Kol12:

 

toejam316: Honestly? The price just isn't going to be low enough to justify it - you're gonna be looking at around $500 NZ at the lowest to get one, I'd recommend holding fire and picking up a new Zen or Kabylake system early next year, or start sniffing around people who have too much money to spend on upgrades. You might also get lucky and find a geekzone member who has a spare one with no home. Out of curiosity, what do you want it for? To upgrade a system? Because you could probably pick up a non-k CPU a lot cheaper, as the k series targets high end gamers who overclock more than anything else, and there's nothing quite like buying expensive enthusiast gear that's a generation or two out, but is still highly relevant performance wise to hurt your wallet.

 

 

 

Well I am a bit of gamer and it seems some of the newer games are recommending i7's. I can only imagine this is for the extra cores and threads. I understand it was widely recognized that more threads weren't of any benefit to gaming but maybe things are changing. I've only had my i5 4690k machine for almost two years now and at the time it was claimed that the 4690k was the gamer's chip of choice for at least 5 years. Notably the newly released Battlefield 1 recommends an i7 4790 or equivalent, I'm not obsessed but I like my games to run comfortably. That game currently has optimization issues but they won't be recommending the i7 for nothing... I recall the Witcher 3 recommended CPU was one of the lower i7's. I probably need to look up some more conclusive benchmarks and opinions. I would prefer to stick with my machine for at least 2-3 more years, I'm not made of money! An upgrade to the 1151 platform would likely be a waste of time and money, the 2011-v3 platform? maybe but pricey. I'll have to read up on Zen and Kabylake to see if it will be the next really big performance upgrade. It took me 8 years to upgrade from a core 2 duo/Q600 machine to the i5 platform.

 

The benchmarks show Kaby Lake is about 20% faster than Skylake ... but in terms of your gaming experience it won't increase your FPS I guess ... Even a dual core will suffice 

SUrely even a dirt cheap secondhand 6600K will suffice? Some People aregoing to startthrowing out their CPU - Mobo soon (when Kaby Lake is released), you might get lucky ... 

If you must have 4690K look at trademe - last time I looked there were a few, but the 6600K combo were cheaper new!