Loosing my shit over CPU and MB selection. Cathartic spewing inside this post.

[Melorski]

When the 7th Gen 7700K was reportedly a fair improvement over the 6th Gen, I was dead set on waiting till January. It's so close, why wouldn't you wait? Then more recently reports seem to indicate that the new chip isn't clock rate dependent and a small increase in clock speed translates into the small increase in performance. In other words it's slightly overclocked compared to the 6700K. Crap. When I started planning this build one of the first reports I read was that it performed like a 6 core! Wow! Now I read it runs hot and not that much faster. 

 

Also, new chipset. What does the Z270 do that the Z170 cannot? Nothing I will use. I have been looking at the prices on the 6700K and found a local retailer that has them for $280. I found the Asus Z170 Pro Gaming Aura for $160. If bought with a chip, $30 more off. US$.

 

My concern is that my hair will fall out trying to game on my Surface Pro 3 (i7) which is just about pointless. I can wait till Jan but who is kidding who. If the 7th Gen is actually available in Jan I can see paying full retail or MORE due to price / demand curves. It may be several months into next year before I can actually build this PC using Gen 7. On the other hand, maybe truckloads of them are being stocked on retailers shelves and you can order late this month and get it on your doorstep Jan 2 along with the Z270MB. 

 

Now for the last possibility that is tripping me up... I could avoid the 6700 vs 7700 and simply buy a 6800 which is selling for $360. Photoshop will like it ( a little because it's still mostly hard drive latency - not CPU in my case ) but gaming performance will actually be less. Except maybe???? I am essentially building a Cities Skylines machine that can play FPS games too. Cities Skylines performance is my target. Of all the games out there it MAY be better on 6 slower cores than 4 faster cores. A benchmark showed that not to be the case but how big was the city? Don't know... BTW don't plan on using Twitch, becoming a YouTuber or video editor. And if I do any video editing, it will be assembling a slide show of a vacation or something like that once a year.

 

The money tease to buy the 6700K now is there, in addition to can ditch the tablet as a gaming platform ASAP.

To be honest money isn't a huge issue so if the 6 core were desirable for me, the cost delta won't stop me.

Would love to have the latest and greatest, but worried it won't get in between my fat little fingers until well into next year and when it does I will have waited for a very modest increase in performance.

 

One last item... Not sure what kind of video card will be needed to drive a 3440 by 1440 in Cities Skylines ( I think a 1070 will kick ass here ) but other games? Not sure. Actually NO IDEA.  Pixel wise the common monitor sizes are HD, 2560 by 1440, 3440 by 1440 and 4K at 3840 by 2160. This puts the monitor I want at 5.0 Megapixels, closer to the 2560 by 1440 at 3.7 MP than the 4K at 8.3 MP.

 

So... Why mention the video card in a thread about waiting till January? The 1080Ti is why. From what I hear the damn thing is likely to be priced closer to $1000 and at that price I think I may pass for the same reason I won't buy water from a man in the desert at $100/gallon unless I was dying and I am not dying for a card that will be eclipsed in a year or so.  $uck them at that price. 

 

To be honest after getting these thoughts out of my head and on to this forum where they can breathe I actually feel better. Still not sure what to do but the above issues are all those that have been floating around my brain. 

 

Thoughts? Please? No wrong answers here.

 

Paul

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, Melorski said:

When the 7th Gen 7700K was reportedly a fair improvement over the 6th Gen, I was dead set on waiting till January. It's so close, why wouldn't you wait? Then more recently reports seem to indicate that the new chip isn't clock rate dependent and a small increase in clock speed translates into the small increase in performance. In other words it's slightly overclocked compared to the 6700K. Crap. When I started planning this build one of the first reports I read was that it performed like a 6 core! Wow! Now I read it runs hot and not that much faster. 

 

Also, new chipset. What does the Z270 do that the Z170 cannot? Nothing I will use. I have been looking at the prices on the 6700K and found a local retailer that has them for $280. I found the Asus Z170 Pro Gaming Aura for $160. If bought with a chip, $30 more off. US$.

 

My concern is that my hair will fall out trying to game on my Surface Pro 3 (i7) which is just about pointless. I can wait till Jan but who is kidding who. If the 7th Gen is actually available in Jan I can see paying full retail or MORE due to price / demand curves. It may be several months into next year before I can actually build this PC using Gen 7. On the other hand, maybe truckloads of them are being stocked on retailers shelves and you can order late this month and get it on your doorstep Jan 2 along with the Z270MB. 

 

Now for the last possibility that is tripping me up... I could avoid the 6700 vs 7700 and simply buy a 6800 which is selling for $360. Photoshop will like it ( a little because it's still mostly hard drive latency - not CPU in my case ) but gaming performance will actually be less. Except maybe???? I am essentially building a Cities Skylines machine that can play FPS games too. Cities Skylines performance is my target. Of all the games out there it MAY be better on 6 slower cores than 4 faster cores. A benchmark showed that not to be the case but how big was the city? Don't know... BTW don't plan on using Twitch, becoming a YouTuber or video editor. And if I do any video editing, it will be assembling a slide show of a vacation or something like that once a year.

 

The money tease to buy the 6700K now is there, in addition to can ditch the tablet as a gaming platform ASAP.

To be honest money isn't a huge issue so if the 6 core were desirable for me, the cost delta won't stop me.

Would love to have the latest and greatest, but worried it won't get in between my fat little fingers until well into next year and when it does I will have waited for a very modest increase in performance.

 

One last item... Not sure what kind of video card will be needed to drive a 3440 by 1440 in Cities Skylines ( I think a 1070 will kick ass here ) but other games? Not sure. Actually NO IDEA.  Pixel wise the common monitor sizes are HD, 2560 by 1440, 3440 by 1440 and 4K at 3840 by 2160. This puts the monitor I want at 5.0 Megapixels, closer to the 2560 by 1440 at 3.7 MP than the 4K at 8.3 MP.

 

So... Why mention the video card in a thread about waiting till January? The 1080Ti is why. From what I hear the damn thing is likely to be priced closer to $1000 and at that price I think I may pass for the same reason I won't buy water from a man in the desert at $100/gallon unless I was dying and I am not dying for a card that will be eclipsed in a year or so.  $uck them at that price. 

 

To be honest after getting these thoughts out of my head and on to this forum where they can breathe I actually feel better. Still not sure what to do but the above issues are all those that have been floating around my brain. 

 

Thoughts? Please? No wrong answers here.

 

Paul

People say that it won't be a huge improvement, and the benchmarks show that. Maybe the 6th gen CPU's may be cheaper to pick up after the 7th gen hits stores, maybe they won't be high in prices (that's quite hard to believe). If the prices are too high on start, and you want that pc so badly, you can just pick up the 6th gen CPU. It won't make a huge difference.

[AdamH96]

honestly a 6700K will do you fine, they are usually about a 10% increase of performance between CPU generations. If you want a 6 core the 6800K or 5820K is a great buy and both run on the X99 platform. You don't need the latest CPU, from what I found from an article on Hexus ( http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/99820-intel-core-i7-7700k-14nm-kaby-lake/ ) it is ever so slightly faster and wouldn't be worth the price surge at release. For GPU i'd wait for the 1080Ti to release to see if the GTX 1080 drops in price to make a decision, a 1070 would be great but because your resolution your looking at is higher than 1440p but less than 4K a 1080 would be great for newer AAA titles at Ultra if that's what your going for. For me the 1080 for most of my games just cuts it close to run 4K Ultra but newer AAA titles struggle (Rainbow 6 Seige, Mirrors Edge Catalyst, The Witcher 3)

[Energycore]

26 minutes ago, Melorski said:

When the 7th Gen 7700K was reportedly a fair improvement over the 6th Gen

Sounds like you believed some pretty farfetched rumors

 

Waiting for Zen is an idea to consider, if anything because it might open the possibility of a true 8-core (not 4 modules like piledriver) for $500-$600, and AMD's high-end GPUs will be coming out around that time too.

 

If you were wanting to buy today, I would go for a 5820K, it's Haswell-E but OCs higher than Broadwell-E, which puts them on par with each other and the Haswell-E part tends to cost $40+ less. You're still getting the 6 cores, and gaming performance on titles that don't use more than 4 wont't be affected as much as you think (1-2% maybe).

[Crossbred]

CPU: Is say since the lower gaming performance in the 6800k vs a 4-core model is negligible while the editing performance will jump, definitely go for a 6800k or 5820k if you're up for the cost. You are correct, the 7700k most likely will not be worth the upgrade from a 6700k.

 

If you end up getting a GPU I would wait for Vega. Hbm2 is your friend at that resolution.