6700K vs 5930K

Davva2004

New member
Hi all,

Speccing up a client build and I've hit a conundrum - do I go for Z170 i7-6700K or X99 i7-5930K?

He wants two Fury X cards and will be using the rig primarily for gaming on the Acer 34" curved Freesync monitor. We will also be fitting an M.2 SSD.

Speeds wise, both CPUs will be at 4.5ghz and cooled by the Corsair H110i GT.

Keeping everything else the same and only changing the CPU and motherboard (both MSI Krait motherboards, it's a black and white theme build) the Z170 build is £200 cheaper than the X99 build. That's a significant saving, but it halves the PCIE lanes available.

With a Z170 6700K build, each GPU would get PCIE 3.0 x8 and 4 lanes go to the M.2 SSD. With X99 5930K, both GPUs get x16 lanes. Seeing as the Fury cards "talk" to each other over PCIE, I'm keen to ensure they have all the bandwidth they could ever need.

My client trusts my judgement and I have talked through the options with him, he's happy to pay the extra if I consider it worth it. I just want to sanity check my decision as I'd hate to waste his money on something that will have zero performance impact.
 
if he's got the money, get the x99, with the whole dx12 thing, more cores = more cores :D
 
You could just settle for 5820K which is about the same price as the 6700K. For SLI setup this CPU will run 1 * 16X and 1 * 8X, that leaves 1 * 4X free for the M.2 SSD. However it might not overclock as well, but that's a lottery anyway.
 
Pretty sure M.2 only gets x4 lanes from the controller anyway(just looked it up and yes they only get x4). So either way I don't believe it would matter. Speed wise both are pretty much identical in the DX12 benches I have seen so far which means stronger IPC is probably more beneficial than say more cores, however that's only with that specific game. It obviously will vary.

Really what it comes down to is features on the board/chipset. The Z170 boards have dedicated PCI lanes for M.2 and other uses. So it won't effect GPU performance. While Fury X in Xfire will require a lot of bandwidth, I don't think any combination of cards(in 2 way config) will exceed that limit. Should be fine there. I also just remebered and article on how Intel upgraded their PCI speed connectivity to the newer standard that increases the speed from 5GT/s to 7GT/s.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9485/...-asrock-asus-gigabyte-msi-ecs-evga-supermicro
Should read up on it, good read.

X99 just has more dedicated CPU pci lanes. That's really the only difference I can tell excluding more cores. It also has less features on the board.

IMO get the 6700k. I believe its the better option
 
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