Gaming comp upgrade...I7-2700k > ?

Haswell or Skylake for another 5+ years?

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Mayseffect

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Hello all.

I'm finally looking to upgrade my gaming system to a updated CPU and mobo setup. I'm realizing the next era of rendering software and game engines are coming upon us, and after almost half a decade with the sandy bridge cpu i'm noticing this system is starting to show signs of it's age with some of the latest games. In comparison to some of my AMD ryzen computers at work, it's clear my gaming computer is not running as fast in a lot of areas.

I made a small attempt of updating the latest mobo chipset for the LGA1155 a year ago and it helped minimally. Along with a 2 year old standard 295x2 gpu, games are on the border of acceptable fps at 2560 at high settings on top name games. I just recently got AMD crimson running well with my freesync monitor so i'm actually pretty happy with the smooth 60-75fps at 75hz on most games. But some signs of frame dropping is still noticeable in heavily populated areas in games.

SSD's are up to date and the ram is pegged at 16gb which hasn't been a issue for this system (i've tried more ram with no real improvements.)

As of now i think i've boiled it down to 2 potential choices, but the open options and questions are this. Should i also make a change in gpu's? And what does the future hold for the next generation of CPU's? I don't feel i have gotten the most out of the 295x2 and i think it should work with the latest amd drivers and a new freesync 4k monitor. I've also considered adding a second 295x2 but considering how power hungry these things are i'm not sure it's wise to continue with this card. The 1080Ti seems to be the industry leader, but i'm not sold on the price to performance on Nvidia so the other option would be a Vega 64.

As of now here is what i have in mind.

i7-5820k or i7 7820x > 32gb ram > 32" 4k freesync. (currently using a 2560 freesync)

As of late, there has been a lot of talk of the i7 skylake cpu's severely overheating from a plethora of reasons. On top of this, some design issues with compatible mobo's.

I've heard nothing but good things about the 5820k, the 22nm form factor seems to be more ideal than the even tighter skylake 14nm design. many of the features i care about are available on both cpu's (28 lane pciE, 6+ cores, 64+gb mem)

But the other SMALL dilemma is i want to be able to use this for another 6+ years. The 5820k is already a few years old and at the end of its "life cycle". I got the 2700k newly released and i can easily say i've gotten every single penny out of it and it's still running relatively strong.

So is the skylake worth the extra money?
 
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At this point, go with the x299 setup - I would say an i7 7800x for your purposes. There would be a massive upgrade path for you as well. Used CPU prices are terrible now. If you are willing to scrounge on ebay, then yeah, go that route. If you want to save some money, just use 16 GB of RAM for now. That is around $200 less and you can always add later if you absolutely need to.
 
Couple of things that I don't see a justification for:
-why do you need the extra lanes?
-why do you need the extra memory?

In both cases, if those aren't solid needs, waiting for 8700k CPUs to come in stock makes more sense, really. That supports up to 64GB easy and has room for M.2 NVMe cards that older 115x platforms didn't, and presents the highest single-core performance you can get your hands on today and multi-threaded performance that's competitive with eight-core CPUs due to higher clockspeeds.

And now that Vega56's are hitting MSRP, that's really your best buy for a FreeSync-capable GPU as they can hit Vega64 speeds with tuning. You should probably also wait for AIB coolers though, as the stock blower is AMD-standard halfassery.
 
I completely disagree with the 8700k recommendation for a 5+ year build. The Z370 board you'd be required to buy to run it is a dead end platform already. At least with X299 you're looking at much more flexibility in the future to drop in different CPU's including off lease Xeons.
 
8700K is the obvious CPU choice unless you need a lot of memory or a lot of PCIe lanes. Else it would be SKL-X platform.

And for your GPU, you aint going to get anything good about buying one of the biggest GPU failures. You talk about price/performance and mentions Vega 64? o_O
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Couple of things that I don't see a justification for:
-why do you need the extra lanes?
-why do you need the extra memory?

In both cases, if those aren't solid needs, waiting for 8700k CPUs to come in stock makes more sense, really. That supports up to 64GB easy and has room for M.2 NVMe cards that older 115x platforms didn't, and presents the highest single-core performance you can get your hands on today and multi-threaded performance that's competitive with eight-core CPUs due to higher clockspeeds.

And now that Vega56's are hitting MSRP, that's really your best buy for a FreeSync-capable GPU as they can hit Vega64 speeds with tuning. You should probably also wait for AIB coolers though, as the stock blower is AMD-standard halfassery.
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If gaming is your main use I agree with this, get an 8700k and spend the money you saved on the best GPU you can afford.

kirbyrj said:
I completely disagree with the 8700k recommendation for a 5+ year build. The Z370 board you'd be required to buy to run it is a dead end platform already. At least with X299 you're looking at much more flexibility in the future to drop in different CPU's including off lease Xeons.
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I see this argument a lot and disagree with it. In 5 years all current platforms will be dead, even in 2 years all current platforms will be dead. Any CPU that comes out next year that is X299 compatible will offer minimal gains over the current CPUs, you will be better off upgraded your GPU instead.
 
Shintai said:
8700K is the obvious cpu....

And for your GPU, you aint going to get anything good about buying one of the biggest GPU failures. You talk about price/performance and mentions Vega 64? o_O
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I haven't seen any noticeable downsides for the vega running on freesync monitors, and its currently at a decent price point. The 1080ti is no cheaper than 700usd online unless used (not doing that).

I prefer not to overclock the cpu or gpu because I've never seen lasting performance benefits without crashing or stuttering. Thus my choice of a modest 6 or 8 core cpu and a standard gpu. Plus the increase level of heat running 5+mhz over standard does not seem ideal to me.

I didn't list all of the things I plan on using this computer for, but it will be more than just gaming.

Video conversion, cad design and i plan on doing some training work with unreal engine and a few other modeling engines. A small bump in ram would possibly be a benefit here.
 
Dermen said:
If gaming is your main use I agree with this, get an 8700k and spend the money you saved on the best GPU you can afford.

The price is not a huge problem, my only argument about cost was justification. Spending 700 on a gpu that will be "replaced" in a month is not in the books for me. I like my items to last a while without problems or further placebo upgrades. So far my 295x2 is working fine enough, but i know it will be stressed heavily running 4k. I just don't see the benefits of buying a 700$ gpu and a 700$ screen if i'm just going to lock it at 60fps. And so far freesync seems to be working better for a slightly lower cost. The bottleneck for me now seems to be the mobo/cpu setup, certainly considering reported gains from the latest generations. Something i was unsure of the previous years until i used the Ryzen cpu's at work.


I see this argument a lot and disagree with it. In 5 years all current platforms will be dead, even in 2 years all current platforms will be dead. Any CPU that comes out next year that is X299 compatible will offer minimal gains over the current CPUs, you will be better off upgraded your GPU instead.
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I don't know what you mean by "dead" or compatibility problems. I've gone down the route of gpu upgrades and so far it has been a good enough investment. Are you saying this cpu/mobo setup is not a problem?
The fact still remains the latest mobo and cpu systems have faster read/write transfer from the drives. This alone is another big issue i'm currently having.
 
Dermen said:
If gaming is your main use I agree with this, get an 8700k and spend the money you saved on the best GPU you can afford.



I see this argument a lot and disagree with it. In 5 years all current platforms will be dead, even in 2 years all current platforms will be dead. Any CPU that comes out next year that is X299 compatible will offer minimal gains over the current CPUs, you will be better off upgraded your GPU instead.
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Except you're limited to 6 cores on mainstream where you aren't on x299.
 
Mayseffect said:
I didn't list all of the things I plan on using this computer for, but it will be more than just gaming.

Video conversion, cad design and i plan on doing some training work with unreal engine and a few other modeling engines. A small bump in ram would possibly be a benefit here.
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For video conversion and modeling the extra cores available on X299 would be better than Z370.

Mayseffect said:
I don't know what you mean by "dead" or compatibility problems. I've gone down the route of gpu upgrades and so far it has been a good enough investment. Are you saying this cpu/mobo setup is not a problem?
The fact still remains the latest mobo and cpu systems have faster read/write transfer from the drives. This alone is another big issue i'm currently having.
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kirbyrj was saying Z370 is dead, because the current CPUs will be the last CPUs released for that chipset. I was saying that pretty much all chipsets only last a year or two with minimal performance upgrades available. Now that you mentioned your other activities that can take advantage of more cores there would be upgrades available on X299 by getting a CPU with more cores later on. In gaming that many cores aren't important.

kirbyrj said:
Except you're limited to 6 cores on mainstream where you aren't on x299.
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Which is plenty for gaming.
 
Again my point is to buy once not every single time something else comes out. I'm not looking to upgrade cpu's and gpu's every season. The 7820 8core cpu seems like something i wont have to touch until 2025 if technology doesn't take a left turn. And even still that wouldn't be enough to trash a system capable of doing all the current world digital functions i plan on doing.
 
kirbyrj said:
I completely disagree with the 8700k recommendation for a 5+ year build. The Z370 board you'd be required to buy to run it is a dead end platform already. At least with X299 you're looking at much more flexibility in the future to drop in different CPU's including off lease Xeons.
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All platforms are dead platforms. Nothing will come out for a socket that's available today that will present a significant upgrade down the line over a top-end build, that would be worth jumping to in place of doing another platform upgrade.

Half-assed arguments about 'why buy the best today when you can buy something slower and get a fractional upgrade down the line?' are poor distractions.
 
Mayseffect said:
Not very helpful banter....
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Reality isn't always helpful :D

Mayseffect said:
So far.

Definitely not the 5820k?
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So, I'll try to be more helpful: definitely not the 5820k.

Beyond that, you pay way too much more for 8 cores, and if you're behind on clockspeeds versus an 8700k, you're going to get less gaming performance with similar multi-threaded performance.

So unless the X299 platform has something you can make good use of today over Z370, it isn't worth it.
 
No one has explained why the z370 chipset is any better. What are the differences between the z299 and z370?
 
Mayseffect said:
No one has explained why the z370 chipset is any better. What are the differences between the z299 and z370?
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You're on the [H], there's a whole website to explain that...

The question is not why it's better/where it's better, but what needs you feel one might meet over the other. For that, you need to explain what limitations you're trying to address (which is why I made my first response above).
 
Mayseffect said:
No one has explained why the z370 chipset is any better. What are the differences between the z299 and z370?
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The comparisons I have seen, at least in this thread, focus on the future upgradability of the x299 platform with server class xeon chips down the road, vs Z370 which will be long phased out in 5 years time.
 
greyboxer said:
The comparisons I have seen, at least in this thread, focus on the future upgradability of the x299 platform with server class xeon chips down the road, vs Z370 which will be long phased out in 5 years time.
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5 years is pretty generous. I don't know that it will be here beyond coffee lake.
 
greyboxer said:
The comparisons I have seen, at least in this thread, focus on the future upgradability of the x299 platform with server class xeon chips down the road, vs Z370 which will be long phased out in 5 years time.
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5 years is a decent longevity.
 
The 2600k is what, 6 years old now? People are still having trouble upgrading from these for gaming and general use because they're good and work well enough.. The 8700k advantage over the X299 platform is that you mention you don't wish to OC. The 8700k has a higher out of the box clock speed and boost speed. 6 cores 12 threads isn't anything to scoff at, even a few years down the track, based on the 2600k example (4c8t), 6/12 should be plenty sufficient for a long while to come, especially at high clock speeds. As others have mentioned, you are locking yourself into that platform on Z370 though with no core-count upgrade path as it appears. That said, do you really do video conversions, cad, etc enough to justify spending 2-3 times as much on a CPU/platform?

If any of the video work you plan to do, may make you money, it may be justified to go X299, as it can pay itself off (perhaps) in some faster render/conversion times long term. Otherwise, will 5 minutes slower conversion or render time really bother you?

To answer the original question, 5820k is a no-go.
 
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Yeah, it's not that hard to understand- given that a top-end CPU bought today will be effective long after its platform and any others available at the time of purchase have been well obsoleted, there's very little point in buying a platform for 'longevity'.

All platforms are dead platforms.
 
Some are less dead than others. In a case where you know you're keeping it for 5 years, why not give yourself the option for upgrades?
 
kirbyrj said:
Some are less dead than others. In a case where you know you're keeping it for 5 years, why not give yourself the option for upgrades?
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Your platform, at best, is only going to be modern for one or two more years, and CPU performance isn't likely to have advanced enough in that period of time to really be worth upgrading unless yours dies. After that period, you're better off moving to a new platform anyway.

And that's the point- after two or three years, it becomes uneconomical to upgrade, assuming a worthwhile upgrade for your old platform is even available. After five? Run what you got into the ground and move on.
 
Case in point. I picked up a X5660 Xeon for my X58 board for $19 shipped. It's a 6C/12T processor that overclocks to 4.2Ghz. Not a bad upgrade and worth the $19. You're assuming "uneconomical to upgrade" when there really is no basis for it. X299 supports up to what? 22C/44T Xeon processors? In 5 years when they are coming off lease that might be a $79 CPU. And if "CPU performance isn't likely to have advanced enough in that period of time to be worth upgrading" then you always have the option of more cores where you don't with Z370.
 
kirbyrj said:
Case in point. I picked up a X5660 Xeon for my X58 board for $19 shipped. It's a 6C/12T processor that overclocks to 4.2Ghz. Not a bad upgrade and worth the $19. You're assuming "uneconomical to upgrade" when there really is no basis for it. X299 supports up to what? 22C/44T Xeon processors? In 5 years when they are coming off lease that might be a $79 CPU. And if "CPU performance isn't likely to have advanced enough in that period of time to be worth upgrading" then you always have the option of more cores where you don't with Z370.
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This isn't a 'case', this is luck- good luck!- but not something that can be reasonably planned for five years in advance.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
This isn't a 'case', this is luck- good luck!- but not something that can be reasonably planned for five years in advance.
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Agreed.

We can't assume in 5 years time Xeons will indeed be sub 100. They could still be several hundreds. It's uncertain at this point in time. I wouldn't really plan anything 'tech' for more than 2 years personally, (or at least no more than the warranty that covers it).
 
ReaperX22 said:
Agreed.

We can't assume in 5 years time Xeons will indeed be sub 100. They could still be several hundreds. It's uncertain at this point in time. I wouldn't really plan anything 'tech' for more than 2 years personally, (or at least no more than the warranty that covers it).
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I think that guy is taking it to the extreme with "hella used" bargain deals. At that price its a win win situation. If it doesn't work, oh well, if it does work, cool beans.

I personally have no intention of buying anything used unless it's from a friend where i know how something was used. Buying something used 80% less than msrp may be a lucky buy. But they are a dime a dozen and certainly not the norm for anything except dirty underwear
 
IdiotInCharge said:
This isn't a 'case', this is luck- good luck!- but not something that can be reasonably planned for five years in advance.
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Not really. There are leased server cpu's on the market for dirt cheap prices. Not really worth it imo unless you are building a server with multiple cpu's (in reality, still spending over 300$ on 4+ cpu's).
 
Mayseffect said:
Not really. There are leased server cpu's on the market for dirt cheap prices. Not really worth it imo unless you are building a server with multiple cpu's (in reality, still spending over 300$ on 4+ cpu's).
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Exactly- and the impossible question is this: can you be sure that in five years a similar supply of off-lease server CPUs will be available at similar prices?

The only logical answer is no; and you'd be taking a hell of a chance (and risking whatever extra you spent) to build toward that potential fortuitous possibility.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Exactly- and the impossible question is this: can you be sure that in five years a similar supply of off-lease server CPUs will be available at similar prices?

The only logical answer is no; and you'd be taking a hell of a chance (and risking whatever extra you spent) to build toward that potential fortuitous possibility.
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You're being obtuse for no good reason (and you told me MY argument was half-assed above :rolleyes:). There are ALWAYS off lease CPU's. Businesses build in a 4-5 year cycle for hardware or just lease servers. When the lease is up, the servers get turned over and sold. Will a 22C/44T $4500 CPU be available for $20? Probably not. But if you get it for $150-200, that's a win (especially since YOU already argued how CPU technology doesn't change much in 5 years). The example I used of a X5660, the CPU went from $1200 to $19. So can I be sure? No, I suppose not with 100% certainty, but pretty close to it. Even regular desktop parts see a dramatic decline in price after office computers get turned in. Look at how many i5 2400/2500's are floating around. They went from $100-110 to $60-70 as soon as the 5 year mark hit and business machines got turned in. Server CPU's see more dramatic price reductions.

The bigger issue is the OP saying he doesn't buy used things. So it throws the whole "buy a used CPU in a few years" argument out the window. I disagree with that also, especially with CPU's, but I'm sure that's a whole new thread.
 
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kirbyrj said:
You're being obtuse for no good reason (and you told me MY argument was half-assed above :rolleyes:). There are ALWAYS off lease CPU's.
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I'm not going to argue against the fact that there is always an off-lease market for retired parts, because you're absolutely right. The main argument is for there being the parts you need, and those parts actually being a useful upgrade (which means that they can actually be used to upgrade in the first place!), five years into the future.

For example: no matter how much you spend on an HEDT or workstation/server part, you can't get a CPU that's faster than an 8700k for gaming right now. It's possible that in a year or two such a CPU would be released, but we cannot guarantee that a board supporting an HEDT part today would actually be compatible with that future CPU.

That uncertainty underlines my point. You might get lucky, and you might have spent more to get less.

kirbyrj said:
The bigger issue is the OP saying he doesn't buy used things. So it throws the whole "buy a used CPU in a few years" argument out the window. I disagree with that also, especially with CPU's, but I'm sure that's a whole new thread.
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Yeah, pretty much a null discussion at this point :).
 
ReaperX22 said:
As others have mentioned, you are locking yourself into that platform on Z370 though with no core-count upgrade path as it appears. That said, do you really do video conversions, cad, etc enough to justify spending 2-3 times as much on a CPU/platform? - NOPE, but the plan is to be able to have a something that will be comparably useful after 5 years and continued training.

Otherwise, will 5 minutes slower conversion or render time really bother you?
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YES ;)lol
 
Mayseffect said:
YES ;)lol
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Haha in that case it appears you've already made your choice. Go grab that 7820x and enjoy. (I seriously suggest you re-consider the overclocking thing though... Even in 2 years time, a nice OC will make it feel like a new processor! :p). Goodluck!
 
I'm not against overclocking. I just don't see it as a long term solution. I haven't found significant advantages overclocking cpu's and gpu's when gaming or video conversion. Certainly when playing online or making a batch of video. At least this has been the case with my 2700k. Sooner or later the computer or the specific program just crashes. Of course I'll give it a try, but i have no intentions of running it boosted indefinitely.
 
Poll has been updated if you feel some other cpu would be better. List your choice in the comments.
 
Mayseffect said:
I'm not against overclocking. I just don't see it as a long term solution. I haven't found significant advantages overclocking cpu's and gpu's when gaming or video conversion. Certainly when playing online or making a batch of video. At least this has been the case with my 2700k. Sooner or later the computer or the specific program just crashes. Of course I'll give it a try, but i have no intentions of running it boosted indefinitely.
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You haven't got it stable then. If you haven't found significant advantages to OCing a 2700K you haven't been reading very much.
 
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