Soldato
Hi Guys
Bit of a wierd one here, but asking honest opinions. I love tinkering, I love optimising within reason a platform to get the most I can out of it so I know I'm not leaving chips in the sand so to speak. Now my backup desktop machine at the moment is the bottom one in my signature. (5930K/16GB 2400MHz/3070)
The backup machine also doubles as the Bedroom HTPC/Gamer for me and the wife to play on, especially if we want to play a PC title not Xbox/Switch, so I do like to keep it moderately up to date. The TV its connected to is 4K, but also supports 1080p120.
Recently I managed to grab an RTX 3070 FE new, at RRP, so went for it, given how crazy the last few years have been, the fact that if anything RRP will likely go up again next generation, and the fact that frankly the 3070 will remain usable for a number of years (plus the wife agreed, which can sometimes be difficult, so that alone basically made it a done deal).
It also handily steps on the 2080 I have in my laptop, even with that one being Max P, whilst running considerably quieter.
The 3070 is lovely, a substantial upgrade over the 1080 that used to be in there, but the downside is it is showing clearly the limitations of the x99/Haswell-E platform, which frankly is still fairly impressive for 2014/5 kit. Some stuff runs literally twice as fast or more (and I suspect even that might be being capped a bit), compared to the 1080 that used to be in there, whilst other stuff has barely changed due to the CPU/Memory bottlenecks. In line with this, and going back to what I said previously about optimising a platform, I had a look around and note that 6850Ks really seem to have come down in price in the last year or so, I can now pick one up for around £60-70, maybe less. They were double that when I picked up the 5930K.
On top of the price changes, my 5930K is not a great clocker; its running 4.3GHz so not disastrous, but I can't really get it any higher than that, even with a 240MM AIO, it simply gets too hot and unstable so I hit the point of it not being worth throwing more at for example a better cooler; I don't have a golden sample at all, rather a much more average one; and it also doesn't seem to like anything much faster than about 2400MHz DDR4. Perhaps not a surprise as it was first gen DDR4 IMC.
SO, given I don't have a particularly spectacular 5930K, my thought was to grab a 6850K for around £60 (as opposed to a cheaper 6800K as I understand those tend to be a lot more variable on silicon quality and they're not that much cheaper on eBay etc), and try to get hold of 32GB of 3000-3200 MHz RAM (4x8 to run quad channel) at a reasonable price, sub £100. I understand the 6850Ks are also not known to be spectacular clockers either, especially as they were first 14nm, but a lot of them will still hit 4.2-4.4GHz with a 240mm AIO, and as time and production weeks went by, 14nm improved so that some examples actually will do 4.5-4.6 or higher if I got lucky. They also as a whole typically had much better DDR4 IMCs that open the door to move to 3000-3200MT DDR4 without any major headaches.
The thought though being that the 5-10% IPC bump of Broadwell means I only really need to hit 4.1GHz to match the 4.3 of my 5930K, and if I got 4.2GHz or higher, I have immediately got a bottleneck alleviating performance bump there, whilst the better Broadwell IMC will allow me to RAM bump to 3000+ from 2400, which will double up on the improvements and definately help raise the bottleneck there, especially for modern titles, and said 3000MHz+ DDR4 RAM kit would be considerably more useful to me if I was to change the platform to something more modern later. The machine would basically then 'live' as is, with me happy I'd got more or less the best out of it until I did an entire system refresh. I'd then look to sell on the 5930K and old RAM to net a bit of the investment back.
Looking at some relatively recent Youtube benches and videos to consider options, it looks like a decently overclocked 68**K will still hold its own or even win in games in a fight against Zen 1/2, which still cost more second hand, and would necessitate a platform change. Something like an 8700K would take away the variability of relying on the overclock and clock higher, but again also necessitate a platform change, and the 8700ks themselves are still going for considerably more, £150+. Realistically beyond clock speed/RAM support, Intel didn't really boost IPC much after Broadwell until 12th gen arrived, it was all power/clock/RAM speed bumps so as long as I'm comfortably over 4Ghz, 6c, I'm not giving much away staying with Broadwell, maybe PCI-E 4.0, but that's no big deal, and I do already have NVME Gen 3x4 support for up to 2 drives, so a newer platform won't benefit me there either.
Between RAM, and hoping for a reasonable OC on 6850K, I'm hoping I'd basically uplift overall performance, especially on the mimimum end by a good 10-20%, which'd allow the 3070 to do it's thing without the CPU/Mem getting in the way as much, but it would be throwing maybe £100-£150 at bringing an old platform up to essentially it's gaming peak; but I'm not sure there is anything else really worth doing at a similar price level, not without splurging considerably more on a newer platform, which would require the RAM change anyway, and then have additional headaches with for example AIO fittings etc.
This all being said, the above is the plan. My budget is very limited, as the wife will balk if I throw too much money around, especially after the 3070, but it does mean I don't have to deal with any worries about new motherboards, cooler not fitting etc, its a fairly easy inplace swap out, that should allow the 3070 to perform to it's potential a bit more.
The question is, is it really worth it, or more accurately, is there anything more worthwhile to spend on? Is my desire to get the best out of what I already have, or to go with a simple upgrade path, blinding me to a better option?
Bit of a wierd one here, but asking honest opinions. I love tinkering, I love optimising within reason a platform to get the most I can out of it so I know I'm not leaving chips in the sand so to speak. Now my backup desktop machine at the moment is the bottom one in my signature. (5930K/16GB 2400MHz/3070)
The backup machine also doubles as the Bedroom HTPC/Gamer for me and the wife to play on, especially if we want to play a PC title not Xbox/Switch, so I do like to keep it moderately up to date. The TV its connected to is 4K, but also supports 1080p120.
Recently I managed to grab an RTX 3070 FE new, at RRP, so went for it, given how crazy the last few years have been, the fact that if anything RRP will likely go up again next generation, and the fact that frankly the 3070 will remain usable for a number of years (plus the wife agreed, which can sometimes be difficult, so that alone basically made it a done deal).
It also handily steps on the 2080 I have in my laptop, even with that one being Max P, whilst running considerably quieter.
The 3070 is lovely, a substantial upgrade over the 1080 that used to be in there, but the downside is it is showing clearly the limitations of the x99/Haswell-E platform, which frankly is still fairly impressive for 2014/5 kit. Some stuff runs literally twice as fast or more (and I suspect even that might be being capped a bit), compared to the 1080 that used to be in there, whilst other stuff has barely changed due to the CPU/Memory bottlenecks. In line with this, and going back to what I said previously about optimising a platform, I had a look around and note that 6850Ks really seem to have come down in price in the last year or so, I can now pick one up for around £60-70, maybe less. They were double that when I picked up the 5930K.
On top of the price changes, my 5930K is not a great clocker; its running 4.3GHz so not disastrous, but I can't really get it any higher than that, even with a 240MM AIO, it simply gets too hot and unstable so I hit the point of it not being worth throwing more at for example a better cooler; I don't have a golden sample at all, rather a much more average one; and it also doesn't seem to like anything much faster than about 2400MHz DDR4. Perhaps not a surprise as it was first gen DDR4 IMC.
SO, given I don't have a particularly spectacular 5930K, my thought was to grab a 6850K for around £60 (as opposed to a cheaper 6800K as I understand those tend to be a lot more variable on silicon quality and they're not that much cheaper on eBay etc), and try to get hold of 32GB of 3000-3200 MHz RAM (4x8 to run quad channel) at a reasonable price, sub £100. I understand the 6850Ks are also not known to be spectacular clockers either, especially as they were first 14nm, but a lot of them will still hit 4.2-4.4GHz with a 240mm AIO, and as time and production weeks went by, 14nm improved so that some examples actually will do 4.5-4.6 or higher if I got lucky. They also as a whole typically had much better DDR4 IMCs that open the door to move to 3000-3200MT DDR4 without any major headaches.
The thought though being that the 5-10% IPC bump of Broadwell means I only really need to hit 4.1GHz to match the 4.3 of my 5930K, and if I got 4.2GHz or higher, I have immediately got a bottleneck alleviating performance bump there, whilst the better Broadwell IMC will allow me to RAM bump to 3000+ from 2400, which will double up on the improvements and definately help raise the bottleneck there, especially for modern titles, and said 3000MHz+ DDR4 RAM kit would be considerably more useful to me if I was to change the platform to something more modern later. The machine would basically then 'live' as is, with me happy I'd got more or less the best out of it until I did an entire system refresh. I'd then look to sell on the 5930K and old RAM to net a bit of the investment back.
Looking at some relatively recent Youtube benches and videos to consider options, it looks like a decently overclocked 68**K will still hold its own or even win in games in a fight against Zen 1/2, which still cost more second hand, and would necessitate a platform change. Something like an 8700K would take away the variability of relying on the overclock and clock higher, but again also necessitate a platform change, and the 8700ks themselves are still going for considerably more, £150+. Realistically beyond clock speed/RAM support, Intel didn't really boost IPC much after Broadwell until 12th gen arrived, it was all power/clock/RAM speed bumps so as long as I'm comfortably over 4Ghz, 6c, I'm not giving much away staying with Broadwell, maybe PCI-E 4.0, but that's no big deal, and I do already have NVME Gen 3x4 support for up to 2 drives, so a newer platform won't benefit me there either.
Between RAM, and hoping for a reasonable OC on 6850K, I'm hoping I'd basically uplift overall performance, especially on the mimimum end by a good 10-20%, which'd allow the 3070 to do it's thing without the CPU/Mem getting in the way as much, but it would be throwing maybe £100-£150 at bringing an old platform up to essentially it's gaming peak; but I'm not sure there is anything else really worth doing at a similar price level, not without splurging considerably more on a newer platform, which would require the RAM change anyway, and then have additional headaches with for example AIO fittings etc.
This all being said, the above is the plan. My budget is very limited, as the wife will balk if I throw too much money around, especially after the 3070, but it does mean I don't have to deal with any worries about new motherboards, cooler not fitting etc, its a fairly easy inplace swap out, that should allow the 3070 to perform to it's potential a bit more.
The question is, is it really worth it, or more accurately, is there anything more worthwhile to spend on? Is my desire to get the best out of what I already have, or to go with a simple upgrade path, blinding me to a better option?
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