Intel Skylake embargo is over, new Z170 series motherboards and dual-channel DDR4 RAM kits released - Polidicks

[QUOTE=POLOPOZOZO;48386749]So it's really not worth it then? [/QUOTE] It's a pretty marginal improvement still. [QUOTE=POLOPOZOZO;48386749]What about gtx 900 series? Is it worth getting or waiting for pascal now? [/QUOTE] Expect pascal in Q2 next year, so you're probably better off with a 900 series card if you want to upgrade now.

[QUOTE=Superwafflez;48386794]It's a pretty marginal improvement still. Expect pascal in Q2 next year, so you're probably better off with a 900 series card if you want to upgrade now.[/QUOTE] That all depends on yields of HBM2, which AMD has dibs on so nvidia will have to wait. If Hynix has half the problems they did with HBM1 it'll be a while.

[QUOTE=Superwafflez;48386735]What's happening?[/QUOTE] Performance bottlenecks. Running 4-5 midi racks each with their own effects, then 2-3 audio racks with effects and such as well, and using high end VSTs for sounds. The better I make everything sound the worse it gets (for example, on my latest track I have a pad thats three synths and a bass sound thats three synths, and a string instrument thats playing up to 24 voices of high res string wavs at once). Popping occurs a lot on my Bassline, and while I can resample the midi to just unaltered wavs this makes it hard to change notes or the arrangement.

[QUOTE=Superwafflez;48386794] Expect pascal in Q2 next year, so you're probably better off with a 900 series card if you want to upgrade now.[/QUOTE] I can totally wait I just won't play video games for a year

Still waiting for a reason to upgrade from my Sandy Bridge i7-2600k. It's still not here.

Would DDR4 benefit an iGPU?

[QUOTE=Adam.GameDev;48389622]Would DDR4 benefit an iGPU?[/QUOTE] Yes, GPU's prefer high bandwidth RAM and don't give many fucks about latency. Opposite with CPU.

[QUOTE=.Lain;48384796]you still don't make any sense? DDR4 is a pretty considerable upgrade from DDR3. especially for 'turbo nerds'. i would say that anyone who wants high performance ram now should only consider DDR4. not being able to look at specifications and speed capabilities has nothing to do with it could you imagine the difference that ram speed might make to a multi-threaded video/photo rendering situation? or an enthusiast wanting to overclock[/QUOTE] Fun fact about that RAM speed, it's not totally accurate. DDR is pretty much a 'hack' at hardware level to speed reading and writing time up. Internally the speed of DDR 2,3 and 4 are pretty much the same. However, DDR speeds things up by reading multiple consecutive memory positions. The higher the DDR number, the more consecutive positions get read. This also means that if you need to get highly non-localized data, DDR4 can be 16 (might be wrong on the exact number) times slower than advertised. According to my professor of computer architectures (who works for IMEC), DDR4 will not provide any noticeable benefits for the average consumer any time soon. There are other memory technologies in the works that might prove to be much better for most people. For example the Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC), which sounds like it comes straight out of some kind of scifi movie. Why is DDR4 a thing then? On one hand, marketing. Boasting with higher numbers will help you to get a bunch of suckers to buy something pretty damn expensive. The other much less cynical reason, specialised equipment that takes advantage of the highly localized data reading, or machines that are used to do operations such as video encoding, zipping, etc... as these tend to have localized data. You just wanna game? Save yourself some money, stay away from DDR4 for at least another year. You wanna encode stuff all day? Check the benchmarks and decide if it's worth it. At this point, probably not, but hey, maybe some really smart guy will write a compiler that takes advantage of the localized memory stuff. That might make it worth it.

I'm going to wait until the next huge jump to upgrade. I'm talking about a jump as big as the Pentium 4 -> Core2Duo.

[QUOTE=dedo678;48390223]I'm going to wait until the next huge jump to upgrade. I'm talking about a jump as big as the Pentium 4 -> Core2Duo.[/QUOTE] I don't think that's ever going to happen.

[QUOTE=redBadger;48390254]I don't think that's ever going to happen.[/QUOTE] Not to mention that's like comparing Core 2 to Sandy Bridge. There was a Pentium D/Netburst between the P4 everyone loved and Core 2

I'm kind of pleased that my old i5-2400 is still worth keeping, less pleased that nearly five years on and some ticks and tocks later the performance difference is negligible.

[QUOTE=Levelog;48389681]Yes, GPU's prefer high bandwidth RAM and don't give many fucks about latency. Opposite with CPU.[/QUOTE] I was actually wondering about this the other day as well. How big of an improvement is it for iGPUs? That might make mobile gaming substantially better. The latest intel iGPUs aren't exactly incredible, but they are solid enough to run modern games on low/medium settings at moderate frame rates.

[QUOTE=Zephyrs;48391511]I was actually wondering about this the other day as well. How big of an improvement is it for iGPUs? That might make mobile gaming substantially better. The latest intel iGPUs aren't exactly incredible, but they are solid enough to run modern games on low/medium settings at moderate frame rates.[/QUOTE] Time will tell. These will be the first DDR4 friendly chips with iGPU's. It could turn out well.

[QUOTE=Levelog;48391610]Time will tell. These will be the first DDR4 friendly chips with iGPU's. It could turn out well.[/QUOTE] Anandtech's benchmarks showed a pretty big difference in performance between the i7 with DDR3 and DDR4 on the iGPU, with DDR4 in the lead by a pretty decent amount. It isn't at AMD's level of IGP performance though.

[QUOTE=cpt.armadillo;48391804]Anandtech's benchmarks showed a pretty big difference in performance between the i7 with DDR3 and DDR4 on the iGPU, with DDR4 in the lead by a pretty decent amount. It isn't at AMD's level of IGP performance though.[/QUOTE] Yeah, my AMD A8 has a TDP of 65w. If I could have their last improvement plus DDR4 it'd be an extremely capable SFF light gaming machine that draws very little power. (And hence needs less cooling space and is quieter)

Everyone with a lot of money to spend is buying Intel and to a lesser extent nVidia. AMD needs to go after the budget gaming market -- everyone I've seen build a 300-400$ computer for entry level gaming used an AMD APU with decent results. Make a clear GPU upgrade path through the Radeon series and you might even get people who have been using the AMD system for so long that even when they can, they won't go with the other guys.

[QUOTE=Sand Castle;48391961]Everyone with a lot of money to spend is buying Intel and to a lesser extent nVidia. AMD needs to go after the budget gaming market -- everyone I've seen build a 300-400$ computer for entry level gaming used an AMD APU with decent results. Make a clear GPU upgrade path through the Radeon series and you might even get people who have been using the AMD system for so long that even when they can, they won't go with the other guys.[/QUOTE] It's actually pretty damn clear for the upgrade path. For the 200 series it went 240, 250, 260, 260x, 270, 270x, 280...etc

[QUOTE=Levelog;48392778]It's actually pretty damn clear for the upgrade path. For the 200 series it went 240, 250, 260, 260x, 270, 270x, 280...etc[/QUOTE] And the r9 series is pretty clear with 380, 390 390x fury x etc.. It's about as standardized as Nvidia's.