x99 platform on the cheap. Worth it?

[Allegrif]

Came across a 5960x with ASUS x99-s motherboard bundled together, overclocked to 4.2 Ghz (used obviously). £350 GBP all in which seems like a good price. Would it be worth going down this route and locking myself into a dead platform in exchange for quad channel memory and more PCIe lanes etc, or would you recommend just going Zen 2? Would cost a bit more and I lose the HEDT features, but the platform is very much alive and carries PCIe 4 support. Plus it would be new hardware and not 4 years old. 

 

Funnily enough my old rig before I had to sell it (bad times) was 5960x and I could only get it to 4.0 Ghz regardless of voltage. 

[aisle9]

A 5960X runs at Haswell IPC on 8C/16T, 3.5GHz max. A Ryzen 7 2700X runs at Haswell IPC on 8C/16T, 4.3GHz max. Unless you're getting the combo for literally half of what a 2700X + mobo would cost you, there's no really compelling argument for X99 or any HEDT platform.

[Jurrunio]

Zen 2 because what's the point of something you had before, i.e. no gains at all. It's also supposedly better at gaming.

 

4 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

A 5960X runs at Haswell IPC on 8C/16T, 3.5GHz max. A Ryzen 7 2700X runs at Haswell IPC on 8C/16T, 4.3GHz max. Unless you're getting the combo for literally half of what a 2700X + mobo would cost you, there's no really compelling argument for X99 or any HEDT platform.

Haswell-E's overclocking should be intact unlike Broadwell-E, it will run faster than just 3.5GHz

[Allegrif]

2 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

Zen 2 because what's the point of something you had before, i.e. no gains at all. It's also supposedly better at gaming.

 

Haswell-E's overclocking should be intact unlike Broadwell-E, it will run faster than just 3.5GHz

Thanks for your input, on both my threads. Not necessarily looking for gains as my budget for this build is much lower than my last, which I no longer own. Just looking for the best bang for buck. It's primarily the quad channel memory I'd be interested in on x99, but I feel like I probably have an unjustified mental draw to it because it's what I had before and going dual channel feels like a downgrade when it probably isn't in reality. 

 

I'm just excited to finally be upgrading and want to get it right. I've been stuck in the poor house with a Kaby Lake Pentium chip for FAR too long now since life took a nosedive a couple years back. 

[Jurrunio]

5 minutes ago, Allegrif said:

Thanks for your input, on both my threads. Not necessarily looking for gains as my budget for this build is much lower than my last, which I no longer own. Just looking for the best bang for buck. It's primarily the quad channel memory I'd be interested in on x99, but I feel like I probably have an unjustified mental draw to it because it's what I had before and going dual channel feels like a downgrade when it probably isn't in reality. 

 

I'm just excited to finally be upgrading and want to get it right. I've been stuck in the poor house with a Kaby Lake Pentium chip for FAR too long now since life took a nosedive a couple years back. 

check used R7 2700? 350 quid is a decent price but then there's no worthy upgrade apart from Xeons that worsen gaming performance for more cores

[samcool55]

12 minutes ago, Allegrif said:

Thanks for your input, on both my threads. Not necessarily looking for gains as my budget for this build is much lower than my last, which I no longer own. Just looking for the best bang for buck. It's primarily the quad channel memory I'd be interested in on x99, but I feel like I probably have an unjustified mental draw to it because it's what I had before and going dual channel feels like a downgrade when it probably isn't in reality. 

 

I'm just excited to finally be upgrading and want to get it right. I've been stuck in the poor house with a Kaby Lake Pentium chip for FAR too long now since life took a nosedive a couple years back. 

I would just go for the ryzen build.

There is an upgrade path, no need to worry about cooling or whatever.

I understand that dual-channel feels like a step back from quad-channel, but if you really need memory, ryzen 2000 supports i think 16gig modules, I think 64gig should be plenty. (3000 goes to 128 gig iirc so there's another nice upgrade opportunity)

[porina]

22 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

A 5960X runs at Haswell IPC on 8C/16T, 3.5GHz max. A Ryzen 7 2700X runs at Haswell IPC on 8C/16T, 4.3GHz max. Unless you're getting the combo for literally half of what a 2700X + mobo would cost you, there's no really compelling argument for X99 or any HEDT platform.

The 2700 is much slower at FP intensive tasks, plus is limited by dual channel ram. If going Ryzen it is Zen 2 where similar cash could only get you a 6 core.

 

Having said all that, for the same cash I would rather get a new 6 core Zen 2 (~£190 for CPU leaving ~£160 for nice mobo, or a bit less if you upgrade cooler which I'd recommend). The bigger caches mitigate ram bandwidth for many workloads.