7700K still worth it?

[superpentium]

Hello, I have a Core i5 6400 on a Z270 motherboard, which I bought because I presumed it would be compatible with Coffee Lake, which I was looking to upgrade to, considering it's speculated that it will be 30% faster. But now that it's been confirmed that Z270 will not support Coffee Lake, I am wondering between selling my CPU + motherboard and going Ryzen or upgrading to a 7700K, which would be a better choice? Thanks.

[unknownmiscreant]

1 minute ago, superpentium said:

Hello, I have a Core i5 6400 on a Z270 motherboard, which I bought because I presumed it would be compatible with Coffee Lake, which I was looking to upgrade to, considering it's speculated that it will be 30% faster. But now that it's been confirmed that Z270 will not support Coffee Lake, I am wondering between selling my CPU + motherboard and going Ryzen or upgrading to a 7700K, which would be a better choice? Thanks.

Depends on your use case.

 

Gaming at high refresh rates probably 7700k due to single threaded performance

Anything else ryzen, as more cores, and not much lower single thread perf.

Ryzen is probably the better overall choice. I went ryzen 7, but that was for a new build.

[stefanDB]

the 7700k is currently the best CPU for gaming, but not the best value. 

[Dalitten]

In gaming the 7700k is superior. Ryzen is a all-rounder and will perform very good in gaming, but not quite as 7700k. Also, I'm no Ryzen expert, but they do really like higher clocked RAM, so depends on the RAM you have now. What Graphics card do you have now, and what games do you play the most?

[Sauron]

I think it makes no sense to go from what you have to a 7700k. At this point wait for coffe lake to actually drop and see if there's anything worth upgrading to. At worst you'll be able to get the 7700k for a lowe price.

 

As a general rule, buying a 200$ cpu just so you can upgrade to a 350$ one a year from now is a bad idea.

[unknownmiscreant]

1 minute ago, Dalitten said:

In gaming the 7700k is superior. Ryzen is a all-rounder and will perform very good in gaming, but not quite as 7700k. Also, I'm no Ryzen expert, but they do really like higher clocked RAM, so depends on the RAM you have now. What Graphics card do you have now, and what games do you play the most?

Ryzen's getting pretty big, so I would suspect that games will start to be optimized for it pretty soon.

[Lord Nicoll]

Now is a terrible time to buy a CPU or GPU, wait a month or two, then decide. If you like overclocking then the i7 7700K can be great, if not then maybe wait to see what comes out

[superpentium]

4 minutes ago, Dalitten said:

In gaming the 7700k is superior. Ryzen is a all-rounder and will perform very good in gaming, but not quite as 7700k. Also, I'm no Ryzen expert, but they do really like higher clocked RAM, so depends on the RAM you have now. What Graphics card do you have now, and what games do you play the most?

I am mostly looking to upgrade for content creation, as the i5 is still plenty for me in gaming, especially considering I have a 980. My ram is 2666Mhz, which is a little low for Ryzen, but considering ram prices I am not looking to upgrade that.

[zMeul]

4 minutes ago, unknownmiscreant said:

Ryzen's getting pretty big, so I would suspect that games will start to be optimized for it pretty soon.

that's the lie said for the last 10y or so

so yeah, keep on dreaming

[superpentium]

5 minutes ago, Lord Nicoll said:

Now is a terrible time to buy a CPU or GPU, wait a month or two, then decide. If you like overclocking then the i7 7700K can be great, if not then maybe wait to see what comes out

Well I will not be moving to Coffee Lake or any other new Intel platform as Intel will just kill it in a year or two, I am only really interested in moving to Ryzen, also the Kabylake i7 price won't drop, that never happens. (E.g. Haswell still costs as much as Kabylake.)

[Varpin]

5 minutes ago, superpentium said:

I am mostly looking to upgrade for content creation, as the i5 is still plenty for me in gaming, especially considering I have a 980. My ram is 2666Mhz, which is a little low for Ryzen, but considering ram prices I am not looking to upgrade that.

If you're mostly going to upgrade for content creation get Ryzen 7 1700 or Ryzen 5 1600.

[Lord Nicoll]

1 minute ago, superpentium said:

Well I will not be moving to Coffee Lake or any other new Intel platform as Intel will just kill it in a year or two, I am only really interested in moving to Ryzen, also the Kabylake i7 price won't drop, that never happens. (E.g. Haswell still costs as much as Kabylake.)

Well obviously Intel will kill it in a few years, when Zen+ drops AM4 will be dead and you'll probably need AM4+ for it, technology is always moving so no platform will still be alive after that long. However as you like content creation, you should look at threadripper, the 12 core looks pretty nice, 24 threads, but the 16 core isn't that much more, however expect to spend even more on RAM + high end board. 

[Emberstone]

15 minutes ago, unknownmiscreant said:

Gaming at high refresh rates probably 7700k due to single threaded performance

Ryzen's still fine for this for all the big games anyway. Overwatch gets me an average of around 200 fps (benched a few games with Fraps a while ago on Ultra settings), CS:GO is always over 250, Doom is pretty much always over 144, etc. the list goes on.

 

Not arguing that the 7700K will be better for certain games that rely on single-threaded performance, but Ryzen will still do the job if the extra threads are enticing.

[tom_w141]

5 minutes ago, Lord Nicoll said:

when Zen+ drops AM4 will be dead and you'll probably need AM4+

AM4 is guaranteed to take future zen cpus up to 2020 minimum.

[Lord Nicoll]

Just now, tom_w141 said:

AM4 is guaranteed to take zen cpus up to 2020 minimum.

Well, some AM3 boards got BIOS updates for AM3+ CPUs, even though AMD didn't expressly say they would, some board makers added it, some didn't though, usually only the high end ones. so there isn't a guarantee, but Ryzen integrates the North bridge like Intel so it's easier now than it was before. 

[tom_w141]

6 minutes ago, Lord Nicoll said:

However as you like content creation, you should look at threadripper,

Sorry for double post I didn't see this part ^

 

8 cores is fine for amateur content creation... Its even up there for professionals. To say any content creator needs TR just because it's around is silly. They don't need it 

[tom_w141]

1 minute ago, Lord Nicoll said:

Well, some AM3 boards got BIOS updates for AM3+ CPUs, even though AMD didn't expressly say they would, some board makers added it, some didn't though, usually only the high end ones. so there isn't a guarantee, but Ryzen integrates the North bridge like Intel so it's easier now than it was before. 

What I said was guaranteed by AMD at Ryzen 7's launch... You will be able to use a Zen(3) or whatever its called in your current AM4 board. Yes ofc you'll need a BIOS update...

[Dalitten]

Depends on what content creation. I've used my 7700k a little for video editing 1440p footage and it works great. 

[Lord Nicoll]

Just now, tom_w141 said:

Sorry for double post I didn't see this part ^

 

8 cores is fine for amateur content creation... Its even up there for professionals. To say any content creator needs TR just because it's around is silly. They don't need it 

it's fine. I mean sure only serious content creators would need it, that's what I said the 12 core would be more than enough, but who wants to wait for a render to finish. There is also the 8 core Threadripper but unless you want loads of PCIe stuff or more RAM it's not the best. 

[Lord Nicoll]

2 minutes ago, tom_w141 said:

What I said was guaranteed by AMD at Ryzen 7's launch... You will be able to use a Zen(3) or whatever its called in your current AM4 board. Yes ofc you'll need a BIOS update...

I would never take a guarantee by a manufacturer or creator, I'll let time do the talking, but there is no reason it would be even that hard, but other features might be around then and that might make a new board worth it. 

[Princess Luna]

Maybe now people will stop the whole nonsense of future-proof motherboards, I always said that it was more worth it just get the cheapest one possible and go locked i7 and stock cooling, you end up paying less for the same performance and has easier true upgrade path as the motherboard is rather dispensable.

[Lord Nicoll]

1 minute ago, Princess Cadence said:

Maybe now people will stop the whole nonsense of future-proof motherboards, I always said that it was more worth it just get the cheapest one possible and go locked i7 and stock cooling, you end up paying less for the same performance and has easier true upgrade path as the motherboard is rather dispensable.

A locked i7 gets it's ass handed to by overclocked i7, but I always wondered if the performance was noticeable, in games not even between a locked i5 and an overclocked i7, but every now and then it pays off. 

[Princess Luna]

Just now, Lord Nicoll said:

A locked i7 gets it's ass handed to by overclocked i7, but I always wondered if the performance was noticeable, in games not even between a locked i5 and an overclocked i7, but every now and then it pays off. 

It does not, the difference is within margin of error, my locked i7 did always what? 3 or 4 fps less then 4,8ghz i7 7700k I'm sorry but 3 fps is not worth paying the double for z chipset, expensive cooling and delid.

 

People need to quit this thought that OC is a must, it is nothing but marketing to give Intel more free money, it makes absolute no sense in the mainstream platform any more, you pay the double for no more than 5%ish percent increase and no it doesn't add life span to the chip at all, if any thing doing my way you can upgrade to better solutions sooner and walk all over the OC'ed older chip.

[superpentium]

16 minutes ago, tom_w141 said:

Sorry for double post I didn't see this part ^

 

8 cores is fine for amateur content creation... Its even up there for professionals. To say any content creator needs TR just because it's around is silly. They don't need it 

I would love a TR CPU, unfortunately it's way out of my budget and probably not very practical considering I don't do that much content creation.

[Morgan MLGman]

32 minutes ago, zMeul said:

that's the lie said for the last 10y or so

so yeah, keep on dreaming

I believe he meant that with both Ryzen having many threads and Intel now pushing 6C/12T mainstream i7 + 6C/6T mainstream i5s will force developers to optimize for more threads. X299 & X399 launches will too. What's more, Intel introduced a similar mesh architecture to what's inside of Ryzen in Skylake-X CPUs (which actually decreased gaming performance as an equally-clocked 7800X loses in gaming to a 6800K at the same speeds despite having higher IPC) so the optimizations for that part should come too - it will probably mean that optimizing for new Intel architectures means optimizing for Ryzen.