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Advice needed for a new build - which socket to go for

ragdollcatman

ragdollcatman

ragdollcatman

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Joined
31 Jul 2013
Posts
6
Location
London, England
Hi all.

So XMAS eve my old i7 950 rig that I gave my dad decided to die.. Just after the warranty for the Sabertooth X58 ran out.

I'm currently on a 3770K, H100i, 16GB DDR3 1600 CL8 RAM, 980TI, 250GB Samsung Evo 840 boot, 2x3TB RAID1 for games and 2TB storage.

As we need to now do a new rig, I was thinking of either going Skylake or Haswell-E. I know X99 socket is "overkill" for gaming, but I'm considering it because I like the idea of extra cores over an iGPU I won't be using.

My dad will be getting my CPU, mobo, RAM, cooler, case and boot drive. I have replacement drives ready for use - a 500GB Samsung Evo 850 and a 960GB Sandisk Ultra 2. Will be using the 3TBs and 2TB in the new build but will be switching the RAID1 to RAID0.

So, I have a budget of about £1000 to do a build, which will include a new case and cooler. Either socket will likely have the future upgrade path of Cannonlake and Broadwell-E.

So was looking at something like the following:

i7 6700K, 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3200 RAM, Asus Sabertooth Z170, Hydro H110i GT, Corsair 450D and something like an EVGA Supernova platinum PSU.

or

i7 5820K, 16GB DDR4 3200 RAM, Asus Intel X99-A/USB3.1, Hydro H110i GT, Corsair 450D and again same sort of PSU.

The costs are very similar, with the Skylake coming out a little cheaper due to the cash back offer that's about to finish with Asus (10th of Jan)

I'm just concerned about Skylake and SLI, as that is something I wouldn't mind doing to then move up to 4K gaming, whether I go Pascal or wait for Volta and go SLI with the 980TI. If I want to go SLI and then add an NVMe SSD how will it affect performance? Is NVMe worth considering for the cost of the SSDs?

I've looked at some of the gaming benchmarks etc, but some of the games I play do seem to be CPU bound for physics etc like Civilisation 5 and Dovetail Railworks 2015/2016.

So if anyone wants to give me advice on the pros and cons for each system I'd appreciate it. I would like to order the parts on Monday to build the new system.
 
ragdollcatman said:
Hi all.

So XMAS eve my old i7 950 rig that I gave my dad decided to die.. Just after the warranty for the Sabertooth X58 ran out.

I'm currently on a 3770K, H100i, 16GB DDR3 1600 CL8 RAM, 980TI, 250GB Samsung Evo 840 boot, 2x3TB RAID1 for games and 2TB storage.

As we need to now do a new rig, I was thinking of either going Skylake or Haswell-E. I know X99 socket is "overkill" for gaming, but I'm considering it because I like the idea of extra cores over an iGPU I won't be using.

My dad will be getting my CPU, mobo, RAM, cooler, case and boot drive. I have replacement drives ready for use - a 500GB Samsung Evo 850 and a 960GB Sandisk Ultra 2. Will be using the 3TBs and 2TB in the new build but will be switching the RAID1 to RAID0.

So, I have a budget of about £1000 to do a build, which will include a new case and cooler. Either socket will likely have the future upgrade path of Cannonlake and Broadwell-E.

So was looking at something like the following:

i7 6700K, 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3200 RAM, Asus Sabertooth Z170, Hydro H110i GT, Corsair 450D and something like an EVGA Supernova platinum PSU.

or

i7 5820K, 16GB DDR4 3200 RAM, Asus Intel X99-A/USB3.1, Hydro H110i GT, Corsair 450D and again same sort of PSU.

The costs are very similar, with the Skylake coming out a little cheaper due to the cash back offer that's about to finish with Asus (10th of Jan)

I'm just concerned about Skylake and SLI, as that is something I wouldn't mind doing to then move up to 4K gaming, whether I go Pascal or wait for Volta and go SLI with the 980TI. If I want to go SLI and then add an NVMe SSD how will it affect performance? Is NVMe worth considering for the cost of the SSDs?

I've looked at some of the gaming benchmarks etc, but some of the games I play do seem to be CPU bound for physics etc like Civilisation 5 and Dovetail Railworks 2015/2016.

So if anyone wants to give me advice on the pros and cons for each system I'd appreciate it. I would like to order the parts on Monday to build the new system.
Click to expand...

What's the system for?

If it's just gaming, then a Skylake I5 6600k is all you need. You could get the 6700k if you want that extra power for productivity apps (hyperthreading, more cache).

As for your concerns with SLI/Crossfire - the 5820k (x99) and 6600k/6700k are both identical in terms of PCI-E lanes for GPU use.

The 5820k only has 28 PCI-E V3 lanes, meaning you cannot do 16x/16x for SLI, you have to drop down to x8/x8, which has a performance penalty associated with it (mostly a small penalty, but top end GPU's suffer more, such as the Fury/980TI etc).

The 6600k/6700k have 16 PCI-E lanes for use for GPU's, so can do x8/x8 for SLI/Crossfire also. Though the skylake platform (z170) also includes an additional 20 PCI-E v3 lanes from the chipset, for use with PCI-E SSD's, meaning it can support more PCI-E storage than a 5820k x99 system can.

You have to buy the 5930k/5960X if you want the full fat 40 PCI-E lanes for 16X/16X SLI/Crossfire, which is much more expensive.
 
Would moving up to a 5930K be worth the extra ££?

I don't mind spending more to get as good a system as possible as this one will have to last a good 4-5 years like the 1366 rig did..

Yes for now just gaming.
 
ragdollcatman said:
Would moving up to a 5930K be worth the extra ££?

I don't mind spending more to get as good a system as possible as this one will have to last a good 4-5 years like the 1366 rig did..

Yes for now just gaming.
Click to expand...

If you know for sure you're getting a high end SLI config, then IMO a 5930k is worth it, since you don't want your £800-1000 investment in GPU's to be bottlenecked by the PCI-E bus.

Though I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference between a 6700k/5930k config, both running FuryX's or 980TI's, except in benchmarks.
 
Yeah I'm considering SLi as at the moment I don't know if I'd like to move up to something like 1440p 140 or 165 hz or 4K 60+ hz (as and when 60+ hz panels come out)

So I take it it'll be something like this 1) 5820K < 6700K < 5930K or 2) 5820K ⇔ 6700K < 5930K
 
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