Question on 11th gen future proofing

[RJMarch]

Hello all!

   I was hoping to get some opinions on a potential upgrade opportunity.  I typically try to upgrade my cpus every 5 years.  I was supposed to upgrade around 13th gen but I broke my motherboard last year and ended up with a 10700k.  I may have the opportunity to get an 11900k for a significant discount from a friend who is looking to move to the 12th gen or to the new zen 4 or 13th gen later this year (he really likes the newest shiny).  While my motherboard is compatible, I know that overall 11th gen was not well received, I'll say diplomatically...but would you consider it worth picking up for the pcie gen 4 compatibility to potentially extend the future proofing if the price is really good, or would you instead wait and potentially upgrade earlier to a whole new platform considering that I'd have to add in DDR5 now too.  To be clear, my 10700k is working fine and I don't need to upgrade, I just wanted to get some ideas on what others thought looking a bit longer term and since the price might be pretty good.  My most common use cases are gaming and machine learning.

Thanks for any insight!

[porina]

Depends on your mobo. I had trouble with Gigabyte Z490 board and 11700k, ended up replacing the board to make it work. The combo just wasn't stable together. Gigabyte bios is way out of date for 11th gen and it doesn't look like any plan for them to update it further. It was fantastic for 10th gen.

 

I'd say, stick with what you know works.

[SupaKomputa]

I suggest you save the money for 12 or 13 or maybe zen4.

While i think ddr4 would still be usable 5 years from now, the next logical upgrade path would be ddr5.

[YoungBlade]

PCIe Gen 4 also requires motherboard support, so unless you're on a B560, Z590, or one of some select Z490 boards, then you won't get Gen 4 from the upgrade anyway.

 

As for future proofing, it's not clear that PCIe Gen 4 is going to matter much. Unless you know that you need fast storage, the advantages aren't amazing for most people.

 

Your ML use-case can actually make the 11900K worth it if you happen to benefit from its AVX-512 support. This is rare for most applications, but ML is one of the few areas where AVX-512 is seeing some use. If this is the case for you, a cheap 11900K is a great option, as Intel is actively removing AVX-512 from future consumer chips. The big downside is that the instruction set turns the 11900K from an already hot furnace into a radioactive volcano of a CPU - it can end up pulling over 300W if you turn off the power limits when running AVX-512. So you're gonna need a good board, PSU, and cooler.