Building a PC...maybe

[Rogean]

I used to build new PC's every 2 to 3 years, but my current one is now almost 5 years old. The 3770k and 680 GTX have served me well, but I think it's been long enough...

First up:

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[Rogean]

And, to give my 2c on some of the topics brought up in this thread...

I jumped on the order for my CPU because those high bins sell out fast. I'm going to go complete max power for this build. However, I'm not necessarily in a rush, so I'm going to wait until the newer Z270 motherboards are in stock. Will probably grab a new ASUS. If you're getting a 7700k, you might want to grab a Z270. While the Z170's will support it with a bios update, the 270's are built for it, and I've actually been reading about some issues with incorrect voltages being sent to the CPU as well as problems with locked multipliers on the older 170's with Kaby Lake.

And regarding which actual CPU to get.. if you're gaming, stick with the 7700k. It's the highest stock IPC of any i7 released, and so far the overclocking looks promising. IPC is king for gaming. No game can even utilize more than 4 cores right now anyways.

Video cards are another thing to maybe wait for. Many were expecting 1080 Ti and/or Vega to be announced at CES.. but neither were, which is quite surprising. However, both of these should come out within a month or two. Regarding SLI, I did it with my current build (two 680's), and I'll never do it again. It's not worth it.

Hard Drive.. Get an M.2 NVME. I'm eyeing the Samsung 960 Pro.

The motherboard I pick out will be one of the DDR4-4133's, and I'll be getting G.Skill RAM to match that.

Anyways, biggest point I guess I'm making is, there's a ton of new stuff coming out with CES and to support Kaby Lake. Give it a chance to settle (a week or two, or longer if you want to wait for new video cards), and keep an eye on the benchmarking.

[Uuruk]

Good post ^

[Metalopolis]

Get this case - Fractal Design Define R5. Best I've owned. Looks good from a minimalist perspective, has tons of room to work in and it's totally silent unless I'm playing a really demanding game.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...g&gclsrc=aw.ds

[Loke]

You all need an Antec P280 in your lives. I don't even want to split hairs over other recommendations here, because I can't stress enough how much better the Antec P280 is than any other case... ever.

[pasi]

Rog - why the 7700k? My impression from the tech community was that its barely an upgrade. The first result in Google for i7 7700k is http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/...y-lake-review/ where they call it what happens when Intel stops trying because they have no competition. In addition, when info came out on the 7700k, the price on the 6700k went up $50 that day.

[Rogean]

Originally Posted by pasi [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Rog - why the 7700k? My impression from the tech community was that its barely an upgrade.

Barely an upgrade from the 6700k yes. It's definitely not worth upgrading if that's what you have. But I've been planning to build a PC for some time now. Almost did it last year with the 6700k but decided to wait when I read about more cores coming.

Then Broadwell-E came and the highest IPC was the 6850k, and the highest binned overclock was 4.6 GHZ. I need IPC more than I need cores, so I decided to wait again. Now with the 7700k out, we're seeing much higher overclocks than any of the chips within the last 5 years.

When doing a clock-for-clock comparison, each generation does yield about a 5 to 10% performance improvement from a previous generation at the same speed. Consider that I'm 4 generations behind (Ivy Bridge), currently running at 4.6 GHZ, and my new processor will probably run 5.3 or 5.4 GHZ after delidding. That's an 800 mhz increase on top of the 4 gen difference.

Not to mention all the other components I'd benefit from in a new PC.. NVME, GTX 1080 [Ti], etc. I don't like to do partial upgrades so I just rebuild when I'm ready.

Honestly, my 3770k could probably last me another year or two. But 5 years is a long time to go without building a new PC, for a performance freak like me [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]. I also don't think the next processors from Intel (which should be the new 10nm architecture) will come close to the same overclocking potential until the tock refinement, which is 2 years away. The reduction in die size will cause a lot of heat issues that need to be worked out.

[khanable]

Are you getting one of those fancy new delidding tools or going to yolo it the old fashioned way?

[Rogean]

Originally Posted by khanable [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Are you getting one of those fancy new delidding tools or going to yolo it the old fashioned way?

The place I ordered the processor from does it for me. They test hundreds of 7700k's and pick out the ones that are able to overclock the highest, and sell them for a premium (Binned chips). That's why you see in my order picture above the one I got is rated at 5.2 GHZ, which is what it was able to handle while staying under 80 degrees C. They then Delid it (An extra cost) and ship it.

[pasi]

Shit - the hell do you plan on running? Streaming 4k gaming? Multiple Vives?