Melorski

When the 7th Gen 7700K was reportedly a fair improvement over the 6th Gen, I was dead set on waiting till January. It's so close, why wouldn't you wait? Then more recently reports seem to indicate that the new chip isn't clock rate dependent and a small increase in clock speed translates into the small increase in performance. In other words it's slightly overclocked compared to the 6700K. Crap. When I started planning this build one of the first reports I read was that it performed like a 6 core! Wow! Now I read it runs hot and not that much faster. Also, new chipset. What does the Z270 do that the Z170 cannot? Nothing I will use. I have been looking at the prices on the 6700K and found a local retailer that has them for $280. I found the Asus Z170 Pro Gaming Aura for $160. If bought with a chip, $30 more off. US$. My concern is that my hair will fall out trying to game on my Surface Pro 3 (i7) which is just about pointless. I can wait till Jan but who is kidding who. If the 7th Gen is actually available in Jan I can see paying full retail or MORE due to price / demand curves. It may be several months into next year before I can actually build this PC using Gen 7. On the other hand, maybe truckloads of them are being stocked on retailers shelves and you can order late this month and get it on your doorstep Jan 2 along with the Z270MB. Now for the last possibility that is tripping me up... I could avoid the 6700 vs 7700 and simply buy a 6800 which is selling for $360. Photoshop will like it ( a little because it's still mostly hard drive latency - not CPU in my case ) but gaming performance will actually be less. Except maybe???? I am essentially building a Cities Skylines machine that can play FPS games too. Cities Skylines performance is my target. Of all the games out there it MAY be better on 6 slower cores than 4 faster cores. A benchmark showed that not to be the case but how big was the city? Don't know... BTW don't plan on using Twitch, becoming a YouTuber or video editor. And if I do any video editing, it will be assembling a slide show of a vacation or something like that once a year. The money tease to buy the 6700K now is there, in addition to can ditch the tablet as a gaming platform ASAP. To be honest money isn't a huge issue so if the 6 core were desirable for me, the cost delta won't stop me. Would love to have the latest and greatest, but worried it won't get in between my fat little fingers until well into next year and when it does I will have waited for a very modest increase in performance. One last item... Not sure what kind of video card will be needed to drive a 3440 by 1440 in Cities Skylines ( I think a 1070 will kick ass here ) but other games? Not sure. Actually NO IDEA. Pixel wise the common monitor sizes are HD, 2560 by 1440, 3440 by 1440 and 4K at 3840 by 2160. This puts the monitor I want at 5.0 Megapixels, closer to the 2560 by 1440 at 3.7 MP than the 4K at 8.3 MP. So... Why mention the video card in a thread about waiting till January? The 1080Ti is why. From what I hear the damn thing is likely to be priced closer to $1000 and at that price I think I may pass for the same reason I won't buy water from a man in the desert at $100/gallon unless I was dying and I am not dying for a card that will be eclipsed in a year or so. $uck them at that price. To be honest after getting these thoughts out of my head and on to this forum where they can breathe I actually feel better. Still not sure what to do but the above issues are all those that have been floating around my brain. Thoughts? Please? No wrong answers here. Paul

I am building a new system and have made only one decision so far - the case which is a Corsair Air 460X RGB. I am shopping for a PSU right now and am interested in a high quality unit with a desirable feature set. My power needs should be fully satisfied by a 650 or 750 watt unit with a bit of headroom. The units I am considering are a EVGA P2 or a Corsair RMi or HXI. My primary concern is reliability and secondary concern is noise. Since I am probably going to use a Corsair AIO cooler, the fact that the Corsair units are "Corsair Link" compatible is attractive, while a friend suggested matching power supply and video card brand is a plus and I am probably going to buy an EVGA video card. The reason I am choosing an EVGA video card is because I understand ( hopefully correctly ) that their tech support and service is better than most. They are local to me ( am in So Cal ) AND my friend works there in tech support. - So he may be biased to recommend the matching of PSU and GPU... Question: Is the Corsair link software and corresponding PSU a nice feature or unnecessary headroom? Question: Is there any reason to choose an EVGA PSU because you are using an EVGA video card? Thanks for your thoughts. Paul

Don't know a thing about the capabilities/needs of the Maya program but I have been away from PC gaming for a good while and some YouTube vids of Cities Skylines has reawakened my desire to build a gaming box. Cost is not a huge issue but I don't want to overspend needlessly. I have done a fair bit of research and found a benchmark that showed no particular advantage ( and actually fewer frames per second ) on a 6 core setup compared to a 4 core on CS. Not sure why. I think you and I might be looking for the same things in a new machine. I have chosen to wait to see what happens with the I7-7600 chip that will be coming out ( hopefully ) early January. Along with this is a new chipset. A few weeks ago it seemed that this might be a fairly big step up from the 6600K but more recent testing seems to negate the initial speculation. In any case I would consider waiting just a short time more. BTW if you know of any site that details and improvement in City Skylines with 6 cores please share them because I have only purchased a case and everything else is subject to change. Also, rather than a dual card video solution, I would consider a more powerful card ( or wait till Jan and buy a 1080TI ) Paul

Yes is almost certainly overkill. On the other hand after redoing my monitor setup, desk, etc. The actual cost of using two extra sticks is pretty minor in the big picture. My concern is my history with motherboards becoming more finicky with memory when you max out the slots. Is that still an issue? If you visit ASUS and look at the approved memory configs, very few specify 64GB. Most are 16GB with some 32. At least on the resource I viewed a few days ago. I didn't make a big study of the subject. So I do want the 64 unless it makes the system less stable. I can certainly live with 32 and probably will not touch the high addresses even if they are there. Paul

Like the setup. If 7th gen Intel and 270 chipset weren't around the corner, this could be my build. PC target use is Gaming and Photoshop. My existing solution is adequate for everything I do except gaming. The photoshop work I do is fairly light and I am not processing many images, but more detail work on a small number of images. My current rig is a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 with I7 Mobile. It usually sits in a docking station where use a secondary screen that is 2560 by 1440 dell that is good for photo editing. I also use full size keyboard and mouse with this setup. I have no hard drive space because I run three servers. Two local and one remote. I am at about 50% capacity ( I think because I seldom check ) and have maybe 10 TB online space 5TB free... Will check later... EDIT 29 TB Online /EDIT So motivation for new machine is re-sparking of interest in gaming generated by you tube vids of these awesomely detailed cities in Cities Skylines. As a kid I wanted but never made a cool model railroad. IMHO programs like Cities Skylines are the model railroad of this century. I used to play FPS games back in the day. Doom, Quake and SOF. I was in the top 20 worldwide on SOF when I binge played using "Game Spy" if I recall. For a few days I was #1. I played that as Charles U Farley. Chuck U Farley - Get it? So FPS is an interest but my main desire is to make a cool model railroad, er, uh, I mean cool city in Cities Skylines. I almost certainly will play some FPS online, but don't want to go down that rabbit hole at this stage of my life. The I7M in my tablet just doesn't cut it on CS, although it gives a darn good try. The other tasks I perform are fine on my tablet so I don't need to move them over. but probably will pull Photoshop over, or not. I don't do the Photoshop work I did years ago when I was an active photographer. In the end, I anticipate both computers to be on my desk with a total of three monitors or maybe two if I can find an elegant way of sharing one monitor between the tablet and the desktop build. I was so frustrated with the wait for the 7th gen I7 that I almost went 6 cores now. The latest benchmarks seem to show the new I7 doesn't out perform the 6700K if you match the clock speeds. Or if it does, it does so very marginally. However the announcement that Netflix will stream 4K to Kaby and not earlier gear is a strong reminder that you move forward or get left behind and I hate to build a heavy box with yesterdays toys. Especially since this will probably be "IT" for a good handful of years. I have a weird background with computing. Programmed in machine code on Z80 as a kid, and active programmer until OOP became the thing which is a long time now. Almost always built my own boxes. Earliest build was a 286 or maybe 386. Yes, I am probably one of your dad's friends... Or maybe your mom's... ( Being anonymous sure makes you cheeky, doesn't it - I am not at all like that in person, oh no, I am maybe morphing back to being Chuck... ) Best to all of you and thanks 10^6 for reading and replying. Happy Holidays to you regardless of your brand. Good time to be among loved ones and friends Peace on earth to all. Paul

Around 2000 USD. More or less for everything in the case. No speakers, keyboard, monitor, etc. Other big purchase not counted is monitor.

No MB choice as I am waiting to see how the z270 chipset boards look. Am anxious to build but patient enough to wait till January.

Ordered a Corsair Crystal Air 460X RGB today. Original plan was for Intel I7 6700K CPU, however since 7th gen so close to release I am going to wait till Jan to purchase the rest of the gear. I am planning on a build that will be strong for Cities Skylines on an ultra wide monitor ( probably a LG 34UC98 @ 3440 x 1440 ) with m.2 boot drive and a 1070, 1080, or possibly 1080Ti if it looks like I might need it vs price point. I am also plannng on driving a second monitor for simultaneous web browsing, etc. The vid vid card needs are what I am most unsure of. Also trying to decide if there would be any benefit of 64 gb over 32 gb on the motherboard. I probably won't have much more to post as I am waiting on Intel for now. Any suggestions are welcome! Paul