Is it time to upgrade my i7 2600K to i5 6600K ?

[Slavomir]

Intel launched Skylake-s and z-170 chipset. I am still going strong with my z77 and i7 2600k and 670GTX.

But one thing that concerns me is that my warranty has ended and all components in my PC except my RAM.

I am thinking about re selling my PC to buy a new platform (skylake).

Sincne if something happens to my PC now like my CPU ends up dying thats like 300$ or my graphics card 380$ i can add that money + re sell my PC and i have a brand new PC.

 

But i want to ask you guys if its a good choice since the more time i will wait for new tech the value of my PC will steadily go down and the re sell value will drop and - warranty.

 

Thank you for your comments/suggestion everything is greatly appreciated.

 

Here is the new build i am thinking about buying:

 

MOBO: ASUS Z170-A 

 

CPU: i5 6600k

 

Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212+ EVO 

 

RAM: Kingston 16GB KIT DDR4 2666MHz CL15 HyperX Fury Black Series

 

GPU: ASUS STRIX-GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5

 

HDD: Western Digital Blue 1000GB 64MB cache 

 

SSD: Adata priemier pro SP900 128GB m.2  

 

Case: Fractal Design Define S Window 

 

PSU: Fortron Aurum S 600

[ShadowCaptain]

SNIP

 

Luke did a video just the other day about this

 

as he says, performance wise there is very little benefit to moving up from a 2600k, there is a small increase in performance, and some key new features, but nothing make or break

 

CPU etc might be out of warranty but the likelihood of them failing is small, your PC should still have plenty of time left - time to save up for something even better

 

[Ykno]

Intel launched Skylake-s and z-170 chipset. I am still going strong with my z77 and i7 2600k and 670GTX.

But one thing that concerns me is that my warranty has ended and all components in my PC except my RAM.

I am thinking about re selling my PC to buy a new platform (skylake).

Sincne if something happens to my PC now like my CPU ends up dying thats like 300$ or my graphics card 380$ i can add that money + re sell my PC and i have a brand new PC.

 

But i want to ask you guys if its a good choice since the more time i will wait for new tech the value of my PC will steadily go down and the re sell value will drop and - warranty.

 

Thank you for your comments/suggestion everything is greatly appreciated.

 

Here is the new build i am thinking about buying:

 

MOBO: ASUS Z170-A 

 

CPU: i5 6600k

 

Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212+ EVO 

 

RAM: Kingston 16GB KIT DDR4 2666MHz CL15 HyperX Fury Black Series

 

GPU: ASUS STRIX-GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5

 

HDD: Western Digital Blue 1000GB 64MB cache 

 

SSD: Adata priemier pro SP900 128GB m.2  

 

Case: Fractal Design Define S Window 

 

PSU: Fortron Aurum S 600

if you can affored it ye why not always better to upgrade but honestly you dont need to i7 2600 is still decent for all your needs but if you want to save some money upgrade to devils cannon now the preformance gains are small between 2nd gen to the 6th gen

[itsmyjobtoknow]

Nah, it's not worth it since there isn't much of a performance increase between the two architecture.

 

Take your budget and spend it on say a GPU like a 980TI or R9 Fury X.

 

And water-cool it for fun....if you

[Elfuego]

Unless you want faster SSD stuff there is literally 0 point currently...

 

Just overclock it and sit around thumb twiddling...

[Norwegiantweaker]

talk about cautious. warranty ended better buy new components hehe. waste of money if u ask me. if the computer still works for you then whats the point of spending x$ to get a new one ?

[Majestic]

Luke did a video just the other day about this

 

At 4K....I had thought it didn't need much explanation for people with nearly 18K posts that 4K CPU benchmarking is pretty damn stupid.

Pretty sure that was just Luke rationalizing his 2600K. I've had criticism of luke's irresponsible way of testing for quite some time, but @Slick doesn't really seem to care much what his audience thinks.

 

http://nl.hardware.info/reviews/6223/7/intel-core-i7-6700k--core-i5-6600k-skylake-review-6de-generatie-core-cpus-getest-benchmarks-ipc-81-sneller-dan-haswell

 

Skylake is 23.4% faster than Sandy in IPC and ~42% faster at stock clocks. Which is still significant enough if people don't plan on overclocking.

http://pclab.pl/zdjecia/artykuly/radek/2015/skylake/charts/def/b4.png

http://pclab.pl/zdjecia/artykuly/radek/2015/skylake/charts/def/pc_c.png

http://pclab.pl/zdjecia/artykuly/radek/2015/skylake/charts/def/tw.png

 

But even if you overclock both, in CPU heavy titles (especially 1080p) it matters quite a bit now.

http://pclab.pl/zdjecia/artykuly/radek/2015/skylake/charts/oc/b4.png

http://pclab.pl/zdjecia/artykuly/radek/2015/skylake/charts/oc/pc_c.png

http://pclab.pl/zdjecia/artykuly/radek/2015/skylake/charts/oc/tw.png

[Ruostunut kokis]

The current components are still decent enough, and performance gains are not enough to justify burning that much money. But if you have that sort-of money lying around that you can spend without worries, then go ahead, it's up to you.

 

The price drop for used components is the most significant after 2 - 3 generations, and after that it slows down. No way you'd be able to get 300$ of a used 2600K, even if it's a winner of silicon lottery. And don't worry, your components won't break as soon as warranty ends. You won't be saving money by upgrading to a whole new system, it costs way more than you'd save.

[ShadowCaptain]

At 4K....I had thought it didn't need much explanation for people with nearly 18K posts that 4K CPU benchmarking is pretty damn stupid.

 

my post count is not respective of my knowledge...  Somebody with 3 posts could be somebody who designs CPUs and knows every benchmarks inside out

 

 

Sure its faster, I said there was an increase in performance, but honestly its hard to say spending all that money and messing around upgrading is massively worth it

 

the OP literally said "I am still going strong" implying that his current PC does everything he wants, with reasonable speed,  -  buying a new CPU will probably not make much difference, especially as far as gaming is concerned, some games might have some bigger improvements but on average it wont be that much to gain

 

Sure going from 85 to 100 FPS is great, but at the end of the day, its hardly groundbreaking, and the 2600k is still capable of 60fps 1080p gaming

 

as far as like rendering tasks go, sure it might be like 25% faster so a 4 minute job will take 3 minutes on the new CPU (or 4 hours takes 3 hours) but its hard to say thats worth all the money to upgrade

 

Its up to the OP to determine if the performance increase is worth their money

[Majestic]

@ShadowCaptain it being "worth it" is always subjective. Because that is ultimately up to the OP to decide. My gripe is the formation of the new dogma, created by LMG's latest tosh video, that the 2600K == 6700K with gaming. Which is simply erroneous. It's atleast 42% faster out of the box and 23.3% faster on the same clockspeeds, which is significant enough in it's own right.

 

That's like going from an i5-750 to an i5-4670K, an upgrade noone would object. But somehow the 2500K and 2600K are sacred cows.

[ShadowCaptain]

@ShadowCaptain it being "worth it" is always subjective. Because that is ultimately up to the OP to decide. My gripe is the formation of the new dogma, created by LMG's latest tosh video, that the 2600K == 6700K with gaming. Which is simply erroneous. It's atleast 42% faster out of the box and 23.3% faster on the same clockspeeds, which is significant enough in it's own right.

 

That's like going from an i5-750 to an i5-4670K, an upgrade noone would object. But somehow the 2500K and 2600K are sacred cows.

 

Sure I understand where you are coming from, the CPU might be 42% faster, but you are not getting 42% faster framerates

 

The fact is the 2600k has lasted this long and can still do a decent  (far from perfect job) in gaming at 1080p, heck if you can get 85fps in BF4 at 1080p is perfectly sufficent for most gamers

 

If they are on a 60hz 1080p monitor, the upgrade will not really net the very much performance improvement, providing it can power games above 60fps in 1080p

 

that is why the 2600k is revered, and why its hard to say you MUST upgrade from, it is still capable of doing the job, 

 

Its not sacred to me, I dont care about wether its a 2600k or a 4770k or an AMD whatever /.... fact is, if the current CPU runs above 60fps in all the games you play, then there is no real need to upgrade

 

If you need extra performance for rendering, and want some future proofing, perhpas looking at new games like Witcher 3, etc - sure there might be something there

 

I DO think he needs a new CPU and GPU - but if its still doing the job, I would hold on, save up and get something even better!

[harrynowl]

Not to an i5 no. But if you haven't OCed that 2600k please do

 

I got 4.7Ghz from a 212 evo

[Majestic]

Sure I understand where you are coming from, the CPU might be 42% faster, but you are not getting 42% faster framerates

 

The fact is the 2600k has lasted this long and can still do a decent  (far from perfect job) in gaming at 1080p, heck if you can get 85fps in BF4 at 1080p is perfectly sufficent for most gamers

 

If they are on a 60hz 1080p monitor, the upgrade will not really net the very much performance improvement, providing it can power games above 60fps in 1080p

 

This is the same argument that was made with the 8350 vs. 2500K back in the day. "ahh well, the 2500K gets 120 fps and the 8350 85" "who cares, i only need 60 anyway". If the conditions are good, you do get 42% more fps. It all depends how CPU intensive the game is. Having extra capacity also means higher min. framerates, so a more consistent experience. Having 60 fps average, does not mean >60 fps guaranteed.

 

On that BF4 multiplayer benchmark it's 83.4 vs 123.3 fps. That's 48% extra fps. 

 

I'm still not saying the 2600K is bad, but the 6700K is def. significantly faster enough to warrant an upgrade if you have the disposable income.

[ShadowCaptain]

This is the same argument that was made with the 8350 vs. 2500K back in the day. "ahh well, the 2500K gets 120 fps and the 8350 85" "who cares, i only need 60 anyway". If the conditions are good, you do get 42% more fps. It all depends how CPU intensive the game is.

 

On that BF4 multiplayer benchmark it's 83.4 vs 123.3 fps. That's 48% extra fps.

 

Fair enough, it can be a substantial performance increase, but as I say its impossible for me to say that its the most necessary upgrade ever

 

If it was my own PC I would still struggle to justify upgrading, and that is the opinion I gave to the OP

If you think differently, then feel free to disagree, and post up some benchmarks if you think that information is beneficial to the OP - but there is no use calling me out on my opinion,.. since its my opinion and I stick by it

 

I am not some 2600k advocate, I have no preference over one CPU to another, just that if your PC is fine, then you dont NEED to upgrade - you still might want to

heck I want to upgrade from my 4770k ant 780ti, but it still plays every thing at 60fps 1440p... and I am finding it hard to justify upgrading at all really, I would prefer to wait, and go for something crazy with another 6 months of saving

[Majestic]

Again, it being worth it is subjective. Some people are still happy on their i5-760's, as it serves them well enough. But what Luke is saying in this video, that there is no performance difference in games. And due to people's inheretence to appeal to authority, that might stick on the forum. 

 

It has happened before, like Linus' FX-6300 + GTX 970 $1000 build which made no sense, but people kept defending it "because Linus also used it, and he can't be that stupid right?".

 

So take my defense as a stab at what luke said, not so much what you said (although repeating it surely doesn't help). I just don't want that poor benchmarking talent of his to have a negative effect on recommendations.

[smjpl]

@ShadowCaptain it being "worth it" is always subjective. Because that is ultimately up to the OP to decide. My gripe is the formation of the new dogma, created by LMG's latest tosh video, that the 2600K == 6700K with gaming. Which is simply erroneous. It's atleast 42% faster out of the box and 23.3% faster on the same clockspeeds, which is significant enough in it's own right.

 

That's like going from an i5-750 to an i5-4670K, an upgrade noone would object. But somehow the 2500K and 2600K are sacred cows.

 

Yes you are correct in saying there is a significant improvement, but that is at 1080p though. You move to 1440p and the numbers start to even out quite a bit. Saying you get 42% improvement out of the box does not tell the full story. Actually it is quite a misleading comment.

 

Here are the findings from PcPer who conducted a 2600k vs 6700k comparison.

 

 

With just a single GPU, and a high end one at that, we saw measured average frame rate differences as well as frame time consistency differences at 1920x1080 in 3 out of 4 our test games. In the newest title of the bunch, Grand Theft Auto V, that gap was 25%! Other games ranged from 7-8%, which isn't enough to warrant a full platform upgrade on its own, but if you have been weighing your options for a while, this might be enough to tip the scales.

 

As we increased the resolution to 2560x1440, those platform differences were minimized yet again, with the Sandy Bridge and Skylake platforms showing very similar results in terms of average frame rate. There was the occasional advantage for the 6700K in terms of frame times (GTA V) but otherwise I could these two experiences being hard to differentiate between

 

For SLI though, that was far from the truth. The pair of GeForce GTX 980 cards running on the Core i7-6700K and Z170 motherboard produced a much better overall gaming experience, even at 2560x1440, than the older Sandy Bridge platform. Both average frame rates and frame times proved this to be the case: if you are a gamer considering or currently running on SLI, then you should really save some cash to make that next upgrade to Haswell or Skylake!

 

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Skylake-vs-Sandy-Bridge-Discrete-GPU-Showdown

 

 

 

 

 

[Majestic]

Yes you are correct in saying there is a significant improvement, but that is at 1080p though. You move to 1440p and the numbers start to even out quite a bit. Saying you get 42% improvement out of the box does not tell the full story. Actually it is quite a misleading comment.

 

There is nothing misleading about that. It shows the amount of fps you're getting without much of a GPU bottleneck. It's not misleading when you have 980TI SLI on 1440p for example. Moving to 1440p or 4K with a single GPU just means GPU bottlenecking. But those are the actual skewed/misrepresenting statistics.

 

It also shows you the performance gap in games with heavy emphasis on CPU. Like RTS/MMO/Multiplayer games. Showing 1440p or 4K results on some simplistic AAA game on single player, is not what i'd call representative of all games or GPU setups.

 

It's again the same argument when people demanded "real world benchmarking" when most reviewers knew that 720p told a better story. Now that 1080p is that resolution GPU's do so easily they're bound by CPU, we have to again move up the scale for some. I don't know where you people get your information from, but it's not from proper scientific education that's for sure.

 

This is the type of sin you can compare to increasing the volt/div on a scope to say something is "stable".

[i_build_nanosuits]

snip!

Dude you're rocking a GTX 670...just buy yourself a brand spanking new powerful graphics card and call it a day this CPU is perfectly fine it's a very powerful CPU that can feed even a GTX980ti if you feel like it...everything in your current machine looks fine to me except your GPU.

If you game at 1080p get a GTX 970 or R9 390 and if you game at 1440p or higher get the best single GPU you can afford...and if you have some more money to burn then upgrade your monitor.

EDIT: a quick google search told me you rock a small 22" monitor so defenetly consider an upgrade to a 27" 1440p display if you want the best gaming experience.

[smjpl]

There is nothing misleading about that. It shows the amount of fps you're getting without much of a GPU bottleneck. It's not misleading when you have 980TI SLI on 1440p for example. Moving to 1440p or 4K with a single GPU just means GPU bottlenecking. But those are the actual skewed/misrepresenting statistics.

 

It also shows you the performance gap in games with heavy emphasis on CPU. Like RTS/MMO/Multiplayer games. Showing 1440p or 4K results on some simplistic AAA game on single player, is not what i'd call representative of all games or GPU setups.

 

It's again the same argument when people demanded "real world benchmarking" when most reviewers knew that 720p told a better story. Now that 1080p is that resolution GPU's do so easily they're bound by CPU, we have to again move up the scale for some. I don't know where you people get your information from, but it's not from proper scientific education that's for sure.

 

This is the type of sin you can compare to increasing the volt/div on a scope to say something is "stable".

 

I never said that we should be benching at 1080p or 1440p or 4k. All I'm doing is showing the differences in some games when you do bench at those resolutions. But on that note, from a practical point of view, if you are considering getting the CPU for a gaming machine, you'd probably want to be getting a high end GPU and a 1440p monitor or higher (well I would recommend it if you are planing on spending a $1000 on the tower). But that doesn't mean you will need to get an SLI setup. I would think the majority of people wouldn't be getting an SLI setup for that system. I wouldn't. In fact I run a gtx 670 on 1440p. I have to drop settings but its does the job for now. I'll upgrade in a while. But I really don't think it is unacceptable to run a GTX 980 on a 1440p monitor with recent(ish) games. That is a real world scenario that. I am not trying to skew results.

 

But on the point of "same argument when people demanded "real world benchmarking" when most reviewers knew that 720p told a better story". There is no "better story" when you are talking about gaming performance. There is only different sides to the same story and I believe you failed to show that. I have not shown it completely either. I am just highlighting that it is not that simple. It depends on your entire system.

[typographie]

I don't understand… you need new components because they're out of warranty? It doesn't matter if the components fail or not, you spend the same money replacing them either way. If it's that you're concerned you won't be able to sell it without the warranty, most manufacturers will ask for a copy of your invoice as part of the RMA, and so warranty coverage is generally non-transferrable anyway.

 

If you're going to upgrade, wait for the i7-6700K. I happen to be one of the few that thinks Skylake is a reasonable time to step off from Sandy Bridge, but if you sacrifice Hyperthreading in the process you may find it's a downgrade more often than it is an upgrade.

 

Plus, your area of greatest upgrade potential right now is your video card. It's not hard to find a new video card these days that will vastly outperform the 670.

[SpeedKingManu]

OP, have you overclocked your 2600K? You can take it to 4.5/4.6GHz easy with the 212...

 

If you are a gamer and are on a budget, grab a better GPU (GTX980/980Ti). It will serve you better than a platform upgrade for the same amount of money.

[PlayStation 2]

That's a complete downgrade, actually.

Sandy Bridge still holds up WELL today.

[Slavomir]

OP, have you overclocked your 2600K? You can take it to 4.5/4.6GHz easy with the 212...

 

If you are a gamer and are on a budget, grab a better GPU (GTX980/980Ti). It will serve you better than a platform upgrade for the same amount of money.

No i havent overclocked it since i dont know how but people say its super easy + i would have to change the thermal compound. Because i havent changed it since i bought it, it curently has MX4 if i remeber correctly.

Also if you have some kind of tutorial exactly for i7 2600k that works feel free to post it thank you.

[Slavomir]

Not to an i5 no. But if you haven't OCed that 2600k please do

 

I got 4.7Ghz from a 212 evo

If you can please post me some overclocking guide for i7 2600k thats easy and works also i think i need to change the thermal compound since it hasnt been changed for like 3 years but the temps dont go over 60 C when i game. Thank you.

[i_build_nanosuits]

No i havent overclocked it since i dont know how but people say its super easy + i would have to change the thermal compound. Because i havent changed it since i bought it, it curently has MX4 if i remeber correctly.

Also if you have some kind of tutorial exactly for i7 2600k that works feel free to post it thank you.

 

If you can please post me some overclocking guide for i7 2600k thats easy and works also i think i need to change the thermal compound since it hasnt been changed for like 3 years but the temps dont go over 60 C when i game. Thank you.

so long as you keep using this GTX670 of yours it's worthless to overclock your CPU because your gaming experience is totally limited by this weak ass GPU and overclocking your processor will not help achieving better gaming experience in such circumstances.