Thread: thinking bout a new build

The days of being cpu bottlenecked every year and a half or so are sort of over. A good cpu can last years. The 3930k I was using was perfectly fine and it came out in 2011. If it wasn't for my mobo blowing up I would still be using it. This goes for higher end parts of course. If you bought a budget part in 2011 it would long since be a weak link in the chain.

That said, the reason I'm not still using the 3930k is because the socket (2011v1) that I was using on the Rampage IV Extreme motherboard is not the latest and as such, upgrade paths are pretty limited to older cpu's. It was worth my time and money to just replace the cpu and ram (ddr3 to ddr4) at the same time instead of going with an older motherboard and keeping the cpu/ram I had. The new board is a 2011v3 socket and incompatible with my older cpu. Since you are getting all the things and building a new machine, you should go with the latest socket (1151) because your upgrade options in the future will be less limited. It uses the higher bandwidth DDR4 ram, and assuming intel doesn't end-of-life it shortly (never any guarantees on that but it did get released just late last year) you should see new cpu's come out for that chipset for another year or two. If you stick with the 1150, you will be limited to chips that came out before Q3 of last year.

In short... go with the newer tech so you aren't artificially limiting your future upgrade paths.

(Though if you DID get the 1150, you would still be building a reasonably fast machine... just an old machine that's tech is past it's shelf life.)

Well I'm open to all suggestions I don't know anything aside fom making sure a mother board takes an intel or amd chip I'd like something that will run games good for 2 or more years but trying to keep it at 800 or under possibly 900 I'm on no hurry either so of I part it out over a few months or wait to take advantage of sales and what not

• 1 × ASUS Z170-A LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX Intel MotherboardItem #: N82E16813132566
  
• 1 × Intel Core i5-6600K 6M Skylake Quad-Core 3.5 GHz LGA 1151 91W BX80662I56600K Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 530Item #: N82E16819117561
  
• 1 × CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2400 (PC4 19200) Memory Kit Model CMK16GX4M2A2400C14Item #: N82E16820233752

Gonna have to pull the trigger on this soon first the psu then a stick of ram my computer is like me 1 organ after a other going bad probably have to skip out on a ssd till later on to lower prices not even sure if I should salvage anything from this machine hell even the DVD drive tries to take my finger when I put a disc in

Most of the things you would salvage would be low dollar stuff so I wouldn't bother. DVD drive is about 20 bux. HDD is well under 100 for a 1TB drive... Just build it from scratch.

Originally Posted by Kanati

• 1 × ASUS Z170-A LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX Intel MotherboardItem #: N82E16813132566
• 1 × Intel Core i5-6600K 6M Skylake Quad-Core 3.5 GHz LGA 1151 91W BX80662I56600K Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 530Item #: N82E16819117561
• 1 × CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2400 (PC4 19200) Memory Kit Model CMK16GX4M2A2400C14Item #: N82E16820233752

could you make these into clickable links i tried looking it up but it gives me mobos ranging from 100 to 300$

I still think dropping ANY money on a new CPU/Board is a complete waste. Your CPU and motherboard are fine. There is little to no difference between the performance of your current CPU and a Skylake CPU when it comes to gaming.

Here are some benchmarks to prove my point... posts pending (I have to reboot )

Here is the 3DMark Fire Strike Benchmark run on an i5-4690k at stock clocks with 16GB of DDR3 1600 RAM and an MSI GTX 1070 Gaming 8G edition at stock clocks. This is running on a bottom of the line 1150 Mini ITX motherboard that cost me only like $70 brand new.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 video card benchmark result - Intel Core i5-4690K,Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. H81N

Total Score - 13688
Graphics Test 1 - 89.87 FPS
Graphics Test 2 - 74.81 FPS
Physics Test - 24.69 FPS
Combined Test - 33.65 FPS

Now look at this benchmark of the PC I just built for my wife. I has an i7-6700K at stock clocks, with the same GTX 1070 as the rig I posted above, but this machine has 16GB DDR4 3000MHz.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-6700K,Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Z170MX-Gaming 5

Total Score - 15221
Graphics Test 1 - 90.29 FPS
Graphics Test 2 - 75.15 FPS
Physics Test - 39.82 FPS
Combined Test - 33.26 FPS

From a graphical standpoint, the FPS was almost identical. The only edge the 6700K had was in the heavy physics tests because the CPU clock speed is faster, and it has hyper threading since it is an i7. This is to be expected.

To put this in perspective, my friend just built a rig 5 months ago with an i7-5930K CPU, 32 GB DDR4, and a GTX 980ti, and he scored 15074. The CPU does NOT make much of a difference.

Sure, synthetic benchmarks may not represent in game performance for EVERY game, but I can tell you that the i5 system I had with a GTX 1070 was running Overwatch practically at a constant 144 FPS when we were at Quakecon. Your CPU and Motherboard are NOT what needs to be upgraded. I will say it again and again. Get a beefier GPU. It will make ALL the difference.

Oh, and if you actually click those 3DMark links, you can see that those results are indeed from my rigs. You can see that the motherboard I used on the i5 system was an H81 chipset, which is like the lowest of the low, and again proof that you don't need a high end motherboard if you are running a simple single GPU system and don't require a motherboard with the best bells and whistles. Hell, that motherboard doesn't even support PCIE 3.0, and it is still capable of delivering performance in the ballpark of the i7-6700K. I could likely close the gap a bit more if I would have put DDR3 2133 MHz memory in the i5 system, but I didn't have any available.

Kanati may disagree, but buying a high end motherboard, in my opinion, is pointless if you are not taking advantage of the PCIE lanes or something else the motherboard has. High end motherboards are geared more towards power users, and I would say that most gamers do not take advantage of the extra stuff they paid for on their motherboard.

Additionally, as a two time owner of Socket 2011 systems, I recommend against a Socket 2011 system unless you are doing some stupid shit like me and tossing in multiple GPUs, capture devices, multiple PCIE SSDs, or something silly and you need upwards of 40 PCIE lanes.