Thinking of upgrading my rig - its been over 4 years with this board and cpu... <- I've looked before and held off as there just wasn't the performance bump, its not like a 950 is a slouch... Was considering Intel i7 4770K Asus Z97-A 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengance DDR3 2133MHz Crucial M500 240GB Soundblaster Z Leaving my 660Ti in for now with a view to looking at a 860Ti/870 when they turn up later this year. Good move?
U want a proper upgrade or waste your money? http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/msi-x99s-sli-motherboard-photo.html
I would go with 4790k, honestly, it's only a fraction more expensive than 4770k, in fact the 4790k OEM costs about the same as 4770k retail. Motherboard wise, I'd go with asus z97 pro, slightly more expensive than the A, but I much better board. The zx7 pro boards have historically been great enthusiast boards.
Good call on the 4790K - £207 vs £199 ex VAT, so that's a no-brainier! I did a compare between the A and the Pro. I take it the major change (apart from 2 extra SATA ports) is the 8 vs 12 phase power circuitry. Is that worth the £30 that splits the boards? To the guy who posted up that new X99 board, I hear you, but that is going to be DDR4, and I suspect a whole other level of cost. This is looking to be a £450 spend rather than the £1000 or so I suspect you need to build one around X99, nice though it would be...
I would go with the pro, definitely. You get more power phases, better vrm cooling, more usb3, some other extra features (usb bios flashback etc). Better board overall. There's other options out there, off course, but if you want a reasonable Asus, I'd go with the pro.
4790k isn't worth it compared to 4770k and maybe a marginal 15% increase over your current OC i7 overall, waste of money. I only upgrade when i can get close to double performance for more future proofing personally, had mine for 5 yrs. Intel built the original i7 too well. X99 6 core base CPU will be superior to these and i predict for similar price plus all the benefits the new chipset will bring. I'd wait and see, only a few months and you'll regret it if you don't
Ah better VRM cooling is always good, didn't see that there, I'll probably head that route. I probably won't be doing much until closer to Christmas, so I'll look at the X99 stuff However I strongly suspect that it is going to be very expensive for the first year or so The Z97 allows an easy upgrade to Broadwell in the future too.
Yes get at least Z97 pro or maybe Hero VII Also 4790K is guarantied to OC to at least 4.6 - 4.8ghz.. Avg 4770K usually tops ~ 4.4 - 4.5ghz. Btw speaking of Broadwell, from what I saw both z87 & z97 will work, but that's not really relevant atm. I think you won't see any need to upgrade from 4790k to 5770K? so soon.. Really Haswell @ 4.7ghz is plenty, even at just 4.5ghz its still too fast for all games atm :nerd: EDIT: is that ram 2133 CL9?
there is no point of getting a i7 desktop cpu. get the top unlocked i5 model. its just as fast, just without HT and costs way less.
If I was buying now I'd fork out the extra for an I7 to be honest, although I tend to keep my CPU's for a fair amount of time.
hell no it doesnt. few games support more than 4 threads and since HT halves the L1 cache, so that each thread has the same amount. That is especially counter-productive for applications limited to 4 or fewer threads, as it gets throttled by HT itself. Best example for this would be the dolphin emulator, that runs up to 30% slower with HT enabled. HT is awful.
HT is situational, and becoming increasingly beneficial. As you said yourself, in situations where it might be a problem it's easily disabled.
the benefit doesnt justify the price. also, especially on laptops, you may not even be able to disable HT, as the manufacturer crippled the BIOS options (**** you ACER!)
So a Z97-Pro, 4790K @ 4.6-4.8 sounds like a decent upgrade then.... 30% faster than what I have? I'll be keeping the H100 and the 600W OCZ PSU (and the 660Ti for now) I'm also going from a board that has SATA2 native so currently using a ASUS U3S6 add in SATA3 controller and that doesn't like posting from cold every time (OC/Ram I suspect) The new SSD/SB-Z are just for space/functionality obviously And I'll see what Nvidia come up with later this year.
That depends entirely on the person. You might not be able to justify the price but many other people can, including it seems the OP. This thread has nothing to do with laptops btw, not being able to disable HT will not be a problem in this scenario.
yeah, my next cpu will have HT, just because it might come handy here and there. I don't mind i7 costing a bit more.
I'm looking forward to a Skylake i7 personally, been dying to do a system build for myself for ages now.
