So I finally bought my upgrade.

[AlienALX]

After having the 5820k for two years I finally decided to look into upgrades properly yesterday. I considered Ryzen, and put a bundle together on Amazon. The only small problem with Ryzen is you really need fast ram which I did not already have. And with ram prices as they are it ended up making the bundle expensive. The total price for a Ryzen 1700, B350 Strix and 16gb Corsair Vengeance 3000 (just using that as an example, Gskill is more) was £517 and some change.

So I started looking around for other options. 5960x is making over £500, so that really wasn't an option. Knowing my luck I would get an early one that could not run above stock on my cooler (120mm aio). Then I found a ten core Xeon that really got me thinking. It was only £230, but the clock speed was awful. Something stupid like 2.2ghz. I looked an Cinebench scores and it was worse than the Ryzen 1700. Back to the drawing board.

So then I found an 18 core E7 Xeon for around £400 or so. Awesome I thought. Then I realised it did not work in any desktop boards. So I looked for a workstation board, but the only boards that were coming up were 4 sockets and cost more than my house.

I went to bed frustrated. I had spent about six hours researching. Then in bed I realised that the newer Broadwell EP chips that released in Jan 2016 may work in my existing board. So I got out of bed around 10pm and came back to the PC so I could check compatibility. I found a Xeon E5 2680 V4 (Broadwell EP) with 14 cores and 28 threads for £369. I then went and checked out a few motherboards, starting with the X99 SOC champion from Gigabyte for £160. It worked.. However, the board is black and orange and orange and blue makes me think of mould. Eventually I found an MSI X99 Plus that again supported the CPU, but this time I found it cheap. £117 "like new" on Amazon Warehouse.

So I pulled the trigger on both.

Here is the Cinebench 11.5 score for a 5960x @ 5.1ghz

And the CPU I bought, which is 120w

I ran it on my stock 5820k and scored 12 lol.

From what I can work out in Cinebench it scores over 2000 points.

* what's weird is that I already have a E5 2680 ! but mine is a V2. But yeah, thought that was kinda freaky.

 

[Dicehunter]

Very cool, Although isn't a max boost of 3.30GHz a little low ? I know applications that are core hungry don't really care about GHz but games sure do.

 

[AlienALX]

Very cool, Although isn't a max boost of 3.30GHz a little low ? I know applications that are core hungry don't really care about GHz but games sure do.

I thought about that. Max boost is 3.1ghz (it's an ES) on four cores. I am currently running a 5820k stock (I've really had no need to overclock it tbh) and my 5820k boosts to around 3.4 on all 6, IIRC. However, the gain from Broadwell E should close that gap quite a bit, so it should, in theory, offer the same sort of stock gaming performance as my 5820k.

Once it threads however? yeah, forget the 5820k. It's over three times faster when threading. For £369 you will not find more power tbh. 14 core boost is 2.8ghz. The new 12 core Skylake E boosts to 2.9 over all 12 cores. Let's see how they compare And of course what this new 12 core beast costs, because I would guess stock peformance on both would be around the same considering mine has two more cores, four more threads etc.

I'm kinda betting here dude. Betting on core support. However, unlike back in my Piledriver days where I was praying more than betting* I think this time I've got it right. If Intel are about to launch their 12 core AMD are about to launch their 16 core I think support is pretty much a given now dude.

*I was kinda hoping this would all happen sooner. Seems not. However, my PD was amazing for Virtualisation, which none of the K series chips support. So I used to have fun setting up like 4 VMs on my machine and running four operating systems on one desktop I can run OSX and everything, so yeah, I think I bought wisely.

I bought a 180gb M.2 SATA 6gbps SSD last week and the MSI board I got cheap supports it and will boot from it. Not exactly NVME, but bang tidy dude. So yeah, it's an upgrade in more ways than one, and I look forward to seeing if I can up the base by a few mhz.

Edit. Oh yeah dude, new CPU = 40 lanes. Massive upgrade over 5820k which has about two.. My Titan X is currently running at X8 PCIE. So yeah, will get a small boost from X16 too

 

[Excalabur50]

Nice one dude

 

[AlienALX]

Thanks man. Been over two years since I bought a new CPU. Have already set everything up I need (spare PSU, spare GPU etc) so I can fire it up on the bench. Will get Windows on, then do the swap

 

[AlienALX]

CPU came at 9AM. Didn't waste any time.

It wouldn't boot after crapping myself for a bit I let it do what it was doing. I would strongly imagine it had a CPU in it before and I had totally forgotten to clear CMOS. So I did that..

Installed 10 Pro

And then...

 

[Dicehunter]

Very cool, I managed just over 1800 with my 1800X ^_^

You could do some very nice folding at home with that thing

 

[AlienALX]

Man, putting it into the rig was a nightmare. I literally had to gut the insides, including all of the mods etc. Just sorting out the drivers now

Edit. Wow. Crapped my pants !

I started setting up software etc, then it threw a spaz. Like the mouse was jumping, stopping etc. Then I got a BSOD.. Uh..Ohhhh.

Kept happening had three BSODs. Then I opened Device Manager and it was jumping about everywhere. Still couldn't figure out what was going on, but the BSOD gave a name and when I looked it up it said it was a faulty GPU. FFS.

Then, as if by magic, I realise that the LED is blinking on the Oculus DK2. It is blinking perfectly in time with the stuttering. Installed the drivers, problem solved. But man, that scared me.