6600k Waste of money?

[Captain Cruz]

18 hours ago, MageTank said:

If you overclock it to 4.6ghz, yes, all 4 cores will run at 4.6ghz. As for my recommendation of the 6700 over the 6600k, that depends entirely on whether or not you are going to invest in an overclocking platform + aftermarket cooler. The 6600k does not come with a cooler. There has been an ongoing fallacy that overclocking a CPU by X%, will give you X% more FPS. This is simply not true. A 10% overclock on a CPU, might give you 5% increased FPS, or it might not even make a difference at all. It depends entirely on the task at hand. Certain titles scale well with higher clocked CPU's, while others simply do not care. It will all depend on whether or not the CPU is the bottleneck in a certain program, or part of a game. The biggest difference that overclocked CPU's make, is on minimum framerates. Situations where your CPU becomes the bottleneck for a specific area, and faster CPU and memory clock speeds make the difference here. 

 

The biggest difference between the 6700 and 6600k, is Hyperthreading. Certain titles can see a 10-15% difference in minimum FPS when hyperthreading is involved. However, with hyperthreading costing an additional 50 euros ($56) on the two SKU's you mentioned, you have to ask yourself this question. Is 10-15% additional FPS in very select titles, worth 20% higher cost? Now, Hyperthreading has more use outside of gaming. If gaming is not your only focus, hyperthreading can seriously aid with multitasking. If you like to stream, or do other things while gaming, the performance difference between the 6700 and 6600k will start to widen. 

 

However, there is also one other thing the 6600k can do, that the 6700 can't (at least, not without using older BIOS revisions and non-K overclocking, which is a headache for another day), and that is overclocking. Most 6600k's can hit around 4.5ghz. That is 800mhz higher than the 6700's all core boost of 3700 (or 500mhz higher than the all core boost of 4000mhz, if you have a Z series board with Multi-core Enhancement). That will surely be more important from a gaming standpoint, than Hyperthreading.

 

So, how do you decide which CPU to get? Let's simplify it.

 

#1. Make a budget, and see what CPU, Mobo, Cooler and Memory you can get within that budget. Do not think about "buying the cheapest". Just name a solid budget you are willing to spend, and buy the best possible hardware within that budget.

#2. Pick the right tool for the job. What do you plan on doing? Gaming? Business? Perhaps you do a mixture of both, sometimes at the same time? 

#3. Overclocking. Are you willing to overclock? Or do you want to avoid doing so? 

 

These are important questions that you have to ask yourself in order to determine which processor is for you. We can't just tell you "X is better because X" simply because there is no clear winner for everything. Some people are looking for price:performance. Others for power efficiency. Some just want the best of the best, while others want something that will do what they need it to, without the added effort and troubleshooting that comes with overclocking.

 

If you don't want to overclock at all, investing in a 6700 + locked platform might be the better option. HOWEVER. If you do want to overclock, the Z platform offers a much better upgrade path. Faster memory has been proven to aid with minimum framerates in situations with high CPU overhead, and it allows you to get more performance out of both CPU and memory. Not to mention Z platforms tend to come with PCIE M.2,  Crossfire and SLI support depending on the board, something you might be interested in the future. Strictly speaking for gaming, the 6600k is a perfectly capable chip, and will most definitely get the job done in all current titles that you throw at it. If a title NEEDS hyperthreading on a quad core to run good, then it was poorly programmed in the first place. After all, Hyperthreading only exists because we live in an imperfect world. It's not magic. 

Thanks for taking the time to write that response. Very helpful. You should conciser writing articles or something

[Nena Trinity]

The real question is cheap board + i7-6700 or Z170 with i5-6600K?

[SouthBi4ch]

Wait for ZEN

zen  might be actually worth it ,if u are willing to wait

[Thorimus]

Cheapest Z170 motherboard is only £90-100 (Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3), shaving off that extra £30-40 and granting you the ability to OC. Pair it with a i5-6600K, Hyperx Fury 8GB RAM and 212 EVO and you have a pretty good budget system IMO.

[igetaroundd]

I thought it was possible to OC non k skylake CPUs or have they removed that now?

[MageTank]

1 hour ago, igetaroundd said:

I thought it was possible to OC non k skylake CPUs or have they removed that now?

It's possible, but there are too many caveats that make it a very questionable option. First of all, you have to use older BIOS revisions that have the non-K overclocking options (ASrock calls this Sky OC). Secondly, you have to avoid microcode 0x76. Not just through BIOS revisions, but also future Windows Updates, meaning you have to disable updates through GPE, which, if you have the latest anniversary edition of W10, you can no longer do (at least, mine didn't work).

 

That's just the parts required to get it to work. Next, you have to deal with the actual downsides, such as:

 

• No iGPU
• No thermal sensor (must use PECI to get accurate temps)
• 75% slower cache speeds
• Loss of C-States
• Clock generator limitations (stock intel clock gen has a maximum limit of 170 BCLK, must have a board with an external clock gen to circumvent this)
• loss of AVX/AVX2

Take it from a man that had a Pentium G4400 at 4.9ghz, and an i5 6600T at 4.59ghz, it's just not worth the headaches. Once you go beyond 4.2ghz, you are going to need an aftermarket cooler anyways, which adds to the cost. If you are already spending extra money on an overclocking platform and an aftermarket cooler, why not invest the extra funds into a CPU designed for overclocking? Not to mention if you don't understand memory overclocking, BCLK overclocking will be a big issue. It impacts memory speeds as well. Sure, you can use straps to keep your memory at it's rated speed, but that will then limit your potential CPU overclocks in order to keep the memory happy. People often say "a few extra or less mhz on ram won't hurt" but they have no idea how the clock speed impacts RTL/IO-L. If your board trains those poorly, you will absolutely regret it.