New Desktop - Skylake i7 or Broadwell-E i7?

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Batman

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#196000 15-May-2016 14:20

I am researching maybe getting a desktop (have only had laptops for about 8 years!) ... if I were to get a new desktop, for the main purpose of photo editing and occasional video encoding. Very little to no gaming.

Looking at i7-6700k vs the yet to be sold 6800-6950ks ...

Since they are on different platforms, I'd like to know which one would be better, or if neither, then have a longer future, if anyone knows that is.

[Alternatively - a Skylake gaming laptop - but surely that would be vastly inferior in performance? Or not ...]

Thanks

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#1553066 15-May-2016 14:54

My old i7-2600K is still absolutely fine, with SSDs and plenty of RAM, benchmarks put brand new i7's as maybe 25% faster - not worth the upgrade for me. From a laptop you should get a pretty big improvement though.

Just buy the current generation i7 (K version not required), or i5 is almost as fast if you care only about interactive performance - i7 may be a little faster in batch. Go for clock speed not total cores. 16GB RAM, 32GB if you work with lots of high MP images. A fast SSD, partitioned for OS + programs on one then data on another, so you can image the OS quickly and without too much crud. A low end nVidia memory card of a recent generation may help a little. The rest is unimportant.

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#1553081 15-May-2016 15:17

I have a gaming spec laptop i7-4702hq with 16gb RAM 512gb SSD and mobile 750 nvidia so it's no slouch,

In terms of highest clock speed it seems to be the 6700k at 4 GHz

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#1553135 15-May-2016 16:34

Yeah but even mobile i7's feel a fair bit slower than desktop. I wouldn't go K for a small increment in GHz, just go for a midrange i5/i7 with decent clock speed and you'll be fine.

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#1553252 15-May-2016 18:57

I recently upgraded to the following:

Gigabyte Motherboard with M.2 capability

Samsung 128GB solid state drive (looks like a stick of ram and goes in the M.2 slot)

6700 (standard not K) processor

16 gig of DDR4 ram

Win 10 64

The solid state drive is loaded with Win 10 and win 10 is optimized for the new 200gbs solid state drives. Makes the whole system very snappy, photoshop etc

I have images etc I work with on an external NAS drive so I upgraded the network switch from 100MB to a gigabyte switch- made a huge difference searching or scrolling through images.

The whole lot cost under $1,000 excluding power supply, case etc that I already had

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#1553288 15-May-2016 19:49

Is m.2 synonymous with pci-e ssd?

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#1553293 15-May-2016 19:56

joker97: Is m.2 synonymous with pci-e ssd?

Yes, PCie 3.0

The one I got (from the UK) was a Samsung 951 NVME. The '4X peeformance' really makes a noticeable difference over my 'standard' Samsung Pro HD. The blurb as follows:

The SM951 NVMe boasts outstanding performance, supports PCIe 3.0 (x4) interface. For ultra-slim notebooks and workstations wanting to adopt the PCIe 3.0 interface, the SM951 can read and write sequentially at 2,150 MB/s and 1,550 MB/s respectively, which would provide approximately four times faster sequential reading performance compared to current SATA SSDs. With a PCIe 3.0 interface, the drive achieves substantially higher energy efficiency, requiring only about 450 MB/s per watt for sequential reading and 250 MB/s per watt for sequential writing, which translates into a more than 50 percent improvement in performance per watt over that of the XP941 SSD. In addition, the new SSD's random read and write speeds reach up to 300,000 and 100,000 IOPS (inputs / outputs per second) respectively.

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#1553294 15-May-2016 19:57

m.2 drives are just another form factor (like 2.5", 3.5"). You can get SATA, PCIe, and PCIe NVME m.2 SSDs. If you get a SATA m.2 SSD, you won't see any performance increase over a 2.5" SSD.

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#1553357 15-May-2016 22:41

FWIW my iMac has a quad-core Skylake i7-6700K, running at 4.0GHz (or up to 4.2GHz Turbo) in and that zips along.

I did manage to get it to slow down the system by having about 30 Safari tabs open - the wireless keyboard was actually typing faster than the words were appearing on the screen by about 3 seconds! I think that was RAM though and I upped it to 32Gb and it has not happened since.

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#1553383 16-May-2016 08:13

joker97:

I am researching maybe getting a desktop (have only had laptops for about 8 years!) ... if I were to get a new desktop, for the main purpose of photo editing and occasional video encoding. Very little to no gaming.

Looking at i7-6700k vs the yet to be sold 6800-6950ks ...

Since they are on different platforms, I'd like to know which one would be better, or if neither, then have a longer future, if anyone knows that is.

[Alternatively - a Skylake gaming laptop - but surely that would be vastly inferior in performance? Or not ...]

Thanks

The Skylake CPUs are a bit better at games and applications that depend on single core performance.

Skylake is a newer design. But, more importantly, the CPUs tend to have higher clock speeds.

Broadwell-E (or even Haswell-E) will be better at any software that scales to a large number of cores/threads. That typically includes video and photo editing apps.

The -E CPUs have more cores/threads and a lot more CPU cache.

Of course they are also range from a bit - to a lot more expensive.

I have a Haswell-E 5820K CPU (6 cores/12 threads). It is is the worst -E CPU.

But, I can run games at good frame rates at the same time as several virtual machines and processing in the background.

I haven't found anything to really grind it down yet.

Dairyxox

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#1553420 16-May-2016 09:27

Its a pretty big price difference too. The E (HEDT) platform (CPU, MOBO, MEMORY) costs about 3x as much.

Personally I'd go for the highest model Skylake, then upgrade again in ~12-18 months time. It would still probably cost less.

JWR

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#1553485 16-May-2016 11:05

Dairyxox:

Its a pretty big price difference too. The E (HEDT) platform (CPU, MOBO, MEMORY) costs about 3x as much.

Personally I'd go for the highest model Skylake, then upgrade again in ~12-18 months time. It would still probably cost less.

That's not true.

The entry cost is much less than 3 times.

When I bought my 5820K, the cost was about $60 more than a 4770K.

I got an AsRock X99 Extreme 4 for a little over $400. It has more than enough features for me and overlaps price/features of socket 1150 boards.

Nowdays, I would possibly buy an Extreme 3 and save another $100.

RAM costs are the same now. They both use DDR4.

The entry cost of an -E series system is probably around $200 more than i7 6700K.

Sure, you can go for a vastly more expensive CPU with 8 or more cores. But, you can't compare those to a 6700K.

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#1553487 16-May-2016 11:12

JWR:

Dairyxox:

Its a pretty big price difference too. The E (HEDT) platform (CPU, MOBO, MEMORY) costs about 3x as much.

Personally I'd go for the highest model Skylake, then upgrade again in ~12-18 months time. It would still probably cost less.

That's not true.

The entry cost is much less than 3 times.

When I bought my 5820K, the cost was about $60 more than a 4770K.

I got an AsRock X99 Extreme 4 for a little over $400. It has more than enough features for me and overlaps price/features of socket 1150 boards.

Nowdays, I would possibly buy an Extreme 3 and save another $100.

RAM costs are the same now. They both use DDR4.

The entry cost of an -E series system is probably around $200 more than i7 6700K.

Sure, you can go for a vastly more expensive CPU with 8 or more cores. But, you can't compare those to a 6700K.

Some people would never spend $400 on a mainboard. You can get capable ones for around $120.

True they both use DDR4 but a quad channel setup will cost more, vs dual...etc.

I think you're looking at one extreme, and I'm looking at the other...the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

JWR

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#1553495 16-May-2016 11:40

Dairyxox:

JWR:

Dairyxox:

Its a pretty big price difference too. The E (HEDT) platform (CPU, MOBO, MEMORY) costs about 3x as much.

Personally I'd go for the highest model Skylake, then upgrade again in ~12-18 months time. It would still probably cost less.

That's not true.

The entry cost is much less than 3 times.

When I bought my 5820K, the cost was about $60 more than a 4770K.

I got an AsRock X99 Extreme 4 for a little over $400. It has more than enough features for me and overlaps price/features of socket 1150 boards.

Nowdays, I would possibly buy an Extreme 3 and save another $100.

RAM costs are the same now. They both use DDR4.

The entry cost of an -E series system is probably around $200 more than i7 6700K.

Sure, you can go for a vastly more expensive CPU with 8 or more cores. But, you can't compare those to a 6700K.

Some people would never spend $400 on a mainboard. You can get capable ones for around $120.

True they both use DDR4 but a quad channel setup will cost more, vs dual...etc.

I think you're looking at one extreme, and I'm looking at the other...the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

You can get a very capable motherboard for $100-$150.

But, you would be wasting the overclocking potential of a -K- type CPU.

For a -K- type CPU, you are still looking at low $200s plus for motherboard with a Z170 series chipset.

You can run a X99 (motherboard in dual channel. I have run single (when I had a faulty RAM stick on RMA), dual and quad.

The difference between dual channel and quad channel isn't noticeable in general use.

The original post was about core i7 processors and they are in the upper range of performance and cost.

The best value is probably somewhere in the core i3 - core i5 range.

gzt

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#1553516 16-May-2016 12:20

By the time of haswell-e there will be a next generation announcement in 1151 ; ).

lagbort

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#1553519 16-May-2016 12:34

upgraded to an i7 6700k from an i5 2500k at the start of the year.

Really notice the general improvements all around, haven't managed to choke it yet.

Pretty regularly run Game + Movie + multiple downloads at once, where I noticed lags and skips with the 2500k, everything is now buttery smooth.

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