6700K (Z170) vs 6850K (x99)

[prophet0001]

Hey all. I was wondering if I could get some input on choosing between these two setups. I'm looking at running an x16 PCIe graphics card with a x4 950 Samsung and I have an x4 wireless card. I will possibly have another PCIe card in the future.

Which platform do you think I should go with? I like the 6770K clock speeds but I'm taken back by the lack of PCIe lanes. I like the 6850K lanes and horsepower but the clocks seem a bit lower and the x99 doesn't seem all that great? Also, isn't the 6850 built on an older architecture? Does that make any difference?

Thank you for any input and tips! I truly appreciate it.

 

[monkeydelmagico]

You are not going to saturate the lanes in either setup so it doesn't really matter which one you choose.

 

[prophet0001]

You are not going to saturate the lanes in either setup so it doesn't really matter which one you choose.

Really?

I thought there were only 16 lanes available to the 6700K (just saw my typo). I need 16 for the card and 4 for the SSD plus 4 more for the wireless.

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

Z170 has 20 PCI-e 3.0 lanes. This is enough to give your GPU 16x lanes and the 950 Pro 4x lanes at full 3.0 speed.

Whatever other cards you use will be limited to PCI-e 2.0 bandwidth. This won't be a problem for a 4x wireless card since it's not really possible to saturate the 2 GB/s bandwidth it will still have available.

As for the other PCI-e card in the future, as long as 2.0 speeds are sufficient for it, you won't be limited by the Z170 platform.

 

[prophet0001]

Z170 has 20 PCI-e 3.0 lanes. This is enough to give your GPU 16x lanes and the 950 Pro 4x lanes at full 3.0 speed.

Whatever other cards you use will be limited to PCI-e 2.0 bandwidth. This won't be a problem for a 4x wireless card since it's not really possible to saturate the 2 GB/s bandwidth it will still have available.

As for the other PCI-e card in the future, as long as 2.0 speeds are sufficient for it, you won't be limited by the Z170 platform.

Thanks for the input. Would you recommend one over the other?

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

It really comes down to what you're going to use it for or what you want.

Skylake is really very fast. Higher clocks and overclocks, great singlethreaded performance, great memory performance for dual channel.

Broadwell-E dominates for multithreading and can potentially have twice the memory as a Z170 Skylake setup. If you overclock you can close a lot of the singlethreaded gap, but Skylake will have the lead.

 

[RussianSensation]

Thanks for the input. Would you recommend one over the other?

The choice should be 6700K vs. 6800K. 6850K is worthless in your use case. 6800K has 28 PCIe lanes. Graphics cards also hardly benefit from PCIe 3.0 x16 vs. x8. That means even if you added 2x GTX 1080 SLI and 2x 950 Pro in RAID, either the 6700K or the 6800K wouldn't be a bottleneck.

- Keep in mind 960 Pro/Evo is coming out really soon. These will be faster than 950 Pro and/or have superior price/performance. RamCity already has SM961 (next gen OEM 960 Pro) for sale - $330 Australian for 512GB:
https://www.ramcity.com.au/upgrade/...e-drives/samsung-sm961/143419?ship_country=US

This drive is faster and cheaper than the 950 Pro, which suggests 960 Pro/Evo are probably worth waiting for.

- If you plan on doing video encoding/rendering/workstation use, go with the 6800K. If you mainly game and use basic apps, save your $$$ and get the Z170+6700K. The money saved could be way better used towards a better monitor or videocard. When buying a Z170 platform, get DDR4-3200 or faster.

- If you don't plan on overclocking, 6700K is better. If you plan on overclocking, and keeping the system for 5-6 years, 6800K may be worth the premium.

Personally, I chose 6700K as $150-200 extra for the X99 platform didn't seem worth it to me. I'd rather put that $ aside towards a future CPU platform upgrade. I estimated that true next gen consoles will not be out until 2019-2020 or so. As a result, I extrapolated that CPU demands will not change enough to stress the 6700K before then. I'd rather just sell the 6700K platform then and upgrade to the latest architecture with the $$ saved now on not buying the more expensive X99+6800K platform.