Building a new overclocking rig, need suggestions please

[Ebolax]

I'm looking to build a new desktop computer and while I'm quite familiar with overclocking from past builds I'm not familiar with the current products on the market. I know I want a K series cpu but I'm not sure about much else. Can someone give me some recommendations as to getting an i5 or i7 and what kind of motherboard and heatsink/cooler to get? I'm thinking about doing watercooling, are there any good prebuilt kits worth considering for the cooling?

I have a decent budget but I'm not looking to do anything super expensive. I have a very roomy fullsize case so I could put a large radiator in it with no problems. I already have a pc power and cooling 850w psu so I think I'm good on the psu already, right?

 

[SketchMaster]

What will you be using this system for? What are your goals for overclocking?

If all you want to do is gaming, then the i5 6600K is going to be your best bang-for-buck. For an AIO cooler, the Corsair H100i can be found for less than $100 these days and keeps my i7 5820k from blowing its top with a mild OC. You're PSU is likely fine, 850 is plenty even if you throw a GTX 1080 in there and OC it. PSUs haven't really changed much for the past five years, other than making them more quiet/efficient.

Motherboards I'll let others chime in, as I don't own any 1151 boards.

 

[Ebolax]

I'm going to be using it for gaming but I also need it to be able to handle running a whole lot of virtual machines simultaneously.

Meant to ask about ram as well. I'd like 32gb, my current system only has 12gb and I'm maxing it out with only about half of the virtual machines running. What's some solid overclocking ram to pair with the cpu?

 

[SketchMaster]

What's your budget for this and how many VMs do you plan to run concurrently on this system? Are the VMs just to play around with different OSs, or are you doing some heavy lifting? An i5 will only give you four cores and no Hyper-Threading, so i7s will be where you should focus.

I personally don't bother with RAM speeds, the returns I've seen on high-speed RAM hardly ever justifies the cost. I personally always recommend slower RAM and put the price difference into more ram (VERY useful for VMs) or faster CPU/GPU. Now if you personally enjoy the thrill of getting every ounce of performance from your hardware, then more power to you, get some high spec RAM and make it scream.

 

[2is]

I would focus more on having more ram then "overclocking" ram. If you're going to run tons of VM's and especially have them running in the background while gaming, I would up the ram to 64GB. That will benefit you a whole lot more then fancy memory, especially since you will likely be filling all your DIMM slots and at that point, your memory frequency is limited more by the memory controller then the memory itself, so that fancy memory that would have done little good to begin with, isn't going to help you at all now.

EDIT: Also as suggested above, you'd want to look at a quad core i7 at the minimum

 

[Markfw]

Depending on the budget, it may be nice to get a 6,8 or even 10 core broadwell-e CPU on socket 2011-3. Its quad channel ram.

 

[Ebolax]

Good to know about the overclocking ram not being needed. The games and the vm's won't be running at the same time, but when I'm running the vm's I'm going to have a network of vm's running. Three windows desktops, one or two windows servers, and three to four linux systems as well. I don't think they'll be doing much heavy lifting as it's for penetration testing.

Budget wise I'd like to keep it around 850 for the motherboard, cpu, ram, and cooler. I could go up to 1000 if it would make a worthwhile difference. I'm not fixated on water cooling, I would rather get more ram.

 

[Markfw]

OK, I just configured a 6 core 6800k, open box ASUS X99-a motherboard, 4 x 16 gig ddr4 2133 (64 gig total) and a Noctura 92mm cooler for $1003.. For your purposes, just will kick butt.

 

[SketchMaster]

As mark showed, for a VM powerhouse the new 6800k or a 5820k would be my top picks. Get whichever you find for a noticeable discount (like open box) since the 6800k is only slightly faster.

By this time tomorrow, we should have a slightly better idea if AMD's new Zen CPUs will be worth waiting for. If time is an issue or AMD looks like they missed the mark you can't go wrong with either CPU above. My VM box is powered by the 5820k and it's great for small VM projects.