Upgrade from Q6600

Participant

Participant

Participant

Caporegime
Joined
13 May 2003
Posts
34,559
Location
Warwickshire
Hi fellas

I'm finally going to upgrade my s775 system. The usage will be mainly watching videos, internet, Fallout 4 (only game I currently play), and Photoshop.

I tend to have lots of different apps open at once and don't want to have to, for example, close down PS if I fancy firing up FO4.

I have a 40" 4k screen, but it wasn't purchased for gaming but for screen real estate, so I'm happy gaming at 1440p for the time being.

My budget is tricky because I'm happy to go with X99 or Z170 if it's worth the outlay over Z97 (I already have 8GB of DDR3), however if for my purposes if I can just get a Devil's Canyon bundle for £250 and a GTX970/980, then I'd be happy to save a load of cash.

Grateful for your thoughts!
 
Participant said:
Hi fellas
My budget is tricky because I'm happy to go with X99 or Z170 if it's worth the outlay over Z97 (I already have 8GB of DDR3), however if for my purposes if I can just get a Devil's Canyon bundle for £250 and a GTX970/980
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Honestly I would save the money and not bother with x99 or z170.

Get a z97 board like the ASUS Z97-P and an i5-2500k for some solid overclocking :)

If you aren't interested in overclocking then get a H81 board with a standard i5-2500 or 3570.
 
Participant said:
I have a 40" 4k screen, but it wasn't purchased for gaming but for screen real estate, so I'm happy gaming at 1440p for the time being.
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I would game at 1080 and not 1440, you will hit more crashes and freezes because 1440 doesn't scale as well into 2160 as 1080 does.

I would recommend a GTX 970 over the 980 all year long, you get so much better value, the 980 performance increase is really not worth its price increase.

You could alternatively get a R9 390 which is similar to the 970 in performance and price, the main difference is team red vs team green :p
 
ExRayTed said:
What case and power supply do you have at the moment? I'm assuming you just need the basics if possible- CPU/mobo/GPU?
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Case is a Lian-Li PC-7 PLUS (I think that's what it's called), which I'm very happy with. PSU is a Corsair HX520, which has also been flawless.

That's correct, I just need the CPU, mobo, and GPU (and maybe PSU and memory, depending).

Frank Jeagar said:
Honestly I would save the money and not bother with x99 or z170.

Get a z97 board like the ASUS Z97-P and an i5-2500k for some solid overclocking :)

If you aren't interested in overclocking then get a H81 board with a standard i5-2500 or 3570.
Click to expand...

Frank Jeagar said:
I would game at 1080 and not 1440, you will hit more crashes and freezes because 1440 doesn't scale as well into 2160 as 1080 does.

I would recommend a GTX 970 over the 980 all year long, you get so much better value, the 980 performance increase is really not worth its price increase.

You could alternatively get a R9 390 which is similar to the 970 in performance and price, the main difference is team red vs team green :p
Click to expand...

Thanks for this. I'm definitely interested in overclocking and I want a CPU that won't be a limiting factor for a good few years.

So I'm thinking

- 4690k
- Z97 board ~£100 (ideally with M.2)
- 970 or 390

Will my PSU be OK with that then?
 
Your existing PSU will be fine with the parts you're considering. I'm also inclined to agree that a good 4690K bundle will be more than enough. I'd personally pick Nvidia right now - had much better experience with their drivers. Card performance between AMD and Nvidia are too equivalent at that price point to affect your decision.
 
Participant said:
So I'm thinking

- 4690k
- Z97 board ~£100 (ideally with M.2)
- 970 or 390

Will my PSU be OK with that then?
Click to expand...

That build would be great for 1080 gaming (60fps with ease in most cases), I'd recommend the 970 I think they are fantastic and your PSU would be fine for this since the 900 series GPUs use so little power! :)

If you ever want to up your resolution then SLI the 970 and you can go up to 4K on max settings on a lot of titles.
 
Cheers guys, I think I've landed on an answer then.

Will probably order a little closer to Christmas, on the off chance that things will have dipped a little further by then.
 
Having used a hexcore, personally I wouldn't be investing now, in a quadcore CPU.
 
What dessimpson said, especially for the desired use of video playback/streaming and gaming a quad is more than enough.

This type of use would benefit more from the higher core clocks of 1150 quad cores than from the increased number of cores in 2011 CPUs.
 
dessimpson said:
I went from 3770k to 5930k and see absolutely no difference in performance.
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Lol, it depends on you use case. If you are exclusively playing games then a 5930k was a pointless buy.

If you are using a load of software in the background maybe virtual machines some photoshop and vegas ect and then want to get game without closing them as the OP does the more cores you have the better and a hex core shines in multi tasking when side by side with a quad core. A hex core would start to clog up having a few intense programs running.

Again it really depends on how the person is going to use it.
 
harry5522 said:
If you are using a load of software in the background maybe virtual machines some photoshop and vegas ect and then want to get game without closing them as the OP does the more cores you have the better and a hex core shines in multi tasking when side by side with a quad core. A hex core would start to clog up having a few intense programs running.

Again it really depends on how the person is going to use it.
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I don't think a quad core would bog down running PS and a game at the same time. Yes more than 4 cores would give an advantage in multitasking, but I still think that in this situation higher clock speeds would be a greater benefit than more cores.

X99 CPUs are far more aimed at things like video editing where rendering actually benefits massively from more cores and more threads.
 
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