Best chipset for gaming?

BDEE

BDEE

BDEE

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21 Apr 2011
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Mobo has died today. Whilst under warranty I can see this being a PITA so going to look to upgrade.

Is the X99 the "recommended" chipset for gaming at the moment?

I am currently running SLi 780Ti's - I am thinking I might just keep those cards and go with an i7 CPU unless I can find some benchmarking showing a big difference against a single 980Ti but guessing there wont be much in it, so keeping the SLi 780Ti's will give me more to spend on the mobo bundle.

Budget is up to around £800-£900 if I keep the 780s - I'm happy choosing the bundle but I guess I just want the starting point of the best gaming chipset at the moment so I have a base to go from.

Cheers
 
it's debatable whether the 5820k or the 6700k is better, atm games are liking bigger clocks over more than 4 cores so if you're not into overclocking maybe get the 6700k but if you are you can get the 5820k up to pretty much the same frequency as a 6700k overclocks too but with 2 extra cores which may be taken advantage of more somewhere down the line, either way the difference is a few fps in most games so I myself went for the 5820k as seems more future proof!
 
The 5820k is what is currently sat in my basket, along with a Asus TUF X99 Sabertooth and 16Gb of Dominator Platinum DDR4.

This is what I came up with as my solution from my research tonight. I can use my current H105 cooler with that too and think it should all be OK on my AX860i PSU.

I am not really in the position that I want to wait as I am without my PC, so basing it on what's available now.

My current CPU is a 4970K (Devils Canyon) - Does the X99 offer anything significant over the Z97 chipset that makes it worth the switch over now? My other option is just to buy a new socket 1150 board now and sell my replacement under warranty when that comes back to me and hold off the upgrade for a year or so.
 
BDEE said:
The 5820k is what is currently sat in my basket, along with a Asus TUF X99 Sabertooth and 16Gb of Dominator Platinum DDR4.

This is what I came up with as my solution from my research tonight. I can use my current H105 cooler with that too and think it should all be OK on my AX860i PSU.

I am not really in the position that I want to wait as I am without my PC, so basing it on what's available now.

My current CPU is a 4970K (Devils Canyon) - Does the X99 offer anything significant over the Z97 chipset that makes it worth the switch over now? My other option is just to buy a new socket 1150 board now and sell my replacement under warranty when that comes back to me and hold off the upgrade for a year or so.
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A 4970K (if it existed) would be ivybridge-e and use the x79 chipset, Do you mean 4790k? (You're not the only one on here who makes that mistake, it's an easy typo).

To answer your original question, for a pure gaming machine, a 6700K would probably be the fastest if it clocks well, but IIRC the 5820k (Haswell-e) has a soldered heatspreader and should clock well. You don't need more than 16 lanes of gen3 PCI-e for a pair of 780tis. The x99 platform would be better if you want to use PCIe lanes for other cards as well.
 
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x99 offers more pcie lanes if you want 3 or more gfx cards, obv more cpu cores and quad channel ram but in gaming performance i doubt you will see any real difference atm. i saw a pretty big boost coming from a modesetly overclocked i7 920 but the 4970k is a fair bit quicker than that!
 
BDEE said:
My current CPU is a 4970K (Devils Canyon) - Does the X99 offer anything significant over the Z97 chipset that makes it worth the switch over now? My other option is just to buy a new socket 1150 board now and sell my replacement under warranty when that comes back to me and hold off the upgrade for a year or so.
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Nope. Not for gaming right now. Cheap £50 Z97/Z87 board to tide you over, and wait for Skylake-E at least.
 
A 4790k should do for gaming for a long time yet, i would only go x99 if your planning on going 3/4way sli/crossfire.
 
Thanks for all the help. Decided just to get another Z97 board for now (went with an msi Z97 Gaming 5). Will do me for another year and get a bit more monies worth out the rest of the rig. Will just sell the replacement mobo once the RMA is sorted :)

Time to test RMA process with gigabyte. Have to say I had to RMA an msi GPU with OCUK this week and it was less than 48hrs of raising the webnote to confirmation is was being sent off. Had nothing but trouble with the retailer I got this mobo from today. Total PITA.
 
BDEE said:
Thanks for all the help. Decided just to get another Z97 board for now (went with an msi Z97 Gaming 5). Will do me for another year and get a bit more monies worth out the rest of the rig. Will just sell the replacement mobo once the RMA is sorted :)

Time to test RMA process with gigabyte. Have to say I had to RMA an msi GPU with OCUK this week and it was less than 48hrs of raising the webnote to confirmation is was being sent off. Had nothing but trouble with the retailer I got this mobo from today. Total PITA.
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not sure about RMA but their customer service seemed very good when i had a small issue setting up my z170 gaming 7 so fingers crossed they will sort it out quickly for you!
 
Well I managed to sort it really easily with Gigabyte today. I emailed them last night, got a response and RMA code this morning before 10am and got it sent today.


I had tried yesterday to RMA with the retailer, which is named after it's owner. That was an awful experience. I was on hold to them an hour yesterday before someone answered but left the phone off the hook, the online system wouldn't allow me to request the RMA due to the age of the order, emailed stating that and got a generic reply saying use the online system??? Facebook messaged them and kept asking one by one in half hour intervals "have you checked X", despite me telling them all the steps I took to diagnose the fault, all of which they re-asked, then came back asking me more late PM today "have you checked this" which I had already told them in all the diagnostics I had done to establish the issue. Total nonsense company with awful customer service. Shall not be using them again!

On the plus side I quite like this msi board - Looks nicer in the case than the Gigabyte one. Prefer the BIOS in the gigabyte but not like I am in it every day.
 
Little update to share experience of the RMA process.

Got an email back today confirming results of testing. Turns out the battery had somehow managed to fry. Not sure how on a 2 year old board, but there you go. They swapped it out and updated the BIOS and it's good to go. Pleased that's all it was. Should make selling it easier.



Pretty pleased with the ease and speed of the service. Glad I found the direct RMA route into them - Will not ever be buying from that Manchester based place again - would probably still be waiting for them to answer the phone if I had continued trying the RMA with them.
 
geraintl said:
i just built a new Z170 chipset gaming pc with a 6700k and it seems very good for gaming.
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just built one a short while back with a 6600k and massive boost over my old phenom II 955, z170 seems a very good platform for gaming :)

edit : good job on the rma result, very wierd a battery would be knackered after 2 years :)
 
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BDEE said:
Thanks for all the help. Decided just to get another Z97 board for now (went with an msi Z97 Gaming 5). Will do me for another year and get a bit more monies worth out the rest of the rig. Will just sell the replacement mobo once the RMA is sorted :)
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This was the sensible thing to do. Good result on the RMA.

I'd personally have RMAd first before buying a replacement but I get you were antsy.
 
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