2500k to 6600k

[Eric1987]

Would it be a worthy upgrade? My 2500k sits around 4.2-4.4 right now. I run all my games at 4k. Got 2x290x and a 1000W PSU.

 

[AtenRa]

I would go for a 6-core Broadwell-E next year and 14/16nm single dGPU.

 

[Eric1987]

I'm gonna go the single GPU route when a single card is better than both of my 2x290x's. And I don't want to spend a ton of money on a E CPU. If I sell my 2500k, mobo, and RAM, I can get the 6600k and 16GB DDR4 RAM for 320$ out of pocket.

 

[Termie]

Do you have a P67 or Z68 board? The only major advantage for your 4K setup would be PCI 3.0 on a modern board, but you may already have that. The 6600K is about 25% faster clock-for-clock, but you're probably not CPU-limited with your setup.

 

[Eric1987]

I have a Gigabyte D2HB3 board which I hate.

 

[Termie]

I have a Gigabyte D2HB3 board which I hate.

Is this it? - http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3855#ov

Being mATX and PCI 2.0, that's a pretty bad board to use with 290X Crossfire. An upgrade will do you good.

 

[RussianSensation]

I'm gonna go the single GPU route when a single card is better than both of my 2x290x's. And I don't want to spend a ton of money on a E CPU. If I sell my 2500k, mobo, and RAM, I can get the 6600k and 16GB DDR4 RAM for 320$ out of pocket.

I would say not worth it at all. If you are going to upgrade and spend > $300 to do so, go to an i7. Also, with your current setup, I would upgrade the CPU when you get a new single GPU. By that point there may be Kabe-Lake or a very good value X99 + i7 6800K combo. This is my opinion but I would never upgrade from an i5 2500K to an i5 6600K because the biggest anchor of 2500K's performance - lack of HT - is still missing in the 6600K.

Is this it? - http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3855#ov

Being mATX and PCI 2.0, that's a pretty bad board to use with 290X Crossfire. An upgrade will do you good.

Why? PCIe 2.0 x8/x8 is not even a bottleneck for Fury X, so how in the world would it be a bottleneck for the 290X?

I know people on AT love love love defending i5s but lack of HT on i5 6600K ensures it is well behind an i7 6700K in some key AAA games and it can even get outperformed by the 2600K or is barely faster. 2600K is almost 5 years old.

I cannot recommend $320 out of pocket to go to an i5 6600K. Might as well spend $100 extra and get a 6700K and keep that for 5 years, having a peace of mind that HT will help in some AAA games.

I also don't see the point of rushing the upgrade to Z170 for the OP. DDR4 continues to drop in price which means it'll be cheaper to buy 16GB DDR4 3200 in 6-9 months than right now. OTOH, the 2500K platform has bottomed out in price which means it'll be easy to sell it in 6-9 months from now for almost the same price as today. Unless the OP's motherboard is buggy/unstable, it might even be better to sell the 2500K and get a 2600K swap in as a temporary stop-gap between now and Cannonlake or SKL-E platform upgrade.

For consistency of gaming performance, I would consider selling 290Xs for $200 a piece and just buying a single 980Ti.

 

[Eric1987]

Yeah I am kinda tired of having to deal with crossfire. Wouldn't a Fury modded to a Fury X be a better bang for the buck upgrade? And I see what you mean about the 2500k and 6600k. I didn't know games used HT at all. I thought it was used for encoding/decoding.

 

[sniffin]

Buy a Skylake CPU and mobo now, wait for 16nm to drop before considering a GPU switch. 2x290X is a fast setup, there is absolutely zero point in selling 2 of them and buying a single 980Ti. Serious waste of money.

Consider an i7 instead of an i5 as mentioned above. The "HT is useless" meme stopped being true years ago. i7s consistently perform above i5s in gaming and would extend their lead even further if doing something that was eating CPU cycles alongside whatever game you are playing.

 

[jihe]

Would it be a worthy upgrade? My 2500k sits around 4.2-4.4 right now. I run all my games at 4k. Got 2x290x and a 1000W PSU.

No. Just get a 2600k or 3770k.

 

[happy medium]

Yeah I am kinda tired of having to deal with crossfire.

2x290X is a fast setup, there is absolutely zero point in selling 2 of them

A Fury is not a upgrade, its a side grade at best.

Why not just buy a $600 gtx980ti and overclock it, that would be faster than what you have, 25% faster than a fury and use less power and be cooler. The best bag for the buck by far.

Now that some games are taking advantage of 8 cores, I'd get a 2600 or if you want a motherboard with more features a 6700k.

 

[happy medium]

Why? PCIe 2.0 x8/x8 is not even a bottleneck for Fury X, so how in the world would it be a bottleneck for the 290X?

Matx? I think he meant the size of the motherboard for crossfire....?

The second card (x8) looks like it covers his usb slots.

 

[aaksheytalwar]

Get a 5930k/6700k along with 980 Ti.

 

[Charlie98]

I have a Gigabyte D2HB3 board which I hate.

The second card (x8) looks like it covers his usb slots.

Heeeeyyyyyy... it's not such a bad board. But I'll agree, it's not a good board for Crossfire, and I've not found mine to be a good OC'er.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I would say not worth it at all. If you are going to upgrade and spend > $300 to do so, go to an i7. Also, with your current setup, I would upgrade the CPU when you get a new single GPU. By that point there may be Kabe-Lake or a very good value X99 + i7 6800K combo. This is my opinion but I would never upgrade from an i5 2500K to an i5 6600K because the biggest anchor of 2500K's performance - lack of HT - is still missing in the 6600K.



Why? PCIe 2.0 x8/x8 is not even a bottleneck for Fury X, so how in the world would it be a bottleneck for the 290X?

I know people on AT love love love defending i5s but lack of HT on i5 6600K ensures it is well behind an i7 6700K in some key AAA games and it can even get outperformed by the 2600K or is barely faster. 2600K is almost 5 years old.

I cannot recommend $320 out of pocket to go to an i5 6600K. Might as well spend $100 extra and get a 6700K and keep that for 5 years, having a peace of mind that HT will help in some AAA games.

I also don't see the point of rushing the upgrade to Z170 for the OP. DDR4 continues to drop in price which means it'll be cheaper to buy 16GB DDR4 3200 in 6-9 months than right now. OTOH, the 2500K platform has bottomed out in price which means it'll be easy to sell it in 6-9 months from now for almost the same price as today. Unless the OP's motherboard is buggy/unstable, it might even be better to sell the 2500K and get a 2600K swap in as a temporary stop-gap between now and Cannonlake or SKL-E platform upgrade.

For consistency of gaming performance, I would consider selling 290Xs for $200 a piece and just buying a single 980Ti.

I personally agree with you somewhat about the "moar cores" philosophy, but one must also remember that the links you show are stock clocks. Depending on turbo behavior, I would estimate that the 6700k has about an 8 to 10 percent clockspeed advantage. So if both were overclocked to the same frequency, the difference would be less.

 

[frozentundra123456]

OP, I would look at the situation differently. What games do you play that dont perform adequately (if any), and are you cpu or gpu limited? I would expect that at 4k you are going to be gpu limited in just about any game, even though as the charts show, 2500k is starting to show its age a bit. But again, yours is overclocked, so some of the difference vs the newer highly clocked chips will be diminished.

If you do decide to upgrade though, the only chips that make sense to me are the 6700k or hex core haswell-E or in a few months BW-E. I dont think the temporary "upgrade" to a 2600k is worth it, unless you are encoding or something as well, where the extra threads are more clearly useful.

 

[Zodiark1593]

I'd probably just go to an i7-2600K if you can find one at a reasonable price. Performance in 4 threads or fewer won't see any step up,throw in some more multitasking though and you should see the i7 Sandy pull ahead.

Many tasks apparently suck at utilizing the full cpu core, thus Hyperthreading exists to cram more data down the hungry core's throat. I5's in comparison are more easily starved as they are (artificially) limited to one bite at a time, though in some (rare) cases, that bite can be big enough to fully utilize the core and close the gap with the i7.

 

[dark zero]

Would it be a worthy upgrade? My 2500k sits around 4.2-4.4 right now. I run all my games at 4k. Got 2x290x and a 1000W PSU.

Just move up to 4.7, your lose will be lesser than 20%... at least against the 6600k on stock.

 

[dark zero]

A Fury is not a upgrade, its a side grade at best.

Why not just buy a $600 gtx980ti and overclock it, that would be faster than what you have, 25% faster than a fury and use less power and be cooler. The best bag for the buck by far.

Now that some games are taking advantage of 8 cores, I'd get a 2600 or if you want a motherboard with more features a 6700k.

Pascal is in less than 6 months. Now the 980 Ti is a very bad desicion.

 

[Head1985]

Skylake have 30-40% better IPC than Sandy bridge and you get fast DDR4 Ram witch have very nice performance boost in fallout4.But at 4k you will be 99% of time GPU bottleneck.That will change when pascal come out with + 40-50-100% performance than GTX980TI(first GTX980 successor and later with +100% GTX980TI successor) after that even at 4K your 2500K will be bottleneck.

6700k vs 2500K 4.5Ghz
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37684080&postcount=4726
6700K HT OFF vs 2500k 4.5Ghz
http://www.overclock.net/t/1578480/i5-2500k-4-5ghz-vs-6700k-4-5ghz-in-games#post_24549583

Fallout 4 testing
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37832969&postcount=328
Comparing same scene with other CPUs
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37834900&postcount=365
as you can see in that scene 6700k is 42% faster than 2600k.

 

[Charlie98]

Just move up to 4.7, your lose will be lesser than 20%... at least against the 6600k on stock.

Yaa, good luck with that on that bottom-end Gigabyte board.

 

[poofyhairguy]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37834900&postcount=365
as you can see in that scene 6700k is 42% faster than 2600k.

Yeah because it has a 670 while the 6700k has a 970.

 

[RussianSensation]

Yeah because it has a 670 while the 6700k has a 970.

What kind of a fair comparison is it to pit a 2500K DDR3 + GTX670 against a 6700K HT with a GTX970 in FO4 when we know that game is crazy sensitive to RAM performance speed, far more than IPC?

An i3 4360 with DDR3 2400 outperforms i7 4770K with DDR3 1333. That's about as crazy as it gets when using that game as some kind of a useful CPU comparison metric to show how Skylake paired with DDR4 is crushing older gen CPUs crippled by slower DDR3.

When looking at many other games, 6700K OC is barely better than a 2600K OC.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2015/08/05/intel-skylake-review/7

I think if the OP can find a good 2600K and resell 2500K, that would a great way to get extra 15-20% performance in some games that take advantage of HT without needing to drop $300 out of pocket to upgrade.

I am having a hard time recommending i7 6700K when it costs basically the same as a 5820K and BW-E 6800K is coming soon with yet another 6-cores, HT and will compress the IPC advantage of 6700K even more. For someone who kept his CPU since 2011 (2500K), I would recommend 6800K over 6700K.

I'd personally rather resell the 290Xs and get a GTX980Ti. Thing is an overclocking monster without any CF scaling issues. 980Ti OC would allow the OP to coast all the way to Skylake-E in 2017.

If the OP sells each of his 290Xs for $200, applies $15 off $15 Visa or $25 off $200 AMEX, it should be possible to get an after-market GTX980Ti for ~$150 out of pocket + net a free Assassin's Creed Syndicate/Rainbox 6 Siege in the process. IMO, an upgrade to an i5 6600K cannot compete with the smoothness factor and consistent performance of a GTX980Ti OC. Then consider a full blown platform upgrade, possibly with SKL-E or Kaby Lake. Grabbing a 2600K by reselling the 2500K is also a great strategy to get 15-20% more performance out of the box with HT -- also maybe 2600K will overclock better than the existing 2500K.

 

[Arachnotronic]

RussianSensation, with the price gouging on the 6700K we're seeing on Newegg, it's actually cheaper to get a 5820K.

 

[poofyhairguy]

also maybe 2600K will overclock better than the existing 2500K.

That is the bonus I recently got when I upgraded from a 2500k to a 2600k. 400 more mhz per core of easy and stable overclock compared to my 2500k which helped the fps minimums even on older games. But I am not trying to pair that with a 980 ti level setup. If I did a platform upgrade I think something like a 5820k is more bang for the buck.