Well Zen APUs are slated for next year but i wouldnt hold my breath for HBM APUs that soon.
And i would like to clarify a bit about monitors and resolutions. There comes a time when something is good enough and it doesnt make much sense to upgrade it.
IMO that happened to monitors. 22-27 inch, 1080p is pretty much all thats needed. When people use computer thes usually sit ~0,60-1m from the monitor so ~27 inch is at a limit of usability. And 1080 still works fine for that size.
Analogy would be cars. Vast majority of cards have 4-5 seats. Going above that is pointless as car with 4-5 seats is good enough. Buying car with more seats thats more expencive makes no sense to most people. There are cars wit more seats (vans and busses) but those are specialized (think of screens for designers)
Thats why AMD went with initiative (and NVidia naturally followed) to actually increase quality of picture of such screens by finally bringing HDR - example how to improve quality of picture without needing more powerful GPUs/bigger screen/higher resolution.
even VR is 1080p(x2)
problem with higher resolutions is that pixel throughtput (needed power of GPU) grows exponentionally.
Also there were many tests done that proves that most people cant even tell the difference between 1080p and 4k in realistic use.
"We also found that 60-inches is about as small a screen as you’ll want to go with 4K, as anything smaller from a typical viewing distance has a much lower payoff."
Also there were many tests done that proves that most people cant even tell the difference between 1080p and 4k in realistic use.
"We also found that 60-inches is about as small a screen as you’ll want to go with 4K, as anything smaller from a typical viewing distance has a much lower payoff."
Can you link a source for that study?
I think that's about viewing movies. Computer screens are usually viewed from very close and used to view much smaller elements like text, so that increasing resolution makes a difference.
IMO that happened to monitors. 22-27 inch, 1080p is pretty much all thats needed. When people use computer thes usually sit ~0,60-1m from the monitor so ~27 inch is at a limit of usability. And 1080 still works fine for that size.
Hmm, I don't know.
I certainly miss the vertical real estate going from 1920x1200 down to 1920x1080, and that's only 120 pixels or so. Right now my gaming setup consists of two 1920x1200 displays - I'm anxiously wanting to upgrade them, but have been waiting on OLED to mature and/or GPUs to be able to comfortably drive 4K. My son games on a 27" 1080p display.
And I can definitely tell the difference in my MBP's Retina display over a non-Retina - that's not because of real estate availability, it's because of PPI. And when Apple's mobile devices moved to Retina - when they first came out I thought "who cares, it's not increasing the screen space" - which is true. Except it does make a huge difference there, and now I can't stand to use the older non-Retina models.
Now I will say, there is some diminishing return on PPI, Apple seems to think it's somewhere around 300 ppi. But a 27" 1080p monitor at ~80 PPI is definitely not at that point for me.
I do agree that size-wize, there is a limit. 24" seems to be about perfect for me, sitting 2-3' away from the displays. Much larger than that and I have to start moving my head to see the entire screen, and I'm lazy and don't like that, although now that I'm getting older, normal sized fonts (12pt and smaller) are getting hard to read at that size and distance. I think my son's 27" is just a bit too large for how close I sit to the display, but I may end up bumping up to that size when I upgrade just to make text a bit larger without losing out on real estate.
Quizzical said:
Get a lower clocked Core i5-6400 and you pay huge price premium for a part that is a downgrade from the Core i7-3770 that he could drop into his current rig.
Please attach that ridiculous graph of price/frequency so others who have not seen it yet might have a good laugh...
Quizzical said:
Get a lower clocked Core i5-6400 and you pay huge price premium for a part that is a downgrade from the Core i7-3770 that he could drop into his current rig.
Please attach that made up graph of price/frequency so others who have not seen it yet might have a good laugh...
Breaking these up between families, because you can draw a direct relative performance comparison with just clock speed within a given family - but that obviously isn't true crossing family boundaries. But, I'll pick a standard benchmark (Passmark), and we'll see where it falls in line with that.
Not bothering with Pentiums & Celerons, because...
There is obviously a cost associated with the ability to overclock, it's not so pronounced in the i7 line when you look out to the Price/Passmark (because the higher stock clocks), but you can see it pretty pronounced in the i5. Which would lead me to say: If your getting an i7, just get the K edition. If your getting an i5, be really sure you want to overclock before getting the K edition.
It looks like with the lower end chips, Gdemami is right - going down the line provides a savings benefit vs performance. It's a matter of finding a chip that's fast enough to do what you want in the first place. I tend not to recommend these to gamers, because while they may be fast enough today, they probably won't be fast enough tomorrow.
The i5 line though, apart from the K edition, they are pretty close. with the sweet spot in the middle. You do pay more for a slower performing chip with the 6400 - which would lean toward's Quiz's argument (and mine, I often give the same advice). But the delta between all of them isn't much - I wouldn't call it a huge premium if you are only considering Intel chips. But there is AMD to consider, and if you are going down from a $213 to a $180 CPU because of budget, then maybe there are better ways to stretch that budget than paying the Intel tax.
Now, these are calculated based on MSRP from Intel - not actual street price - and only for Skylakes, although Intel has been pretty consistent in their CPU pricing and tiers. A good deal on any given day could sway your decision. And the performance metric is based on a benchmark, not actual gaming performance, so there is that to consider as well.
You can OC any Skylake CPU so discussion "faster i3/i5/i7" is pretty pointless as they all OC the same
Most people don't OC them.
Nowadays a good gaming computer will get steady 60 FPS even without any OC, and the expected life of the parts is maybe 4-5 years before need to replace. In those conditions, I think for most people with day jobs it's not worth it to overclock. The reliability, stability, and convenience of not having an OC are more important than the extra 20% performance you might be able to gain.
Ridelynn said:
And the performance metric is based on a benchmark, not actual gaming performance, so there is that to consider as well.
This is the only line that matters and what is so ridiculous about Quizzical's claims - ie, only worthy i5 is being the K series or at least top clocked. Nothing new tho.
I think you know very well what graph I am talking about...
Although I admit that Skylake ain't all that bad for OC but still, baseline i5 will do the job more than fine, pretending otherwise would be plain stupid. If you still want to spend more, it is up to you but game performance do not tend to scale well with cpu power.
People are still somewhat stuck in with idea that CPU frequency has some significant impact on gaming performance, those days are long over though...
Ridelynn said:
And the performance metric is based on a benchmark, not actual gaming performance, so there is that to consider as well.
This is the only line that matters and what is so ridiculous about Quizzical's claims - ie, only worthy i5 is being the K series or at least top clocked. Nothing new tho.
I think you know very well what graph I am talking about...
Although I admit that Skylake ain't all that bad for OC but still, baseline i5 will do the job more than fine, pretending otherwise would be plain stupid. If you still want to spend more, it is up to you but game performance do not tend to scale well with cpu power.
People are still somewhat stuck in with idea that CPU frequency has some significant impact on gaming performance, those days are long over though...
If he gets a Core i7-3770 instead, he doesn't need to buy a new motherboard or memory. That makes a huge difference. It also means no concerns at all about the OS license, nor any need to reinstall things.
It looks like with the lower end chips, Gdemami is right - going down the line provides a savings benefit vs performance. It's a matter of finding a chip that's fast enough to do what you want in the first place. I tend not to recommend these to gamers, because while they may be fast enough today, they probably won't be fast enough tomorrow.
When going down the line, another thing to consider is the cost vs. speed improvement compared to your previous CPU.
20% speed reduction by going down the line doesn't sound like much for the savings, but if it means you'll get only a 40% speed increase instead of 60% speed increase compared to your previous CPU, then you'll have to do those 40% upgrades that much more often.
As long as the performance per $ is about the same, a faster part is usually better because then upgrade per $ is much larger.
I say usually, because if we'll get release of a new architecture that improves the performance like 100% then it might not matter much how good your previous generation part was. But we haven't gotten any gains like that for a decade now, and as long as the improvements between generations stay smallish good parts are more cost effective due to not having to upgrade so often.
I'm not 100% sure I'd have to buy a new os. I wasn't able to find out if the windows 8 version I have is OEM or not... I bought it as the upgrade version which was around $40 I think... Can upgrade versions even be OEM? lol.
Of coarse I'd be stuck with windows 8 even if I didn't have to buy an OS which isn't ideal since most of the new games coming out I want to play are dx12 and would have increased performance on windows 10.
You can OC any Skylake CPU so discussion "faster i3/i5/i7" is pretty pointless as they all OC the same
Most people don't OC them.
Nowadays a good gaming computer will get steady 60 FPS even without any OC, and the expected life of the parts is maybe 4-5 years before need to replace. In those conditions, I think for most people with day jobs it's not worth it to overclock. The reliability, stability, and convenience of not having an OC are more important than the extra 20% performance you might be able to gain.
What stability? you can OC every 6400/6500 to 6600k frequencies without any "reliability and stability issues". Unless youre going for monster OC there are no "reliability and stability issues".
There are two ways to overclock frequency, either by increasing the multiplier or by increasing the BCLK. On "K" SKUs both the multiplier and BCLK are fully unlocked, but on "non-K" SKUs, Intel locked both. It turns out that while multiplier overclocking is fully locked down on "non-K SKUs", BIOS engineers have found a way to unlock BCLK overclocking. This recent development has many people very excited because now you can theoretically overclock all SKUs. There are a few caveats.
First, you must watch out and lower other multipliers because BCLK overclocking increases the final frequency of all domains (Core, Cache, FCLK, and Memory). Second, these new BIOSes are not perfect because the changes that allow overclocking not only screw up temperature sensor reporting but also break power savings features (your CPU will always run 100% frequency). Third, overclocking the BCLK can introduce jitter and might even require more VCore for stable overclocks than multiplier overclocking. Fourth, Intel does not support this, and it might be reversed soon. These issues might be mitigated in coming UEFI releases, but Intel might fight this by implementing locked UEFI updates, which do not allow flashing back to previous versions after upgrading.
I'm not 100% sure I'd have to buy a new os. I wasn't able to find out if the windows 8 version I have is OEM or not... I bought it as the upgrade version which was around $40 I think... Can upgrade versions even be OEM? lol.
Yes, Upgrade editions are considered to be the same as whatever you upgraded from, so if that was OEM, your upgrade is considered OEM.
You can OC any Skylake CPU so discussion "faster i3/i5/i7" is pretty pointless as they all OC the same
Most people don't OC them.
Nowadays a good gaming computer will get steady 60 FPS even without any OC, and the expected life of the parts is maybe 4-5 years before need to replace. In those conditions, I think for most people with day jobs it's not worth it to overclock. The reliability, stability, and convenience of not having an OC are more important than the extra 20% performance you might be able to gain.
What stability? you can OC every 6400/6500 to 6600k frequencies without any "reliability and stability issues". Unless youre going for monster OC there are no "reliability and stability issues".
You can OC any Skylake CPU so discussion "faster i3/i5/i7" is pretty pointless as they all OC the same
Most people don't OC them.
Nowadays a good gaming computer will get steady 60 FPS even without any OC, and the expected life of the parts is maybe 4-5 years before need to replace. In those conditions, I think for most people with day jobs it's not worth it to overclock. The reliability, stability, and convenience of not having an OC are more important than the extra 20% performance you might be able to gain.
What stability? you can OC every 6400/6500 to 6600k frequencies without any "reliability and stability issues". Unless youre going for monster OC there are no "reliability and stability issues".
You can OC any Skylake CPU so discussion "faster i3/i5/i7" is pretty pointless as they all OC the same
Most people don't OC them.
Nowadays a good gaming computer will get steady 60 FPS even without any OC, and the expected life of the parts is maybe 4-5 years before need to replace. In those conditions, I think for most people with day jobs it's not worth it to overclock. The reliability, stability, and convenience of not having an OC are more important than the extra 20% performance you might be able to gain.
What stability? you can OC every 6400/6500 to 6600k frequencies without any "reliability and stability issues". Unless youre going for monster OC there are no "reliability and stability issues".
Sure, you can choose not to update your BIOS I suppose.
You only need to upgrade bios if its malfunctioning in some way. But many people have done it and most bios updates were only to disable this "feature"
also i would bet that vast majority of people have never updated mobo bios....ever ;P
You can OC any Skylake CPU so discussion "faster i3/i5/i7" is pretty pointless as they all OC the same
Most people don't OC them.
Nowadays a good gaming computer will get steady 60 FPS even without any OC, and the expected life of the parts is maybe 4-5 years before need to replace. In those conditions, I think for most people with day jobs it's not worth it to overclock. The reliability, stability, and convenience of not having an OC are more important than the extra 20% performance you might be able to gain.
What stability? you can OC every 6400/6500 to 6600k frequencies without any "reliability and stability issues". Unless youre going for monster OC there are no "reliability and stability issues".
Sure, you can choose not to update your BIOS I suppose.
You only need to upgrade bios if its malfunctioning in some way. But many people have done it and most bios updates were only to disable this "feature"
also i would bet that vast majority of people have never updated mobo bios....ever ;P
And you don't see any risk in relying heavily on a feature that Intel is actively trying to break? Intel does have considerable sway with motherboard vendors, as if one defies Intel too much, Intel can refuse to sell them any more chipsets. Have fun producing exclusively AMD motherboards.
Rumors say that AMD did exactly that to Gainward in video cards several years ago. Gainward wanted to do something with aftermarket cards. AMD said no, it will be too unreliable. Gainward did it anyway, and AMD refused to sell them any more GPU chips.
I've had to update the BIOS to fix some nasty bugs both on my current motherboard and on my previous one. So I'd really advise against relying on a feature that requires you never to update the BIOS.
oh please enlighten me how would Intel interfere with your motherboard? Many many people have done this, thats why -k chips werent selling all that well as for vast majority of people who OC theres no point in wasting money on Intels OC tax.
And bioses work fine. mobos work fine. havent seen any complaints in that departement yet.
All i can speak to is my current situation, right now I am running 3 monitors. I have a two 21" 1080p and 1 32" 4k. I am running a 5820k i7 OC. I am running a 1070 gtx. As of now I have zero issues running the top end games that are out today at max settings with zero lag or issues of any kind that i can tell. I do plan on getting a 1080 gtx and give this one back as soon as my local micro center has a 1080gtx i can buy. so if you look for a graphics card that will get everything done without any issue for sure and taking the guess work out i would say go with the 1070 gtx.
Ridelynn said:
And the performance metric is based on a benchmark, not actual gaming performance, so there is that to consider as well.
This is the only line that matters and what is so ridiculous about Quizzical's claims - ie, only worthy i5 is being the K series or at least top clocked. Nothing new tho.
I think you know very well what graph I am talking about...
Although I admit that Skylake ain't all that bad for OC but still, baseline i5 will do the job more than fine, pretending otherwise would be plain stupid. If you still want to spend more, it is up to you but game performance do not tend to scale well with cpu power.
People are still somewhat stuck in with idea that CPU frequency has some significant impact on gaming performance, those days are long over though...
While this is true for single player gaming, a lot of MMOs are heavily CPU bound.
Given the state of the latest Crimson drivers from AMD I'd go for a 960 or a 970 if you can stretch that far. I've had nothing but trouble since they changed from catalyst to crimson, so I finally caved and bought a 970. Boy am I happy now.
1080p @ 60fps on high/ultra settings playing anything you can throw at it. That's with an i5 4690k and 16Gb RAM on a cheap MSI z97 mainboard. Nothing OC'd either, straight out of the box.
by state of crimson drivers.. i can only assume you mean working amazingly and playing all games with little to no faults.
Well the 480 is probably the safer bet since it's pretty doubtful the 1070 would live through until the end of the real next gen consoles (not scorpio and neo). The 480 would most likely play everything at high+ at least at 45+ frames until the next gen consoles arrive which is where game specs usually start to rise.
Unless you need that $400 card performance, it is better to buy 2x $200 cards...
I couldn't disagree more. Twice in my life I have done SLI and both times it was a mistake. This is the problem with looking at just the numbers. It's like comparing a Porsche 911 to a Corvette. Yes, the corvette is faster and costs a hellofa lot less. But it doesn't tell you the whole picture. There are quality of life issues with SLI that make it more trouble than its worth.
IMO the only application for SLI that makes any sense is for people who are really into benchmarking. For actual gamers, its just not worth the trouble/hassle.
i can tell you i've had basically no issues with bridgeless crossfire on my 290xs, it's always ran well.
Comments
And i would like to clarify a bit about monitors and resolutions. There comes a time when something is good enough and it doesnt make much sense to upgrade it.
IMO that happened to monitors. 22-27 inch, 1080p is pretty much all thats needed. When people use computer thes usually sit ~0,60-1m from the monitor so ~27 inch is at a limit of usability. And 1080 still works fine for that size.
Analogy would be cars. Vast majority of cards have 4-5 seats. Going above that is pointless as car with 4-5 seats is good enough. Buying car with more seats thats more expencive makes no sense to most people. There are cars wit more seats (vans and busses) but those are specialized (think of screens for designers)
Thats why AMD went with initiative (and NVidia naturally followed) to actually increase quality of picture of such screens by finally bringing HDR - example how to improve quality of picture without needing more powerful GPUs/bigger screen/higher resolution.
even VR is 1080p(x2)
problem with higher resolutions is that pixel throughtput (needed power of GPU) grows exponentionally.
Also there were many tests done that proves that most people cant even tell the difference between 1080p and 4k in realistic use.
"We also found that 60-inches is about as small a screen as you’ll want to go with 4K, as anything smaller from a typical viewing distance has a much lower payoff."
I think that's about viewing movies. Computer screens are usually viewed from very close and used to view much smaller elements like text, so that increasing resolution makes a difference.
I certainly miss the vertical real estate going from 1920x1200 down to 1920x1080, and that's only 120 pixels or so. Right now my gaming setup consists of two 1920x1200 displays - I'm anxiously wanting to upgrade them, but have been waiting on OLED to mature and/or GPUs to be able to comfortably drive 4K. My son games on a 27" 1080p display.
And I can definitely tell the difference in my MBP's Retina display over a non-Retina - that's not because of real estate availability, it's because of PPI. And when Apple's mobile devices moved to Retina - when they first came out I thought "who cares, it's not increasing the screen space" - which is true. Except it does make a huge difference there, and now I can't stand to use the older non-Retina models.
Now I will say, there is some diminishing return on PPI, Apple seems to think it's somewhere around 300 ppi. But a 27" 1080p monitor at ~80 PPI is definitely not at that point for me.
I do agree that size-wize, there is a limit. 24" seems to be about perfect for me, sitting 2-3' away from the displays. Much larger than that and I have to start moving my head to see the entire screen, and I'm lazy and don't like that, although now that I'm getting older, normal sized fonts (12pt and smaller) are getting hard to read at that size and distance. I think my son's 27" is just a bit too large for how close I sit to the display, but I may end up bumping up to that size when I upgrade just to make text a bit larger without losing out on real estate.
http://ark.intel.com/products/codename/37572/Skylake#@Desktop
Calculating a few spots $/Ghz, using the "Up to" speed and the bottom of the listed MSRP
Breaking these up between families, because you can draw a direct relative performance comparison with just clock speed within a given family - but that obviously isn't true crossing family boundaries. But, I'll pick a standard benchmark (Passmark), and we'll see where it falls in line with that.
Model - Price per Ghz - Price per 1000 Passmark
Core i7
6700K - $80.71 - $30.78
6700 - $75.75 - $30.53
Core i5
6600K - $62.05 - $31.01
6600 - $54.62 - $27.96
6500 - $53.33 - $27.28
6400 - $55.15 - $27.80
Core i3
6320 - $38.21 - $24.53
6300 - $36.32 - $23.85
6100 - $31.62 - $21.30
Not bothering with Pentiums & Celerons, because...
There is obviously a cost associated with the ability to overclock, it's not so pronounced in the i7 line when you look out to the Price/Passmark (because the higher stock clocks), but you can see it pretty pronounced in the i5. Which would lead me to say: If your getting an i7, just get the K edition. If your getting an i5, be really sure you want to overclock before getting the K edition.
It looks like with the lower end chips, Gdemami is right - going down the line provides a savings benefit vs performance. It's a matter of finding a chip that's fast enough to do what you want in the first place. I tend not to recommend these to gamers, because while they may be fast enough today, they probably won't be fast enough tomorrow.
The i5 line though, apart from the K edition, they are pretty close. with the sweet spot in the middle. You do pay more for a slower performing chip with the 6400 - which would lean toward's Quiz's argument (and mine, I often give the same advice). But the delta between all of them isn't much - I wouldn't call it a huge premium if you are only considering Intel chips. But there is AMD to consider, and if you are going down from a $213 to a $180 CPU because of budget, then maybe there are better ways to stretch that budget than paying the Intel tax.
Now, these are calculated based on MSRP from Intel - not actual street price - and only for Skylakes, although Intel has been pretty consistent in their CPU pricing and tiers. A good deal on any given day could sway your decision. And the performance metric is based on a benchmark, not actual gaming performance, so there is that to consider as well.
Nowadays a good gaming computer will get steady 60 FPS even without any OC, and the expected life of the parts is maybe 4-5 years before need to replace. In those conditions, I think for most people with day jobs it's not worth it to overclock. The reliability, stability, and convenience of not having an OC are more important than the extra 20% performance you might be able to gain.
I think you know very well what graph I am talking about...
Although I admit that Skylake ain't all that bad for OC but still, baseline i5 will do the job more than fine, pretending otherwise would be plain stupid. If you still want to spend more, it is up to you but game performance do not tend to scale well with cpu power.
People are still somewhat stuck in with idea that CPU frequency has some significant impact on gaming performance, those days are long over though...
20% speed reduction by going down the line doesn't sound like much for the savings, but if it means you'll get only a 40% speed increase instead of 60% speed increase compared to your previous CPU, then you'll have to do those 40% upgrades that much more often.
As long as the performance per $ is about the same, a faster part is usually better because then upgrade per $ is much larger.
I say usually, because if we'll get release of a new architecture that improves the performance like 100% then it might not matter much how good your previous generation part was. But we haven't gotten any gains like that for a decade now, and as long as the improvements between generations stay smallish good parts are more cost effective due to not having to upgrade so often.
Of coarse I'd be stuck with windows 8 even if I didn't have to buy an OS which isn't ideal since most of the new games coming out I want to play are dx12 and would have increased performance on windows 10.
http://www.tweaktown.com/guides/7481/tweaktowns-ultimate-intel-skylake-overclocking-guide/index3.html
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/222721-end-of-the-line-bios-updates-end-non-k-intel-skylake-overclocking
Sure, you can choose not to update your BIOS I suppose.
also i would bet that vast majority of people have never updated mobo bios....ever ;P
Rumors say that AMD did exactly that to Gainward in video cards several years ago. Gainward wanted to do something with aftermarket cards. AMD said no, it will be too unreliable. Gainward did it anyway, and AMD refused to sell them any more GPU chips.
I've had to update the BIOS to fix some nasty bugs both on my current motherboard and on my previous one. So I'd really advise against relying on a feature that requires you never to update the BIOS.
And bioses work fine. mobos work fine. havent seen any complaints in that departement yet.
My recommendation goes toward something repeatable and reliable.