So I'm going to be building a PC for myself soon and I'm spending about £1700 on it. My original plan was to by an intel i7 4790k and overclock it a tonne but then I remembered that the Broadwell CPUs are going to be realed in the second quarter of this year and that they are going to run on the 1150 socket. Because of this I'm going to get myself a cheaper CPU for now and buy the top end Broadwell when it is released.

I was thinking maybe an intel i5 4960K as I'm still gonna want to overclock it but I'm not sure if it will give me good enough performance. For gaming and rendering of reasonably complex scenes would this CPU be good enough? Are there any cheaper CPUs that would still give me good performance in the months whilst I wait for Broadwell?

Also, whilst I'm on the topic of future CPU generations does anyone know the exact month of when Skylake is going to be released? My googlefu appears to be weak at the moment.

 

Skylake is rumored to be revealed on the Intel Developer Forum that's going to be from the 18th to the 20th august and then released in Q3 and Q4 (see pictures here and here). If those rumors hold true, then going for Broadwell is pretty much pointless, since you'll have to exchange the CPU and the mainboard in Q3 or Q4 again.

Leaving that aside, if you want to render stuff then you'll want either an i7 or a Xeon because of hyperthreading. The Xeon is generally cheaper, and the only difference to the i7 (that a normal consumer cares about) is that it's got no GPU, so you might want to go for a Xeon instead of an i7. The Xeon alternative for the i7 is at the moment the Xeon E3-1231 v3. But like I already said, buying all this just to exchange it less than a year later seems kind of pointless.

You could always go with AMD as a substitute, since that would be much cheaper, but of course it also wouldn't have the performance of an i7/Xeon.

 

I can't comment on rendering, but there's no reason to wait for the next cpu. The 4790k will not bottleneck you. I'd say go for the 4790k, (xeon's cant overclock). and keep it at stock w/ turboboost. Down the line if you see a bottleneck then overclock it.

 

Huh I completely forgot about that. Thanks for the correction, and I agree with you that Skylake (or Broadwell for that matter) probably won't bring too much of a performance gain (probably the usual 5-10%), but it'll probably run cooler which might allow for a higher overclock.

 

Given that you've noted rendering, you may want to look at LGA2011-3 just for the extra cores the platform offers. A build with a 5820K will cost more due to CPU+Motherboard+DDR4 costs but the extra two cores will benefit rendering a lot and may extend to DirectX 12/Mantle game titles in the future. £1700 should be more than enough to set up a single GPU LGA2011-3 system.

 

Ain't gonna happen.

I have a 4790K sitting on an ASUS Maximus VII Hero and water cooled. I can't push it much past 4.6 without it going unstable. I've hit 5 Ghz, but with just enough time to screenshot and save before it crashed. There's little headroom in the 4790K so don't waste your time if you are looking to do serious overclocking. I'm pretty disappointed on that front.

On the other hand, there's little this chip won't handle with the stock speeds.

 

Also do not use the latest versions of prime95. They will fuck up your cpu and hit temps of 90+ They are not meant to be used for the current generation of cores

 

I was thinking of doing this but I'm not sure if my water cooling block will work with the socket. Is the LGA 2011-3 socket a different size than the LGA 2011?

As for the 5820k that would work well, especially considering the extra PCIe lanes which will make SLIing in the future better as the 4790k only has 16 PCIe lanes. DDR4 RAM wont really help at the moment but it should help with future proofing. I can build a decent LGA 2011-3 build for about £1650

Really? I've seen some people get 5 Ghz with water cooling and have it pretty stable. Maybe its your chip that just isn't great at OCing. Either way it doesn't really matter as 4 Ghz is good enough for just about anything.

Now this is kinda off topic but can anyone recommend a decent SSD? I was thinking of getting a 480 Gb Corsair Neutron but its way too expensieve for an SSD even if it is really good.

 

Whoever did that got a great chip. Here's some reviews on it.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2461705,00.asp (Toward the end of the article)

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8227/devils-canyon-review-intel-core-i7-4790k-and-i5-4690k (about half way down the page)

I could go on. But yeah, 4.0 with 4.4 turbo on all cores is good enough for most types of computing. Although right night I'm ripping a blu-ray, and after going back to specs, it's definitely a longer rip.

 

840/850 EVO's are good. Crucial MX100's are good. Given the same price I'd go for the EVO, if the Crucial is significantly cheaper I'd go for the Crucial. Honestly you won't notice much of a difference between the good SSD's

 

Nope, same mounting holes for coolers.

PCIe lanes aren't an issue. The link shows that even PCIe x4 loses 5% at 1080p, and performance loss only goes down as resolution goes up. The biggest benefit will be if you have other expansion cards installed.

My rule of thumb is: don't buy SandForce, don't buy Kingston SSDNow V300. If it has 300+ MB/s reads and writes, it's going to be (somewhat) decent. My picks would be Crucial MX100, Crucial BX100, or Samsung 850 EVO. They are comparable to (or better than) the Corsair Neutron (regardless of GTX or XT) and are cheaper.

 

Overclocking is fun, but is it even practical? I don't even really bother at this point. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth

I'm sure there are other bottlenecks that even if you spend a lot of time and money getting a stable 5 Ghz you may not necessarily see any significant performance increase.

 

When I overclock I improve the time it takes to rip a bluray by 20 to 30 percent. Yeah, I'd say that's worth it. But as the wiki pointed out, you have to be careful when comparing clockspeed, because your 4 Ghz may be a whole lot slower than some else's 3.4 Ghz.

 

The Megahertz/Gigahertz myth is about comparing two different architectures. In the case of overclocking a CPU, it's still the same architecture so of course you can compare it overclocked to when it is not overclocked.

In that regard, it's all dependent on the slowest part of your system for the workload. For CPU intensive tasks, like rendering, overclocking is a huge boon because you can bump the frequency by a good portion (20-30%, even higher in some cases). Of course, CPUs that are binned near to their maximum (Core i7 4790K, FX 9590) won't overclock as far but their stock frequencies make them powerhouses in their own right.

Overclock if the bottleneck is your CPU, you can handle the extra heat with a good cooler, and don't mind the reduced longevity.

 

Which is why I said, "as the Wiki said, you have to be careful comparing clock speeds."

Also, with the way the multipliers work, I've found slight differences in OCing your CPU will also give you better RAM OCs. I'm seen about a 100 Mhz difference, which isn't a ton by any means, but can add to the overall performance (depending on the timing, of course).

Honestly, with Sata3 SSDs, 6/8 core core chips that can still be OC'd, DDR 4 memory, etc., It's quickly coming to the point where the two greatest bottlenecks are your wallet and programs/apps that can't use everything available to it effectively (the last has always been an issue--as software has to catch up with hardware. I still have programs that can only run on 1 or 2 cores, or can't hyperthread on a four-core system, etc).

 

It's actually just the wallet. Having too many cores, in my mind, is a matter of finding things to add to the workload. Individual programs might each be single threaded, but using some or all at once will definitely use your multiple core CPU, not to mention background processes. Given that OP wants a gaming/rendering computer, it's not going to be hard finding or adding to the workload in the event programs just don't use all of the CPU.

 

I would just get the i7-4790k and OC it. Unless you really enjoy tinkering with your rig as a hobby, this is probably going to get you the most bang for your buck in terms of dollars spent versus performance versus amount of time and energy you put into your rig over the next several years.

Depending on your usage, you are much better served spending any additional funds on a better video card and a high capacity Solid State Drive with RAID. The few percentage points you can eek out on a CPU benchmark (because you are unlikely to feel the difference in day to day usage) isn't worth the potential FPS advantage with a better GPU or the ability to save your data after a storage device failure.

 

While I would agree if this were a normal gaming rig (although I would then recommend going down to an i5, since Hyperthreading does nothing for games), the fact that he wants to render changes thing. When it comes to rendering the 2011-3 CPU's are simply superior, and since it fits into his budget why not go for it then? Storage is always something you can buy later, but upgrading your CPU would also require a new motherboard if it's not of the same socket, so going with 2011-3 seems like the better choice here, especially since he won't have to upgrade that for quite a while.

 

In my original post I said I was going to get an i5 and wait for Broadwell because I incorrectly believed it to be the 'tick' of intels release cycle and therefore have a new architecture with huge a performance increase. Now I now it is actually the 'tock' of the release cycle I'll get the 2011-3 CPU (5820k) because the scenes I'm going to be rendering are huge and as I can't GPU Compute them (I can't afford a Quadro) I'm going to need the extra cores and hyperthreading. The fact the the X99 chipset means I can use DDR4 ram is going to be useful as whilst DDR4 ram isn't useful for gaming it will (hopefully) give me a performance increase when I am baking fluid simulations. I'm also going to get a 500Gb Samsung EV) 850.

Despite my system being extremely powerful I'm still going overclock my CPU. Hopefully I can get it from 3.3Ghz to about 3.7Ghz. Thanks for all your help with this, I really appreciate it.

 

Huh.

Let us know when you decide to put a water rig on it.