So it looks like my 3930K system is starting to give up the ghost. To be specific the Rampage IV Extreme board I'm using often doesn't detect my boot SSD on a cold boot.

So I'm taking it as a sign/excuse to upgrade.

I mostly game but also encode video.

Am I best waiting for Broadwell-E (however far away that is), just going mainstream/peasant and getting a 6700K or should I wait and see if AMD have a competitive chip in the Zen?

Get a replacement motherboard?

No point going for a Skylake, Zen's an unknown.
Broadwell-E will be a meagre upgrade too unless you're going 8/10 core.

Way too early to tell. I'm in a slightly similar problem in that my motherboard seems to have problems with its RAID. I'm considering getting an AM4 motherboard when they appear with the Bristol Ridge APU, as it will be socket compatible with Zen when that arrives.

I freely confess it's a gamble though and offer it only as what I think I will do, not as advice. That probably wouldn't appeal to you. Zen is expected to be competitive with Skylake and with it being 8c/16t should be pretty good for video encoding.

If you have lots to spend Broadwell E looks good.
Likely overkill for your use.

Skylake is much cheaper and will be just as good in games.

I have no pc at the moment and I could get 5820k or wait for entry level Broadwell-E

Just to be clear, Zen is unlikely to be more powerful than Broadwell-E. I mean it could be, but I think respectable sources are pitching it a shade under but competitive on price.

If you have a huge amount of money desperate to be spent, I doubt you'll go wrong buying a Broadwell-E system. I'd hold off on GPUs until we've seen the announcements from AMD, though.

Martini1991 said:

Get a replacement motherboard?

No point going for a Skylake, Zen's an unknown.
Broadwell-E will be a meagre upgrade too unless you're going 8/10 core.

Click to expand...

Reasonably sure the motherboard is out of warranty, plus it's Asus so I'm guessing there's little chance of that happening.
Not sure how easy it is to get a new X79 board now either.

Plus, excuse for shiny new stuff!

I do worry that Skylake would seem like a downgrade. I'm guessing the only thing I do that really pushes my CPU is video encoding, which does make use of the 12 threads. So skylake would need to be 50% faster per thread just to be level with it.
Although whether I do enough encoding to make it worthwhile is also questionable.

I have a Haswell 470K and I'm disappointed with the temps, probably due to the TIM used between die and heatspreader. I'm hoping that won't be an issue with Broadwell-E but may well be with Skylake.

Personally I'm waiting to see something concrete about Zen then I'll decide. If it's competitive with 8c 16t at a reasonable price I'll happily give AMD another shot, my old Athlons used to be great cpus.

like with polaris, if Zen is MUCH CHEAPER and ALMOST AS GOOD AS its competition, I will buy. Otherwise, no. Intel and Nvidia have the reputation for quality such that a few bucks difference will not sway me astray from them.

There's also the aspect of the motherboard features.

X99 is mildly behind (though not much), and the top-end Zen chipset will be going against Z270 and kaby lake for latest features.

Hope they do a good job of offering any/all connectors and ports under the sun.

What are the refresh motherboards behind on? I thought the refresh boards had feature parity (at a premium)

Skylake sits at a good price for entry level. Haswell-e is really expensive and out of a lot of people's budget.

Amd has a lot to catch up on with respect to intel. Zen might be better, but Intel has a proven track record.

I would love some certainty around AM4 release dates as well - I am in i5 6600k territory for my next build - but if I could get an 6 or 8 core for somewhere half way between i5 Skylake and i7 Haswell pricing wise it could get me to wait for Zen.