Broadwell or Skylake? Opinions needed!

[Nakoron]

I have an 2500k OC'ed to 4.6ghz via "Off-set mode"

The board: Asus Maximus IV Genie-Z

Ram: who cares

The card: Asus R9 290 (stock cooler, bleh)



--------


So before I begin, I'll have to tell my motherboard woes:

Sometime ago my Asus board used to allow my 2500k to OC nice and stable to 4.8ghz, which I might add was quite rare. I did a bios update and it has since not been able to break 4.6ghz without more juice then I feel comfortable giving.
Long story short; between the bios update and my overclocking all my USB ports on the board have fried. Whether this has to with either the update or my overclocking, I do not know. 
I did not find this out until I have lost both my mouse and my mech keyboard - which totals an easy $300 for the two. 

I have since installed an 2 port USB 3.0 card, which takes up precious space as my board is an mATX board inside an incredibly small Fractal core 1000 case. I then had to also buy a powered hub to run from the card so I can use SOME of my devices.

***

So my question(s) is this:

I game, is my CPU holding me back?
I also (re)encode a ton of (music) videos for my car's headunit.

Should I suffer through no USB ports and wait for skylake, of which I presume I would get the most bang-for the buck.
Or, rather, would the new coat of pain on Haswell, aka Broadwell, be a noticeable upgrade NOW for gaming and encoding? Also yay USB ports.



Note: from synthetic benchmarks my 2500k is superior than an 8350 and not quite, but close, to a stock 4670k.

PS: I'm going to Gigabyte for my next board.

[H4X3R]

Skylake. DDR4 will be cheaper, we will probs see pci e gen 4.0 (less likely to see with broadwell), Z97 boards (broadwell compatible) use ddr3, which will soon become the "old" standard. Your current rig will last you another 4 years IMO

[nishank93]

 

Or, rather, would the new coat of pain on Haswell, aka Broadwell, be a noticeable upgrade NOW for gaming and encoding? Also yay USB ports.

 

Haswell Refresh =/= Broadwell. Broadwell will come at the end of this year and will use the Z97 chipset which Haswell is already compatible with.

 

Clock for clock, Haswell Refresh has the same performance as Haswell, i.e., the new chips are slightly faster because they are clocked higher (AnandTech). We don't yet know what sort of improvement we'll see with Broadwell or Skylake.

 

The cheapest option would be to just get a new LGA1155 motherboard and stick with your current system till you see something that would give you a real performance upgrade. If you can't find one, get a Z97 motherboard and an unlocked Haswell refresh CPU (aka Devil's Canyon). If you wait for Broadwell or Skylake, you'll be waiting a very long time.

[Sauron]

look, performancewise an upgrade is useless in the forseeable future. haswell has a very little performance advantage over sandy bridge and broadwell will just be a die shrink. if skylake is a real tock, then maybe you should consider it. but i would stick with the i5.

for the motherboard however, I would change it asap. it's a shame that such a good board got ruined, but once it's fried it makes no sense to keep it.

[Faa]

*

Performance wise broadwell/haswell whatever isnt worth it. If you cant boot into windows with a certain OC and a high vcore that means you have to enable internal pll overvoltage. It's not the same as the cpu pll at all. Did you check your vdroop under load & idle? Make sure to tweak the load line calibration properly.

[Kamina]

Skylake should be your next big upgrade unless Intel plans to do a delay and do a refresh of broadwell. 

 

That or the possible "game breaker" from AMD with their new x86 architecture. 

 

Sandybridge was a bang for your buck and should last you awhile, everything after were frog leaps.

[Ethanololol]

I'm waiting for Skylake. I also have a 2500K and I really don't feel that it's holding me back when gaming, but I'm starting to do some 3d modeling so I'll want to upgrade next year, and the extra fps will be nice too. Also wait to see what comes of AMDs new architecture and see if that'll be at all appealing.

[Nakoron]

Performance wise broadwell/haswell whatever isnt worth it. If you cant boot into windows with a certain OC and a high vcore that means you have to enable internal pll overvoltage. It's not the same as the cpu pll at all. Did you check your vdroop under load & idle? Make sure to tweak the load line calibration properly.

Thanks for all the replies, guys!

Yes all that is done. I've followed a guide from the Asus rog website written by one of the staff. I think my board is just fubar.