Hey. My fellow FP'ers. I am trying to get a new rig sorted. I have been out of the game for ages both figurativel and literally. I found a Skylake i5 @ 3.8ghz and a Kabylake i7 @ 4.2ghz. The latter is almost doubled the the price. Would like advice on the main differences (I plan to overclock)
Well the main difference is that the i7 has more cores. Also, if you plan to overclock those need to be the K models of those CPU's.
The i7 won't be double the performance.
The difference in terms of games would likely be clock speed, but if you're overclocking then it's down to hyperthreading. KabyLake and Skylake would be quad core.
Is hyperthreading all that useful in games though? Just wondering due to how writing a game to take advantage of multiple cores is notoriously difficult.
This one is almost 400 pounds, so I unfortunately cannot afford that. I assume K models have an unlocked multiplier. Are there any other differences?
I wouldn't bother buying a quad core without hyper threading in 2019, many modern games need more than 4 threads.
Even then, it would have to be under or very near $150. There's far better options with Coffee Lake and Ryzen at the higher price points. I've been seeing blow outs on first gen Ryzen, lots of stuff going for $60~ for low end, power efficient quad cores.
I was reading up on the differences between the models and it was implied that there is not a huge amount of difference between Skylake and Coffee Lake.
Sort of, a 4ghz skylake is mostly the same as a 4ghz coffee lake with all the same settings.
But in Intel's defense, they did make measurable improvements in performance with the newer skus through improvements they have made to their existing designs as well as plastering on more cores and/or more threads. The new coffee lakes can hit up to like 5.2ghz on the high end with 8c/16t where as 4.3ghz could be as far as you can go on a 4c/4t if you got a dud 6600k.
There's not a huge amount of difference when you compare CPUs with the same amount of cores, but the Coffee Lake CPUs get more cores at around the same price point as Skylake/Kaby Lake. There's no point in getting Skylake/Kaby Lake at this point in time without getting a monstrous deal on them. Current Coffee Lake/Ryzen offerings are much better value for your money.
If you're on a budget, Ryzen is a much better choice, as the performance difference is negligible until you reach the very top end GPUs.
I have two 1080s, so imagine Ryzen is a bad choice.
eish thats starting to sound like a nice idea to upgrade to me
too bad I'd have to exchange my 6600k and my z170...
Wait, what? Are you saying that 4K requires a less good processor than 1080p? I assume that's the wrong way around?
Oh well, lol. Already shipped so too late to change it. Last time I had a CPU was an Ivy Bridge, so I should notice the upgrade either way.
I play a lot of games that don't utilise more than one core, so clock speed is quite important as well as threads.
Oh, I have a question. Wouldn't 4K require far more drawcalls from the CPU though?
Not really. The main change with higher resolution is far more raw shader calculations on the GPU and significantly higher VRAM usage and bandwidth requirements. GDDR5 kind of chokes on 4K, GDDR5X, GDDR6 and >8GB of HBM2 handle it a lot better. 4K doesn't really demand that much more from the CPU at all.
I'd also like to chime in to say you'd be best off selling one of those 1080s because Nvidia has dramatically distanced themselves from SLI support, so you get to have all the stability problems of olde with none of the performance boost. How exciting.
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