i5-6600k vs Xeon E3-1231v3 for future performance

[mhonor]

For my first PC from scratch, I've narrowed down my CPU choice to the options above. 

 

My budget is around $1000, and I will be gaming primarily. I am not a frequent upgrader - this will be my main rig for 5+ years probably (obv GPU will need an upgrade at some point). In the forum's opinion - which CPU will be retain its value the longest? 

 

Many people have recommended Skylake for an upgrade path, but since I don't see myself upgrading for a long time this is not really a consideration for me. In that sense Haswell and Skylake are kind of on even terms. 

 

• i5-6600k has the newest platform, DDR4 and overclocking. 
• The Xeon has hyperthreading, and I have heard that games will become more optimized for this in the future. 

 

Does hyperthreading trump the faster single core performance on an OC'd 6600K?

 

(btw, I've posted a lot about CPU choices and thanks to everyone who has chimed in. I asked this question ^^^ on an older thread of mine but it got buried in all the comments.)

 

[Fulgrim]

No.

 

And you'd only benefit from hyperthreading if you livestream/render etc. For normal gaming, that i5 will slap the shit out of that Xeon. And it's overclockable.

[79wjd]

Right now the 6600k will yield slighty better performance in most games (with the Xeon taking an edge in games that can really leverage the extra threads). 

 

Honestly, it comes down to which becomes more important in the future -- more cores or still single core performance, and no one can really claim to know which will end up being better in the future (although my money is on the extra threads). As it stands, the extra performance you get from overclocking is smaller than the extra performance you get in those games that can leverage the extra threads properly. So, my vote is for the Xeon (and yes, if I could go back and redo my build I would swap my 4690k for a Xeon in a heartbeat).

[aisle9]

i5 all the way. It's current gen and overclockable, so you'll be able to keep it relevant longer if you take care of it.

[Enderman]

the i5 is a better choice

[TrifectaIII]

"An i5 is all you need for gaming" has been true for a while, but we might be on the edge here. More and more games are benefiting from multiple cores/more threads. Right now, the i5 will beat the xeon by a bit. Hard to predict the future.

[KemoKa]

Unless you intend to stream your games, the i5 will be much better for a lot longer. If you are planning on streaming... the Xeon will probably be your best bet. And it will be better if APIs down the road end up being optimized for more threads. It will also help immensely in heavily multi-threaded workloads. In terms of CPU-bound performance, the Xeon will beat the 6600K, even when overclocked. Skylake hasn't really made any leaps and bounds over Haswell.

The DDR4 is nice, but its biggest perk is power consumption. There's no real performance benefit from having faster memory in this case because the latency will in most relevant tasks overcome the speed benefits. Going with an older platform won't really hurt - RAM hasn't been a system bottleneck for well over a decade.

 

Skylake does have advantages, though - it has a lot (A LOT) of peripheral expansion options - 16 PCIe Gen3 lanes on the CPU and a whopping 20 on the chipset. that's a lot more than even Haswell had. You are limited to 4 of those lanes at a time when going over DMI 3.0, but even that pipeline is a massive improvement.

 

So it really depends on what you need, at the end of the day. Do you want PCIe Gen 3 M.2 drives? Get Skylake. Do you want to stream with minimal impact on your games? Get the Xeon.

 

[mhonor]

3 minutes ago, KemoKa said:

Unless you intend to stream your games, the i5 will be much better for a lot longer. If you are planning on streaming... the Xeon will probably be your best bet. And it will be better if APIs down the road end up being optimized for more threads. It will also help immensely in heavily multi-threaded workloads. In terms of CPU-bound performance, the Xeon will beat the 6600K, even when overclocked. Skylake hasn't really made any leaps and bounds over Haswell.

 

Skylake does have advantages, though - it has a lot (A LOT) of peripheral expansion options - 16 PCIe Gen3 lanes on the CPU and a whopping 20 on the chipset. that's a lot more than even Haswell had. You are limited to 4 of those lanes at a time when going over DMI 3.0, but even that pipeline is a massive improvement.

 

So it really depends on what you need, at the end of the day. Do you want PCIe Gen 3 M.2 drives? Get Skylake. Do you want to stream with minimal impact on your games? Get the Xeon.

 

I won't be doing any streaming, and M.2 drives definitely don't fit in my budget, nor do I need that kind of performance. I should mention that through microcenter the two CPUs are within $10 of each other (after a mobo combo.) That's part of the reason it's a hard decision - if I had to pay $250 for the i5 I would not hesitate to get the Xeon at $210.