Should I upgrade from a 4700k to an 11700k, or wait a few months to get a 12700k?

[GalacticViper]

Budget (including currency): preferably around $2000 USD - but I would rather pay more for better quality.

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: 4k gaming - mainly modded Minecraft, Battlefield 2042, and StarCraft II - occasional video editing, casual music production, school.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):

I currently have a 4790k, 32 GB of DDR3 ram, and an AIO cooled 2080.

I already know I want to upgrade sometime soon, so I have a list of everything I want put together but, I am only worried about the CPU right now.

I originally had an 11700k picked out so I could get a super fast gen 4 m.2, but then I looked up 12th gen.

From what I have heard, Alder Lake will launch very soon, but I am wondering if it would be better for me to get an 11th gen CPU since, from what I'm seeing, the main focus of alder lake seems to power efficiency for laptops. Something I don't exactly care about on desktop.

I also heard that 12th gen CPUs will be DDR5 and PCIe 5 compatible? Will z690 motherboards have those features as well?

If so, would those benefit me at all? (I know better memory would help in Minecraft, but would it be worth it?), and does anyone know if they would be backwards compatible with current parts?

 

I know I'm asking a lot of questions that might not have answers yet, but I'm not asking for the answers to all of them at once. 

If nobody knows, I will just wait until 12th gen launches and there is more info available to make my choice.

Thanks in advance! 

 

 

[RONOTHAN##]

Alder Lake is rumored to launch within a month, and even if you don't go for it you should be able to get a really good deal on some 11th gen Intel once it releases.

 

Basically, if you can wait like 2-3 weeks, wait 2-3 weeks. Some people have even managed to get hold of Alder Lake CPUs now, and they aren't even officially released yet.

[GalacticViper]

2 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Alder Lake is rumored to launch within a month, and even if you don't go for it you should be able to get a really good deal on some 11th gen Intel once it releases.

 

Basically, if you can wait like 2-3 weeks, wait 2-3 weeks. Some people have even managed to get hold of Alder Lake CPUs now, and they aren't even officially released yet.

Ok thanks!

I can totally wait, so that's what I will do

[Jurrunio]

8 minutes ago, GalacticViper said:

I also heard that 12th gen CPUs will be DDR5 and PCIe 5 compatible? Will z690 motherboards have those features as well?

On a good side if you bought DDR5, you can use the memory kit for quite some time even when upgrading the CPU and motherboard assuming you don't upgrade it too for extra speed (just like how DDR4 changed from "2666 is quite good" to "3200 is the standard")

[KaTaLy5t-87]

39 minutes ago, GalacticViper said:

Budget (including currency): preferably around $2000 USD - but I would rather pay more for better quality.

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: 4k gaming - mainly modded Minecraft, Battlefield 2042, and StarCraft II - occasional video editing, casual music production, school.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):

I currently have a 4790k, 32 GB of DDR3 ram, and an AIO cooled 2080.

I already know I want to upgrade sometime soon, so I have a list of everything I want put together but, I am only worried about the CPU right now.

I originally had an 11700k picked out so I could get a super fast gen 4 m.2, but then I looked up 12th gen.

From what I have heard, Alder Lake will launch very soon, but I am wondering if it would be better for me to get an 11th gen CPU since, from what I'm seeing, the main focus of alder lake seems to power efficiency for laptops. Something I don't exactly care about on desktop.

I also heard that 12th gen CPUs will be DDR5 and PCIe 5 compatible? Will z690 motherboards have those features as well?

If so, would those benefit me at all? (I know better memory would help in Minecraft, but would it be worth it?), and does anyone know if they would be backwards compatible with current parts?

 

I know I'm asking a lot of questions that might not have answers yet, but I'm not asking for the answers to all of them at once. 

If nobody knows, I will just wait until 12th gen launches and there is more info available to make my choice.

Thanks in advance! 

 

 

Just one thing to bear in mind with Alder Lake is that the latency on the DDR5 RAM kits I've seen is C40 or higher which is pretty terrible but to be expected with a new generation of RAM. The bandwidth is huge from the get-go with DDR5 but the latency is bad.

 

I saw an article somewhere saying that you may be able to use DDR4 RAM which would be a better option for the time being until the latency comes down on DDR5. You'd need to confirm that as I haven't been following it super close.

 

One other word of warning is that early adopters of new architectures sometimes find they have issues with poor driver support or stability issues for a little while until the bugs get ironed out. 

 

Not trying to put you off, just something to be aware of with a new architecture.

[brob]

https://www.crucial.com/articles/about-memory/difference-between-speed-and-latency

[GalacticViper]

18 hours ago, brob said:

https://www.crucial.com/articles/about-memory/difference-between-speed-and-latency

I always wondered what the difference between those two were.

That was very informative. Thanks!