Hmmmmm Skylake....

[Cmdr Kharma]

Just wondering whether to build/buy an exclusive gaming rig based on the new Intel skylake and Win 10......

Mine is Sandy bridge at the mo and they reckon skylake is a 45% improvement...Plus loads of other new shit of course......

I might have to wait a bit though...Just configured a build and it came to £2500....

Mind you that did include a 28" 4K monitor.......And a 980 Ti....

Hmmmmmm......

*Looks at bank balance*

[WolfRaven]

I'm in the same situation, I've a i5 2500K and have been itching to upgrade it to the i5 6600k.
My heart says do it.... but my head says no.

The general consensus online is it wouldn't be such a vast improvement in real world gaming over what I have now.
Especially as I have yet to overclock my i5 2500k, which can go to 4.5 GHz easily.

What CPU do you have? If it's a K-type, the smart move would probably be to overclock it for now (if needed)
and go for the best GPU that you can get right now, to future-proof your rig, and maybe pick up the
next generation CPU whenever they come out.

Going 4K is definitely going to depend a lot more on the GPU than on the CPU I reckon.

[Cmdr Kharma]

Same chip as you....I5-2500K......

Not overclocked......

GPU is a GTX 970.....That was the last splash out......

Wife ripped my bollocks off for that one.....



Might give the OC a go.....

I did try when I first built this box....But it just become too unstable, so dropped it back to stock.....

Might read up a bit more and try again.......

Whilst I save my pennies....

[Cmdr Space Madness]

I did try when I first built this box....But it just become too unstable, so dropped it back to stock.....

Do you have an aftermarket CPU cooler in your rig? The stock fan isn't really up to the job, so things can go pear shaped pretty quickly when attempting an overclock. In terms of a reasonably priced cooler that gives good enough cooling overhead for a solid overclock, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 (there are a few variants, all reasonably priced and effective) is a good choice.

Other things to check are to what degree your mobo supports overclocking (can vary a great deal). Instability might also have been a power problem, but with the maxwell graphics card (970) your power draw's likely lower while gaming than it was (probably even if you were running a pretty basic card before).

[Loriath]

I am wondering why so many people are building game rigs and staying with 16:9 monitors when there is so much of a FOV improvement going to a 21:9 (1440p preferably).

If I was to upgrade my monitor today, it would definitely be 21:9 for gaming.

[Schmobius]

I have an i7 4790k (If I'm remembering correctly), and an Nvidia GTX 980Ti. All in a mini-itx case barely larger than an Xbox One.

I'm not regretting jumping the gun before the skylake came out. (I think I heard it's only a 10% improvement). Of course, I really built this computer for Fallout 4, and I am definitely not regretting doing that early, as I don't think my laptop would have handled Elite terribly well, except perhaps at very low graphics settings.

GPU is much more important than CPU here. If there were a wider gulf in price, I would have gone with an i5 CPU, because it should be more than enough. I think the CPU mostly helps by keeping windows things running in the background from impacting your game these days.

[Gorf]

Wife ripped my bollocks off for that one.....

No doubt helped by all the musicians' hair that was tangled around them...

[Digga]

My advice is wait 1 year, with amd bringing Zen and next gen gpu's (hbm2) from nvidia and amd, combined with how dx12 games will perform... Things might be very different to general expectations.

Next years hardware, especially gpu's are going to be significantly faster then what you can buy today

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[Zadkiel]

Personally I'm still fine with my Sandy Bridge gaming PC, it still plays any new game perfectly fine. But then I'm using the famed i7 3770K processor which was famous for it's performance from that generation and other high specced components like overclocked low latency RAM and an SSD etc, so maybe that explains why I am still perfectly satisfied with it, while you feel you want to upgrade yours.

[CMDR Abil Midena]

I would not do that.

There's an article on Anandtech I think it is, that says Skylake is not an improvement unless your CPU is 4 yrs old.

Rant about Win 10 "we are at war against curves" and "it has to run on a phone" aside, Intel has made Skylake to cater to the mobile/tablet/crappy laptop crowd. <---This grinds my gears.

That aside, it seems it would be smarter to either wait another 6 mos /1 yr, or just buy a system based on tech a year or two old. The second option is smart because you'd be getting the same performance as Skylake at a much lower cost. See what I'm saying?