i7-5960X or i7-6900K

[Lord Alibaski]

What would you do?

I need an upgrade but not in much of a rush, the next upgrade I will be doing will hopefully last me many years. I will mainly be using the system for video encoding not interested with games.

I can get the 5960X for £600 but do I wait for the 6900k! I have no idea on the price of the 6900k but if it's the same price as the 5960X is it worth waiting for.

 

[P4Clock]

Simple reply here pal.
Can you use all the threads?
When do you need to upgrade?

Asking if you should wait is stupid question if you need to upgrade then no dont wait, the question is do you need it NOW or can you wait?

 

[Lord Alibaski]

I did say m8 I would wait there is no rush I don't need it yet just that I'm getting a bit bored with the system I have at the minute. I'm using an old Q9950 at the moment and I find it slow even compared to a Core i5-4460 which I have tried.

I do a lot of encoding with Staxmedia using x264/x265.

 

[TheMorningStar]

If you need lots of cores but not interested in gaming why not go Xeon? Or do you like to do a little overclocking? I'm not sure what exactly you need for your workload or the prices of Xeons in comparison to the price/performance of the X/K x99 chips but thought it worth a mention.

 

[Lord Alibaski]

I did think about going down the Xeon road but I have no idea about price/performance compared to the Extreme series chips.

I won't be overclocking either.

Looking at the Xeon E5-2630 this runs at 600Ghz less but only £48 cheaper than the 5960X I can get.

 

[pandem0nium]

Broadwell-e (69xx) is due to launch in Q1 next year, so you could either wait and get that or buy Haswell-e now and upgrade the CPU if you deem it worthwhile after reading the reviews. The socket will be the same.

 

[nalla]

I do video encoding, and have tried with an i7 950 and a 3930, and the 3930 is absolute miles ahead due to the 6 cores and the quad channel ram, so I would suggest the 5960.

Just an example I encoded the same film in HD on both pcs, the quad core took nearly 3 hours, and the 6 core took just 43 mind, and the 5960 your after will be quicker still.