water you would be able to hit 4.6/4.7 on a xeon and more and more games are using the extra cores. They seem more effecient/optomized, my batman AC min fps shot up from about 20 to 48. For very little cash its worth it, even to mess around, all those cpu graphs in task manager lol. My 780ti was bottlenecking on my 920@3.8Ghz, but the 980Ti is going strong on this. If you have a few bob to spare its well worth it, its delayed my upgrade itch for the past year.

 

I have a feeling it will be 280-300/350-400/600/1000-1100


6800/6850 is only a clock speed, so we can compare this to the lower tier x820 [x being 3,4,5] we've seen in the past being entry level.

6900 is the main one, being like the x930K series

6950K being the extreme.

 

For me only 6900k looks interesting.. 8core, but then again I see no point in this just yet..

Maybe in another 2years with skylake-e.. or even 8core 16thread amd zen cpu:nerd:

 

Gonna scrouge it! Playing games still ok...i.e witcher 3 n fallout 4 etc, think its actually my old benq thats giving up the ghost. (getting some odd ghosting).

 

Personally im betting on intel not doing much with CannonLake, and giving us 6 core in the next consumer based platform.

 

I hear ya man, do consider it in the future if you can, alternatively your mobo will sell well now due to the Xeon craze

 

Single core has stalled at Intel, but I might buy for 2x cores

My 2600k has had a long life and is still plenty at 4.4Ghz on water for Witcher 3 and other big games. Maybe 40% load with rare peaks on 2015 titles...

I can't be bothered to upgrade for less than 2x performance. The 6950k could fit, primarily for the platform RAM and PCIe lanes.

It's just ridiculous how a 2011 rig with upgrades is comparable to a brand new system:

i7-2600k, 295x2 with its PCIe switch & Samsung 951 M.2 is only limiting if I want to add more PCIe native drives or GPUs.

 

it will not increase perceived speed. doesn't matter infinite cores. And smartphones / tablets are the most useless technology in the civilian sector envisioned ever. Smartphones have a lot of potential if developed to rival pcs, but they are more than oft used or abused for the mundane.

 

AMD's core counts are not directly comparable due to their shared resources. In fact, it felt like they increased the number of modules in order to help compensate for poor IPC. GCN on the other hand, seems to be a pretty good, forward thinking design. The thing with everything though, is compromises. Even though GCN seems great for DX12/Mantle, it was launched in a time (and we are still in it) with literally everything still on DX11. GCN and Bulldozer derivatives are fundamentally designed for parallel workloads, making them very selective. To achieve maximum efficiency, you often need to design and plan for the task at hand and a little bit ahead, not something that is beyond the EOL of the product.

Good enough today also does not mean regression backwards. There simply just aren't many consumer workloads that require an extremely powerful, 4+ core processor. Sometimes, their requirements are satisfied by smartphones and tablets with ARM SoCs. Unless some must-have application stirs up the performance race on PCs again, there is simply no demand for more complex, bigger chips when a modern Intel quadcore is already lightly used by most. Proper multi threading is VERY hard to do. Sometimes it is impossible for certain code/functions (you lose more than you gain). The laws of diminishing returns thus strikes for CPUs, just as sticking more and more GPUs into a system does not net you anywhere near linear returns unless you are running extremely parallel code (mining, rendering, certain compute tasks, for example). Again, this is all for typical consumer loads, not for enthusiasts or professional applications.

As tech enthusiasts, we also must understand that we're the minority, edge cases. Our demands for performance and other things often don't directly correlate to what the general market wants.

Yep for gaming. The only game I know that really scales better higher than 4 cores is BF3/4 on select larger maps. It was pretty much the only game to see a pretty significant improvement when I upgraded from a 950 to this.

 

You got it.. nice to see someone who knows this also. Intel is not really pushing single threaded performance. Imagine a decked out high frequency quad core with large L1/L2/L3/L4 and no GPU (make the most of that die space) but there's no competition for them to create that, so if you want real performance you have to move to the extreme range which doesn't benefit what people generally really want performance for.. gaming which quad cores still work the best for ATM. Intel do need to need to recover the costs of their industry leading nodes though.. the price we pay for technology advancement I guess. I expect Zen will finally provide Intel some decent competition but will it be enough?

 

Although I reckon that DX12 is going to be removing CPU bottlenecks rather than forcing people to upgrade their CPUs. Most of the current CPU bottlenecks are due to single cores being maxed out & not spread efficiently between the cores, with DX12 eliminating that problem I would think that even Sandybridge i7's will be given a new lease of life, so I don't think DX12 will be a driving force for people needing to upgrade their CPUs - at least not for a few years yet, perhaps when games start to get really complicated to take advantage of DX12 and the extra CPU power available.