Music/Gaming : i7 8700K upgrade or Ice Lake later ?

[0rpheus]

Hey guys !

Currently debating if my rig could need an update with the new Coffeelake i7 8700K chip.

I'm a music composer using Cubase and mostly creating orchestral music with pretty big projects, including a lot of tracks with VST's (Kontakt/Omnisphere/Diva/Bazille/EZDrummer..) and plugins (Waves, iZotope, FabFilter, Lexicon..).

I'm also doing quite a bit of gaming at 1080p/60Hz. I wouldn't consider myself as a hardcore or competitive gamer, I just play games casually, most of them being single player RPG's, FPS's or online multiplayer games like Hearthstone or Overwatch.

 

My current setup is :

Proc : i5-4590 (3.3 Ghz)

Mobo : MSI Z97 PC Mate

RAM : 24GB DDR3 (yeah..)

GPU : Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC 4GB

OS : Windows 7 x64

 

While I don't have too much problems running most current games maxed out @1080p/60Hz, I do encounter some limitations when working on big Cubase projects (audio crackles, dropouts, CPU@100% load..). 

 

So ! My question is the following : is it worth upgrading at all ? If it is, is it worth upgrading to an i7 8700K or wait a little bit longer and see what Ice Lake has to offer in 2019-2020 ? I'm not sure if the performance gain will significant, that's why I'm not entirely sure if waiting for that could be a good strategy.

 

Thank you for your answers !

[jeff.proto-_-]

Upgrade, why wait for 2-3 years when you can have much better performance now

[Dreaper]

1 minute ago, jeff.proto-_- said:

Upgrade, why wait for 2-3 years when you can have much better performance now

ummm thats not a good reason

[NerdModeEngaged]

Right, personally i upgraded this year from the 4570 to a 1600X and in gaming the differences were HUGE, although my averages were not changed too much, i did no longer have huge fps drops from time to time, and now my multi tasking ability is just godlike, personally i would say you should upgrade, however i do not think that upgrade should be made to a 8700K, personally Ryzen still stands out as a more appealing option, now this isnt down to performance, as the 8700K would out edge a 1700 by a fair amount in games, however with multithreaded tasks you are looking at a pretty identical experience, and the 1700 is half the price here in the UK when you take into account motherboard prices, now what i would also like to point out is the fact that the 1700 is indeed much easier to keep cool than the 8700k due to the lack of thermal paste, this would further drive down cost, whereas it would still give you the same amount of performance, at the moment the value of the 8700k is stupid, the motherboard and cpu combo, as well as a decent cooler, lets say you spent about £60 on a cooler, i feel like that is fairly conservative if you want to keep the 8700k at resonable temps without a delid while overclocked, the cost of this platform would be a tad over £600, this would not include RAM, now for the 1700 you will be looking at approx £330 as you would not have to go for an aftermarket cooler and the motherboards are a tad cheaper, now the real kicker is AMD has said that they will support the AM4 socket until 2020, this means that you have a solid upgrade path to go down and you would be able to install 3rd gen ryzen about 3 years from now, now when you compare this to the 8700K and the Z370 platform, intel has made no such promises, and from previous platforms, you would expect it to feature a refresh of coffee lake, if that, and then a new platform would be launched, these of course are just my thoughts, however you can take the facts and my opinion and make your mind up about what you would like to do

[jeff.proto-_-]

Hmm, well the 4590 might struggle in newer games, so upgrading to coffee lake would be good. However, I might be wrong.

1 minute ago, Dreaper said:

ummm thats not a good reason

i'm dumb okay?

[Dreaper]

21 minutes ago, 0rpheus said:

Hey guys !

Currently debating if my rig could need an update with the new Coffeelake i7 8700K chip.

I'm a music composer using Cubase and mostly creating orchestral music with pretty big projects, including a lot of tracks with VST's (Kontakt/Omnisphere/Diva/Bazille/EZDrummer..) and plugins (Waves, iZotope, FabFilter, Lexicon..).

I'm also doing quite a bit of gaming at 1080p/60Hz. I wouldn't consider myself as a hardcore or competitive gamer, I just play games casually, most of them being single player RPG's, FPS's or online multiplayer games like Hearthstone or Overwatch.

 

My current setup is :

Proc : i5-4590 (3.3 Ghz)

Mobo : MSI Z97 PC Mate

RAM : 24GB DDR3 (yeah..)

GPU : Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC 4GB

OS : Windows 7 x64

 

While I don't have too much problems running most current games maxed out @1080p/60Hz, I do encounter some limitations when working on big Cubase projects (audio crackles, dropouts, CPU@100% load..). 

 

So ! My question is the following : is it worth upgrading at all ? If it is, is it worth upgrading to an i7 8700K or wait a little bit longer and see what Ice Lake has to offer in 2019-2020 ? I'm not sure if the performance gain will significant, that's why I'm not entirely sure if waiting for that could be a good strategy.

 

Thank you for your answers !

wait for the stock to go up then buy

[0rpheus]

Thank you for the answers guys ! Much appreciated

 

@NerdModeEngaged I've been torturing myself over the past few days with either going with the Ryzen chip or the Intel chip. I have to say Ryzen's are pretty impressive for the price and certainly a lot more bang for your buck. But, long story short, I've found out that the Intel chip is the way to go for heavy duty music production projects because single core performance and clock speed are paramount for real-time audio processing and working at low latency - better than more cores clocked at lower speed like the current Ryzen chip. It's been a god damn head-itching reading through every possible forums and benchmarks, but I'm pretty confident now with the 8700K, even if the price isn't ideal - it just performs better in that regard (and this is my top priority as music production is my day to day work).

Truth be told I was originally considering replacing my laptop with an Alienware 15 R3 at approx. 2.000€ so.. I'm pretty sure I won't hit that mark with a good upgrade, not even close.

 

So most of you guys would consider an upgrade right now ? That's appealing indeed