Need to make CPU decision

[PeggersXtreme]

Hi Guys,

So my X99 motherboard developed a fault with the bios chip and so Amazon asked me to return it for a full refund. Now I need to decide whether to stick with my 5960X or sell it and get the 6700k as I no longer do much rendering and mostly use my PC for gaming I am wondering if I would be better of getting the 6700k. I use 2-way Titan X's and never plan to do more than 2-way SLI as the benefits of more than 2 gpu's isn't usually worth the cost.

What do you guys think stick with 5960x or make the swap to the 6700k i'm trying to get some opinions on this before I go replace my x99 board. I have seen benchmarks where the 6700k is 10-15 fps ahead of the 4790k which I assume the 4790k would be similar performance to the 5960x when gaming.

 

[AlienALX]

I would stick to what you have, it's far more future proof. If you go Skylake then due to your GPUs you would need an expensive board any way, as you would need PLX.

The Skylake may be a little quicker in 4 thread games but in everything else it will be drastically slower. The 5960x should last you years and years.

 

[PeggersXtreme]

I would stick to what you have, it's far more future proof. If you go Skylake then due to your GPUs you would need an expensive board any way, as you would need PLX.

The Skylake may be a little quicker in 4 thread games but in everything else it will be drastically slower. The 5960x should last you years and years.

Someone else said that I could always upgrade to broadwell-e and probably get better performance over the 6700k and also my 5960x overclocks to 4.8ghz which isn't very common apparently?

 

[AlienALX]

No that isn't common. I believe they call that rocking horse droppings.

Broadwell is ever so slightly slower than Skylake. I would say 1-3%. Yes, there's a 10 core chip coming out that should just drop into your X99 board (with a bios update I would assume).

My main concern with the 6700k would be the lanes, and thus your choice of motherboard to get the PLX chip.

 

[PeggersXtreme]

No that isn't common. I believe they call that rocking horse droppings.

Broadwell is ever so slightly slower than Skylake. I would say 1-3%. Yes, there's a 10 core chip coming out that should just drop into your X99 board (with a bios update I would assume).

My main concern with the 6700k would be the lanes, and thus your choice of motherboard to get the PLX chip.

Yeah I think without a PLX chip the gpu's would run 8x 8x whereas on x99 with 40 pci lane cpu's you can run 16x 16x which I also use an m.2 ssd so I use 36 lanes in total but I think m.2 runs of the chipset on z170 at the moment I am leaning towards just getting a new x99 board but I cant decide between the x99 msi gaming 9 or the godlike which on paper doesn't seem a lot better whats the idea of two ethanet ports btw?

 

[JR23]

My main concern with the 6700k would be the lanes, and thus your choice of motherboard to get the PLX chip.

x8/x8 would be fine and the chipset still has a few lanes for an M.2 or whatnot.

If you've already got the quad channel DDR4 kit and an epic 5960X then getting another X99 is by far the best route to go down in all respects. Comparing a 4790k to a 6700k is not quite the same scenario as they run different memory. Sticking with 2011 leaves you with the option to add further GPU's or cards and to potentially upgrade to broadwell-E, neither of which are really going to benefit you right now.

JR

 

[PeggersXtreme]

x8/x8 would be fine and the chipset still has a few lanes for an M.2 or whatnot.

If you've already got the quad channel DDR4 kit and an epic 5960X then getting another X99 is by far the best route to go down in all respects. Comparing a 4790k to a 6700k is not quite the same scenario as they run different memory. Sticking with 2011 leaves you with the option to add further GPU's or cards and to potentially upgrade to broadwell-E, neither of which are really going to benefit you right now.

JR

Ok i'm leaning more towards the x99 route and if broawell-e does provides a bit of a performance boost maybe upgrade to that later on. Do you know what the point of dual ethanet ports are on some motherboards?

 

[AlienALX]

x8/x8 would be fine and the chipset still has a few lanes for an M.2 or whatnot.

http://ark.intel.com/products/88195/Intel-Core-i7-6700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_20-GHz

16 lanes total dude. You could run SLI but you would have no lanes left for anything else..

Do you know what the point of dual ethanet ports are on some motherboards?

The last time I ran dual ethernet it was to double up on performance.. So basically if your host PC had two ethernet cards and another PC had two ethernet cards you basically doubled the speed of the network.

Not sure if that's changed over the years, though, but back in the day my PC shop had X3 network cards in all of our rigs for 300mb network speeds.

 

[JR23]

http://ark.intel.com/products/88195/Intel-Core-i7-6700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_20-GHz

16 lanes total dude. You could run SLI but you would have no lanes left for anything else..

The Z170 chipset itself has further lanes available for SATA/SATA express/M.2 or to switch to conventional PCIe lanes, all board manufacturers implement them differently sometimes with switches on higher end boards to allow different configurations of SATA or M.2 when needed.

Z97 and X99 had them too but they were only PCIe2.0. My XPOWER runs PCIe3.0 x16/x8/x8/x8 with PCIe2.0 x2 lanes from the chipset available for a PCI based M.2 and the remainder dedicated the the extra SATA's.

JR

 

[AlienALX]

Ack, tripped up by Skylake yet again ! I thought it sounded a bit tight.

 

[JR23]

Ack, tripped up by Skylake yet again ! I thought it sounded a bit tight.

Yeah it's really odd and something to look out for because each motherboard uses them differently.


This is from the MSI Z170A XPOWER Titanium.

And an MSI X99A XPOWER AC for contrast.

JR

 

[AlienALX]

So pretty much every board is different? damn !

 

[JR23]

So pretty much every board is different? damn !

Yeah some are insane for example the ASRock Z170 OC Formula lets you disable nearly all of the SATA ports and run 3x M.2's at PCIe3.0 x4 while utilizing 4x lanes from the chipset for quadfire at x8/x4/x4/x4.

Not many at all support 3-way SLI I think the EVGA Z170 Classified with it's mad PLX chip capable of x8/x16/x8/x8 is the only exception to that. Obviously a lot of them 'technically' support quad-SLI should anyone have a pair of Titan Z's or 690's still around. The Maximus VIII Extreme is the least, extreme, of the flagships despite the price tag basically doing the same as the ASRock with a less impressive array of M.2 ports, although it does have U.2. Exactly what the Gigabyte G1 is capable of is quite misleading from the manual although from what I can tell it's roughly similar to the Extreme.

At the end of the day the crazy flagships with loads of slots and sometimes a few more than 16 lanes available to back them up are all a bit silly and X99 is still the one for 3/4-way SLI. However it's nice that the Z170 chipset offers a few extra lanes for M.2's when your running a 2-way CF/SLI setup without having to compromise the x8/x8. There are quite a few little niggles with skylake which in my opinion still make X99 the more enduring platform for high-end rigs.

JR

 

[Dicehunter]

Hi Guys,

So my X99 motherboard developed a fault with the bios chip and so Amazon asked me to return it for a full refund. Now I need to decide whether to stick with my 5960X or sell it and get the 6700k as I no longer do much rendering and mostly use my PC for gaming I am wondering if I would be better of getting the 6700k. I use 2-way Titan X's and never plan to do more than 2-way SLI as the benefits of more than 2 gpu's isn't usually worth the cost.

What do you guys think stick with 5960x or make the swap to the 6700k i'm trying to get some opinions on this before I go replace my x99 board. I have seen benchmarks where the 6700k is 10-15 fps ahead of the 4790k which I assume the 4790k would be similar performance to the 5960x when gaming.

Most CPU's are on par with eachother now ranging from the 4790K, 6700K etc... in games but as games become more multithtreaded you'll see the quad cores falling behind.

I'd stay with X99 especially if I had a 5960X and when Broadwell-E comes out you can drop that into your X99 mobo

Some good numbers here comparing 4770K, 6700K and 5930K -