DDR4 - What do

wkingsnorth · 20 Aug 2015 at 10:48

So I'm planning an upgrade to a skylake i7, motherboard not decided but I'm going to need some DDR4, probably 16gb. What offers the most bang for the buck, and would there be much practical difference between speeds? PC will be general use, some gaming, a fair amount of programming for a Comp Sci degree

I was thinking the team group 2400mhz on offer this week

5960xNvidiaGamer · 20 Aug 2015 at 14:08

Which ever is on offer when you go to purchase. Little difference really between ram sets. You should pick up a 5820k rather than skylake.

Joe! · 20 Aug 2015 at 14:11

X99 is definitely the route to go if you planned on buying a 6700k, X99 offers 2 more cores and 4 more threads for the same price. But if for some reason you do go for 6700k, get the highest speed your budget allows. Skylake loves high speed RAM.

P4Clock · 20 Aug 2015 at 15:07

the super cheap set that OcUK sell is getting about 1% difference in performance over the more expensive stuff in the real world(not bench)

Buy X99 not 1151

Rikk82 · 20 Aug 2015 at 20:26

Rowlii said:
X99 is definitely the route to go if you planned on buying a 6700k, X99 offers 2 more cores and 4 more threads for the same price. But if for some reason you do go for 6700k, get the highest speed your budget allows. Skylake loves high speed RAM.

Does that apply to the 6600k as well? (didn't want to presume).

Joe! · 21 Aug 2015 at 01:17

I have only gone by what 8pack has said about the 6700k, I can't imagine it's too much different for the 6600k.

Dave2150 · 21 Aug 2015 at 05:35

wkingsnorth said:
So I'm planning an upgrade to a skylake i7, motherboard not decided but I'm going to need some DDR4, probably 16gb. What offers the most bang for the buck, and would there be much practical difference between speeds? PC will be general use, some gaming, a fair amount of programming for a Comp Sci degree

I was thinking the team group 2400mhz on offer this week

I'm running a 6700k, awesome chip that runs fast and cool, also easy to overclock.

If you're just gaming on the PC, then Skylake is better than X99 IMO. No games really take advantage of 6 cores on x99, and no developer in their right mind will develop a game for 6 cores, when 0.1% of the userbase own a x99 system.

We also saw the first DX12 game (ashes of the singularity) release their benchmark tool, which shows Skylake to outperform X99.

I'd recommend 3000Mhz for Skylake, it's not too expensive, I got a Corsair 16GB 3000Mhz kit for £130 delivered on Ocuk.

Rikk82 · 21 Aug 2015 at 08:07

Dave2150 said:
I'm running a 6700k, awesome chip that runs fast and cool, also easy to overclock.

If you're just gaming on the PC, then Skylake is better than X99 IMO. No games really take advantage of 6 cores on x99, and no developer in their right mind will develop a game for 6 cores, when 0.1% of the userbase own a x99 system.

We also saw the first DX12 game (ashes of the singularity) release their benchmark tool, which shows Skylake to outperform X99.

I'd recommend 3000Mhz for Skylake, it's not too expensive, I got a Corsair 16GB 3000Mhz kit for £130 delivered on Ocuk.

Those 3000 MHz DDR4 Corsair kits are out of stock at the moment. The word is (when I spoke to OcUK) more should hopefully be incoming by middle of next week.

Simon Belmont · 22 Aug 2015 at 15:28

Dave2150 said:
I'm running a 6700k, awesome chip that runs fast and cool, also easy to overclock.

If you're just gaming on the PC, then Skylake is better than X99 IMO. No games really take advantage of 6 cores on x99, and no developer in their right mind will develop a game for 6 cores, when 0.1% of the userbase own a x99 system.

We also saw the first DX12 game (ashes of the singularity) release their benchmark tool, which shows Skylake to outperform X99.

I'd recommend 3000Mhz for Skylake, it's not too expensive, I got a Corsair 16GB 3000Mhz kit for £130 delivered on Ocuk.

This^

Don't see the point of x99 if your a gamer. Skylake is faster, Cooler and very easy to OC. 4.5ghz here without any volts.

Caracus2k · 24 Aug 2015 at 15:08

Simon Belmont said:
This^

Don't see the point of x99 if your a gamer. Skylake is faster, Cooler and very easy to OC. 4.5ghz here without any volts.

I'll give one reason - platform longevity. On past performance people tend to be able to stick with the enthusiast -e platforms longer. Plenty of people on this forum still rocking x58 quads 920's etc which still perform well with modern gpu's in crossfire or sli. Not so many people rocking the contemporary 1156 socket i7's that were not much cheaper at the time. And the people on nehalem x58 chips have a great cheap upgrade path with a cheap hex core.

I'll take the potential of 40 pci-e lanes, quad channel memory and a bigger socket with more upgrade potential over a marginal improvement in ipc and tdp with consumer skylake any day. I'm not just a gamer and will often repurpose my former high end rigs down the line. A few years down the line if I wanted to I can drop a second hand 18core hyper threaded monster into my board ala the Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3 CPU. You will be stuck with a 4c 8t CPU with z170.

So for 'general' use I would recommend x99 with a 5820k and whatever 2400 kit is cheapest