Which processor?

[TheBadWarrior]

I want a new core i5 Skylake CPU for the purposes of gaming. I'm not sure if I should get the 6500 or the 6600 as I couldn't find much information about the regular 6600 since all of the attention is on the 6600k. As of right now the 6600 is $10 more than the 6500. 

[tomoki]

Are you only gaming and not doing anything else? Any video rendering/recording/streaming or rendering in general? 

[DividedByZero]

You'd probably be better off buying an i7. However if you insist on going with an i5 you'd be better off with the 6600. And if you're willing to pay more then I would even go for the 6600k as it's easy to overclock.

[TheRandomness]

The 6600 is just a locked 6600k

[Guest]

But Skylake has so many problems though lol

[SeanAngelo]

6 minutes ago, TheBadWarrior said:

I want a new core i5 Skylake CPU for the purposes of gaming. I'm not sure if I should get the 6500 or the 6600 as I couldn't find much information about the regular 6600 since all of the attention is on the 6600k. As of right now the 6600 is $10 more than the 6500. 

6600!

 

Just now, Yames said:

But Skylake has so many problems though lol

like???

[Guest]

3 hours ago, SeanAngelo said:

6600!

 

like???

It just hasn't been a successful launch, I keep hearing problems about it in news

[TheRandomness]

1 minute ago, Yames said:

It just hasn't been a successful launch, I keep hearing problems about it in news

Uhm, no. It hasn't had many problems at all (apart from the guy bending his with a power drill or whatever).

[SeanAngelo]

Just now, Yames said:

It just hasn't been a successful launch, I keep hearing problems about it in news

links pls

[Ryoutarou97]

8 minutes ago, DividedByZero said:

You'd probably be better off buying an i7. However if you insist on going with an i5 you'd be better off with the 6600. And if you're willing to pay more then I would even go for the 6600k as it's easy to overclock.

What? Why? It's just for gaming, it seems. No need to spend $100 when it could be put towards the GPU.

[Jacktastic-Mofo]

TBH You could get a i5-4690k and a Z97 motherboard for like 25-50 bucks less and OC it to match Skylake without any issues. However I'd go with the i5-6600 since it's actually overclockable and you won't have to pay the price premium for the K.

[Sanderman135]

The 6500, 6600, and 6600k aren't too different. The 6500 and the 6600 are the same chip but the 6600 has a better iGPU and the 6600k is just an unlocked 6600 which allows it to overclock. At stock speeds, they'll all get about the same performance, but overclocking the 6600k will make it pull ahead. So if you don't want to overclock and are using a discrete GPU then the 6500 will be fine, if you want to overclock then get the 6600k.  

[DividedByZero]

6 minutes ago, Ryoutarou97 said:

What? Why? It's just for gaming, it seems. No need to spend $100 when it could be put towards the GPU.

If you meant that question as in why an i7? then here's the answer: i7 CPU's generally give a greater clockspeed and I do admit the difference in price is significant. However that clockspeed would really help in more recent games and allow beter mutlitasking (if thats something you need). 

If you meant that question as in why going with a 6600k then here's why: CPU's that end with a 'k' in their name have an unlocked multiplier which allows them to be overclocked with ease, if that's something you want to do.

[J. Hammond]

7 minutes ago, Jacktastic-Mofo said:

TBH You could get a i5-4690k and a Z97 motherboard for like 25-50 bucks less and OC it to match Skylake without any issues. However I'd go with the i5-6600 since it's actually overclockable and you won't have to pay the price premium for the K.

Not anymore. Intel closed the Non-K overclocking BIOS loophole.

[Ryoutarou97]

9 minutes ago, DividedByZero said:

If you meant that question as in why an i7? then here's the answer: i7 CPU's generally give a greater clockspeed and I do admit the difference in price is significant. However that clockspeed would really help in more recent games and allow beter mutlitasking (if thats something you need). 

If you meant that question as in why going with a 6600k then here's why: CPU's that end with a 'k' in their name have an unlocked multiplier which allows them to be overclocked with ease, if that's something you want to do.

I meant "why an i7?"

 

The main benefit of an i7 is that it is hyperthreaded which will give ~20-30% better performance on a heavily multithreaded workload. While i7's do feature a higher clock speed, if that's why you're buying it you may as well go with a k series chip. the 6600 goes from 3.3 to 3.9ghz while the 6700 does 3.4 to 4. That's a 100mhz base and turbo boost and is in no way worth the $100. Gaming (mostly) only uses up to 4 cores, often less, and it's really not worth getting a hyperthreaded chip for that.

 

Edit: and more cache! But that's probably not doing much either so...

[DividedByZero]

2 minutes ago, Ryoutarou97 said:

I meant "why an i7?"

 

The main benefit of an i7 is that it is hyperthreaded which will give ~20-30% better performance on a heavily multithreaded workload. While i7's do feature a higher clock speed, if that's why you're buying it you may as well go with a k series chip. the 6600 goes from 3.3 to 3.9ghz while the 6700 does 3.4 to 4. That's a 100mhz base and turbo boost and is in no way worth the $100. Gaming (mostly) only uses up to 4 cores, often less, and it's really not worth getting a hyperthreaded chip for that.

True dat. Your parts are personal preferences I casually do give my CPU a higher workload. So it's really up to you to see what you're going for. However if want to overclock you are indeed better off with a 'k' series CPU.

[Ryoutarou97]

9 minutes ago, DividedByZero said:

True dat. Your parts are personal preferences I casually do give my CPU a higher workload. So it's really up to you to see what you're going for. However if want to overclock you are indeed better off with a 'k' series CPU.

Not so much better off as indispensable 

[DividedByZero]

Just now, Ryoutarou97 said:

Not so much better off as indispensable 

Not really The 'X' series allows overclocking as well. And with hard measures you can still overclock a normal CPU. But a custom BIOS would be needed.

[Ryoutarou97]

Just now, DividedByZero said:

Not really The 'X' series allows overclocking as well. And with hard measures you can still overclock a normal CPU. But a custom BIOS would be needed.

To be fair, most 'X' series chips are either... xeons which are kind of slow to start off with to compare to the i5 in gaming, or if you call extreme edition CPUs 'X' series, probably more than OP's budget. A custom bios while not too difficult, is not the kind of thing a first time builder wants to do. You can OC without it, but it's probably not going to be helpful here.

[DividedByZero]

1 minute ago, Ryoutarou97 said:

To be fair, most 'X' series chips are either... xeons which are kind of slow to start off with to compare to the i5 in gaming, or if you call extreme edition CPUs 'X' series, probably more than OP's budget. A custom bios while not too difficult, is not the kind of thing a first time builder wants to do. You can OC without it, but it's probably not going to be helpful here.

The 'X' series stands for extreme and Xeon isn't part of it. Yeah they are overpriced which is why the are called 'Extreme' :D. Yeah, as a first time builder I would also leave overclocking behind but if you want to make sure to follow the right guide if it's the first time. Anyway succes with your build!

[Ryoutarou97]

3 minutes ago, DividedByZero said:

The 'X' series stands for extreme and Xeon isn't part of it. Yeah they are overpriced which is why the are called 'Extreme' :D. Yeah, as a first time builder I would also leave overclocking behind but if you want to make sure to follow the right guide if it's the first time. Anyway succes with your build!

Actually there are x series xeons, they just haven't been around since 2011. They were the chips that ran at around the TDP of a CPU at the time so they were basically what the 4 core xeons people replace i7's with are now (which is why I thought you might have meant those since extreme editions are too high end for this build, but these didn't make much sense either). Here's an example from the ark: http://ark.intel.com/products/52576/Intel-Xeon-Processor-X5690-12M-Cache-3_46-GHz-6_40-GTs-Intel-QPI

[DividedByZero]

22 minutes ago, Ryoutarou97 said:

Actually there are x series xeons, they just haven't been around since 2011. They were the chips that ran at around the TDP of a CPU at the time so they were basically what the 4 core xeons people replace i7's with are now (which is why I thought you might have meant those since extreme editions are too high end for this build, but these didn't make much sense either). Here's an example from the ark: http://ark.intel.com/products/52576/Intel-Xeon-Processor-X5690-12M-Cache-3_46-GHz-6_40-GTs-Intel-QPI

I don't tend to look that far into history seeing that a CPU from 2011 probably won't run a recent game at a very high frame rate  Xeon's are servergrade CPU's they shouldn't really be used in a gaming enviroment.

[TheBadWarrior]

2 hours ago, Yames said:

But Skylake has so many problems though lol

What do you mean?

[ybriK]

If you're not overclocking at all you might aswell save more money by getting a 6400 or 4460. Clock speeds don't matter at all between the following chips and I highly doubt you'll get 10+ FPS in your CPU heavy games just by getting a higher model.

 

i5-6400

i5-6500

i5-6600

i5-4460

i5-4590

i5-4690

[Ryoutarou97]

2 hours ago, DividedByZero said:

I don't tend to look that far into history seeing that a CPU from 2011 probably won't run a recent game at a very high frame rate  Xeon's are servergrade CPU's they shouldn't really be used in a gaming enviroment.

Aaaaaactually (I need to stop starting my posts like this) the 2500k/2600k (2011 chips) are still used by a lot of people today and they work pretty well from what I hear. Xeons aren't just server chips, they are also perfect for workstations. Many professional grade creative applications (think adobe) are highly multithreaded and will benefit from all the cores/threads a xeon has. Lower end xeons have been used (often on gaming builds) for some time to get a multithreaded 4 core chip (basically an i7) for the price of an i5 at the cost of an iGPU which doesn't matter because a dGPU is used for gaming. Then they are OCed to perform as a gaming chip should and voila! Look at haswell, for example, xeons even ran on the same platform until you got to something like 8 or 10 cores at which point xeons switch over to x99.

 

end rant