Torn on upgrade (7700k w/z170)

[mechanicalfluff]

Been pondering my situation, just looking for a little guidance (or justification on me blowing more money on pc parts :P)

 

I recently built a nas with unraid. I went to microcenter and grabbed a cheapo i3 and with the mobo discount, I ended up paying ~$4 for a Gigabyte z170 hd3p board.

My current "main" rig is a 4930k in an asus x79 deluxe. It's certainly aging, overclocks have been failing and i'm down from 4.6 to 4.2 at 1.4v to keep it stable.

 

The plan:

Go back to microcenter, grab some more ram and a 7700k to replace the i3 and use my 4930k cpu and mobo as the unraid nas host (after underclocking it to nothing). Heck, it'll make a way better transcoding box in the end

 

My potential issues:

I have a TON of usb devices. I populate just about all of them, the x79 deluxe obviously offers those (13 ports including front panel), the hd3p doesn't really offer much (6, including the 3.1 ports, 10 including the old case front panel).

I use a Rift along with 2 extra sensors (5ports), a hotas (2ports), a wheel (2ports), usb mic interface (1port), keyboard (1port), mouse (1port).

 

Since the board doesn't have enough usb ports, i'll need an add-in card. Kinda worried about available pcie lanes. Should i be? 

 

Pcie devices:

• Single GPU x16
• sound card x1
• capture card x1
• (Future) m.2 ssd (board only hosts 1) x4

I'll just make it by with sata availability.

 

I used to make videos and do other content creation all day - I only stream here and there now, so the cores aren't as important.

 

 

Thoughts, suggestions?

[Lurick]

Yah, the GPU will pull PCIe lanes directly from the CPU and the add-on cards will grab from the chipset. Even if you add in an M.2 later and it pulls PCIe lanes directly from the CPU and the GPU operates at 8x, you'll suffer no frame loss (we're talking margin of error levels low at worst).

 

Just make sure you update the BIOS on the Z170 board to support the 7700K

[mechanicalfluff]

Yeah i read about having to do the bios update, not concerned about optane. Just the whole pci lane issue.

 

With the cpu and chipset included, i'm reading i've got about 36 but the lanes from the chipset are limited to x4 - right?

 

If that's correct, i'm pretty much good as long as i don't add another gpu.

[Lurick]

1 minute ago, mechanicalfluff said:

Yeah i read about having to do the bios update, not concerned about optane. Just the whole pci lane issue.

 

With the cpu and chipset included, i'm reading i've got about 36 but the lanes from the chipset are limited to x4 - right?

 

If that's correct, i'm pretty much good as long as i don't add another gpu.

Yah I believe its up to x4 for the chipset lanes per slot.

[mechanicalfluff]

On 7/27/2017 at 8:07 AM, Lurick said:

Yah I believe its up to x4 for the chipset lanes per slot.

it totally worked - can run all the usb devices i need with pci expansion cards

 

10000% better gaming at 5.1ghz --- Should've made the move a long time ago

[Guest]

13 minutes ago, mechanicalfluff said:

it totally worked - can run all the usb devices i need with pci expansion cards

 

10000% better gaming at 5.1ghz --- Should've made the move a long time ago

I hate you I thought your profile pic was a bug on my screen

[mechanicalfluff]

2 minutes ago, Abyss Gaming said:

I hate you I thought your profile pic was a bug on my screen

haha, i did the same thing when i didn't log in for a while