The current CPU, Motherboard and RAM landscape

[Knight Tarkus]

Hey all,

 

Like a lot of people, i'm planning Mobo, CPU and RAM upgrade, thought not instantly, probably few months down the line. I would be interested to hear what the current landscape looks like when it comes to these parts, and how/if things have changed since around 2013 when I got this build.

 

Edits: If its not fully clear from text above: I'm planning to get all of these new parts at once, some months in future.

 

So first of all, my current specs:

 

Asus Z87-K

EVGA GeForce GTX 1070

Intel i5-4670K @ 4.00GHz

HyperX Savage DDR3 1600 C9 2x4GB

Samsung 850 EVO 240Gb SSD

Windows 10 64bit

Western Digital Blue 1TB HDD

Seasonic S12 II 520W BRONZE

 

Lets move on the to the questions, shall we:

 

#1: Motherboards

 

Are there any changes aside from socket type I should be worried about? I'm not planning to do anything special with the motherboard. Will probably just leave it be, and maybe few years after the upgrade overclock my CPU, that's it. Are there any new must have new features I should be aware about? I'm *probably* just grabbing some Asus motherboard for my upgrade, something like Asus PRIME B250-PLUS (Because its cheap).

 

#2: RAM

 

DDR4. 16Gb. That's my plan so far. How much should I be concerned about the RAM speed? Or should I be concerned at all. Whats the "Go to gamer RAM" these days.

 

#3: CPU

 

Probably the most important discussion.

 

Ryzen, details are still mostly unknown and hype is strong, really excited to see what comes out of this, but since its not out yet, pretty hard to get reliable stats and opinions, so we shall move onto whats actually out right now:

 

Kaby Lake. While there was understandably salt being thrown around about this CPU line, for me its the most reasonable place to go with my next CPU.

 

So the question I have is the age old "i5 vs i7". For longest time "i5 is good enough for gaming" was thrown around, but now, i'm not so sure. Games such as Witcher 3 benefit from i7's and i7 are becoming the standard in the recommended CPU section of game system requirements. Few months ago I made an thread discussing the bottleneck of my CPU and got some interesting answers regarding the i5 V i7 debate:

 

So, with the new generation of CPU's from intel, does still still hold true: I would see gains from i7 grade CPU on build with GTX 1070. While i7-7700K is 120€ more expensive than i5-7600K, I fear that if I cheap out here, I will run into same bottleneck problems few years down the line, as i'm having now. The idea is to have an upgrade that will last me next 3-5 years, no sweat.

 

Thanks for reading. Feel free to suggest me any parts you think would suit me in this situation. Also, as an reminder: I'm not going to upgrade now. Probably around June, or July, so don't start berating me about not waiting for Ryzen to release ;). I'm in no hurry, I just want to get the feel of the modern CPU,RAM,MOBO landscape.

 

 

[WereCat]

Why not just get Haswell i7? There is no point in going Skylake or Kaby Lake for 4 core i7 as you will pay so much for barely any improvement over the Haswell i7. In this case the only worthwile decision would be going at least the 6-core route with X99 and 6800k but that will cost even more of course.

[pwn_intended]

didn't read it all but here's my take:

Don't get an i5, because your current i7 is better that the newest i5's in most use cases.

In fact, don't bother upgrading just yet since your CPU platform is more than capable for all gaming related tasks, and swapping out for sky/kaby lake wouldn't really give you any performance benefits.

^oops, misread. Get a haswell i7 if you can find one for cheap. Even a non-k works since you can still overclock haswells via multiplier by up to 4 steps above max turbo (so 4.3 or 4.4)

 

RAM: speed largely doesn't matter outside of a few very specific use cases that likely do not apply to you. Get whatever's cheapest from a reputable maker and fits in your mobo.

[App4that]

11 minutes ago, pwn_intended said:

didn't read it all but here's my take:

Don't get an i5, because your current i7 is better that the newest i5's in most use cases.

In fact, don't bother upgrading just yet since your CPU platform is more than capable for all gaming related tasks, and swapping out for sky/kaby lake wouldn't really give you any performance benefits.

^oops, misread. Get a haswell i7 if you can find one for cheap. Even a non-k works since you can still overclock haswells via multiplier by up to 4 steps above max turbo (so 4.3 or 4.4)

 

RAM: speed largely doesn't matter outside of a few very specific use cases that likely do not apply to you. Get whatever's cheapest from a reputable maker and fits in your mobo.

RAM speed makes a big impact on gaming, Digital Foundry just made another video proving it...

 

OP, get a 4790k unless you want Octane or M.2.

[ImperialSteele]

19 minutes ago, Jaska95 said:

DDR4. 16Gb. That's my plan so far. How much should I be concerned about the RAM speed? Or should I be concerned at all. Whats the "Go to gamer RAM" these days.

You can't use DDR4 with that MoBo/CPU. Also, the only really "upcoming stuff" for mobos is DDR5 and PCI E Gen 4 both coming roughly 2020-2021

[pwn_intended]

1 hour ago, App4that said:

RAM speed makes a big impact on gaming, Digital Foundry just made another video proving it...

 

OP, get a 4790k unless you want Octane or M.2.

I found a digital foundry video from last year where he benchmarks a bunch of ram speeds with 8 different games. The only game in that video that RAM speed had any real impact (more than 2-3 fps) was GTAV, and to a lesser extent, witcher 3. The rest of the games all performed the same.

Were you referring to a newer video?

[Knight Tarkus]

2 hours ago, pwn_intended said:

I found a digital foundry video from last year where he benchmarks a bunch of ram speeds with 8 different games. The only game in that video that RAM speed had any real impact (more than 2-3 fps) was GTAV, and to a lesser extent, witcher 3. The rest of the games all performed the same.

Were you referring to a newer video?

I believe that this might be the video in question: