CPU/Mobo refresh - first in 7 years!

Phil99

Phil99

Phil99

Soldato
Joined
29 Oct 2004
Posts
10,884
Hi all,

My Q6600 is on its last useful legs - it's done me proud for 7 years, but I could almost hear the howls of pain from it when I tried to play the SW:BF beta last month. It's finally time for an upgrade :D

I've recently bought a GTX 970, rest of the spec I think is fine and I want to keep as-is where possible (650W Antec TruePower PSU, Fractal R2 case, Xonar D2 PCI sound card, BluRay drive, SSD)

Can I do any better for the money than the below spec?

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £494.62
(includes shipping: £11.10)
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I was originally looking at 6700K, but the prices are hilariously high these days so looking at the 4790K instead.

I have no real personal preference over the mobo/RAM/cooler. All three were selected near enough at random.

Any thoughts? Primary usage at the moment will be gaming, but I've selected the i7 for the extra speed/virtual cores for the times when I may need to run some fairly resource-intensive programs for work/own research.

Thanks!!
 
How old is your psu mate? might seem fine but if its getting on could cause issues down the line. as you said skylake prices are stupid atm like £390 for 6700k? and £270 for the 6700 whats that about.. just because its not overclockable?

personally I'd try to go ddr4 if you can though for a little future proofing and try for a motherboard with usb 3.1/m.2.

Personally i think a 6700 none k would be completely fine for your uses, just limits future performance upgrades (overclocking)
 
joeyjojo said:
I'd personally get a 4690K and 8 G memory but it's your money.
Click to expand...

If it was a purely gaming build then I'd absolutely be going for 4690k and 8GB. It's probably not a huge difference from 4690k to 4790k for the other purposes, but potentially the HT is worthwhile.

powelly2010 said:
How old is your psu mate? might seem fine but if its getting on could cause issues down the line. as you said skylake prices are stupid atm like £390 for 6700k? and £270 for the 6700 whats that about.. just because its not overclockable?

personally I'd try to go ddr4 if you can though for a little future proofing and try for a motherboard with usb 3.1/m.2.

Personally i think a 6700 none k would be completely fine for your uses, just limits future performance upgrades (overclocking)
Click to expand...

Just found the order history for the PSU. It's a "Antec TruePower New Modular 650W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply" from 2011. At the moment it's powering a Q6600 @ 3.2GHz and a GTX 970 without any issues, I'm guessing that at least at stock most modern CPUs won't draw too much more power? Or is there anything else I need to take into account in terms of PSUs in modern systems (If you can't tell already I'm a bit out of the loop :o)

I hadn't thought of the non-k 6700, will take a look. Is DDR4 much of an advantage over DDR3, or is the thought purely for future-proofing as you mentioned?

The board I linked to has:

"1 x M.2 Socket 3, with M Key, type 2260/2280 storage devices support (both SATA & PCIE mode)"

I think M.2 with PCI-E support is the faster one, right? (or not?) I did have an eye on moving to M.2. at some point in the future as my current SSD is relatively small.

Thanks for all the input so far, very useful! :)
 
yeah that psu should be fine in all honesty. M.2 3 x4 is the faster type yes.
With ddr4 i'd say at the moment its more of a future proofing thing, who knows though something could come out in the future that takes advantage of it :p
 
At a glance, I'd just stick with an i5 and stick with the 16GB ram. Not sure if you need a CPU cooler other than the stock one unless you're gonna OC.

To be honest, I think you can go with a 6th-gen i5 (and compatible mobo) for under the combined price of your current cpu and mobo selection.
 
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