Whats Going On in The CPU World

[elitejp]

Ive been out of the loop for a while so I have kept up with whats going on with cpu's. So the question is whats the current recommended CPU for an everyday user? especially with 4k becoming much more available.

My current usages outside of the normal include:
Photoshop
Watching Movies (already have a 65in uhdtv)
Some light gaming (no need for the newest games but would like to play it on an uhdtv)

Sometimes with all the new names of the cpu's I dont even know which one is the newest generation or as it seems to appear sometimes the newer gen doesnt really add anything to necessitate an upgrade.
I appreciate any insight

 

[jihe]

Nothing much. For your needs a 5 year old 2nd gen i5/i7 would still suffice.

 

[deustroop]

I agree

 

[RussianSensation]

In January of 2017, buy an i7-7700K + Cryorig H7 + Z270 chipset motherboard + 250GB Samsung 960 Evo PCIe SSD for Windows 10 OS. Come back in 5 years.

For "light" PC gaming at 4K, an RX480 8GB or GTX1060 6GB is a good start. It's hard to call 4K gaming as light gaming though as this level of pixels generally needs at least a GTX1070/980Ti for a decent performance in modern AAA titles.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

With what you're describing, any i5 or higher will do.

Since you'll be using a discrete GPU, there is no need to wait for KBL. I'd get a 6600K (or 6700K, if you can spare the cash), decent Z170 board, fast (3000MHz+) DDR4 RAM, a GTX1060* and call it a day.

One thing you should include is an SSD, what one does for everyday usage cannot be overstated. It matters far more then the CPU choice.

*or RX480, but the Nvidia GPUs since Maxwell use far less power doing video decode. If all you're doing is very light gaming the soon to be released 1050 might also work.

 

[NTMBK]

Apple A10 Fusion.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Intel CPUs are currently the best across the board and should be what you buy if you are buying now. It is also that time again (happens every four years or so) when AMD says it's planning to release a "revolutionary" new architecture that will put it back into competition with Intel. Results of that TBD.

 

[MajinCry]

Ya, a Sandybridge i5 will do fine and leave plenty of room. Nehalem/Phenom II level o' perf is a bit too weak these days, 'n' AMD CPUs are terrible at handling draw calls compared to their intel equivalent.

So yah. Nab a 2500k or an i7 2600k if you want the system to have more oomph, and call it a day.

 

[deustroop]

Very well said

 

[zinfamous]

what others said with the sandy bridge i5 is fine for an HTPC if that is what you are aiming for. If you want gaming at 4k on that TV and for some years to come, I would recommend this mini 1070 for a small HTPC box

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...93&cm_re=gtx_1070_mini-_-14-125-893-_-Product

It's not even exorbitantly priced...assuming that is in your budget.

If you aren't doing AAA games (or can actually tolerate ~10-20 fps in many of those cases ), then you can probably escape with a 1060/6gb or 480 8gb for 4k content for ~half the cost of that 1070.

 

[Torn Mind]

Skylake i5 or i7. As nice as the second and third gen Intel i5 and i7 CPUs are, you will always want more.

An m.2 SSD also offers the fastest data read and write speeds.

 

[daxzy]

Is OP building or ordering a new system (kind of sounds like it)? If so, I don't understand all people recommending Sandy/Ivybridge era CPU's. Sounds like you can buy a H110/170 Skylake i5/i7 and not worry around it for 5+ years. Or start with a Skylake i3 and you can upgrade it later on if needed.

For UHD TV's, you should probably get something with HVEC/HDMI 2.0. Such as RX 4xx/GTX 10xx series. You mentioned casual gaming, but realistically, you'd need at least a RX 480 8GB/GTX 1060 6GB to play in native 4K mode at the minimum. Possible GTX 1070 if you want the game to look great. If you're ok with gaming at 1080p, you can probably just go with a RX 470 4GB.

I'd also consider a M.2 PCIe SSD. Really does make your system fly. Although if you're more price conscious, modern SATA M.2 SSD's are decent as well.

 

[superstition]

For your needs the best price-performance will come if you have access to a Micro Center.

1) AMD 8320E CPU
2) cheap 140mm single tower cooler (shop Newegg or Amazon for best pricing)
3) Gigabyte UD3P motherboard (with rebate and $40 off with CPU bundle pricing)
4) Decent brand 80 Plus gold or platinum PSU you can find. Shop Newegg for power supplies on sale.
5) Two sticks of cheap 1866 DDR3 RAM.
6) Install the stock CPU cooler fan on an angle blowing out to the back and partially down to cool the VRM sink.
7) Turn off APM and the other power stuff and set a 4.1 to 4.3* GHz static overclock using the multiplier.
8) Pair with a 4 GB 480 GPU or find a deal on a 290/390 card (making sure your PSU can handle it) or a second-hand GTX 970.
9) Cheap 256 GB or 512 GB SSD. Even a 2nd generation Sandforce controller drive is good enough. M.2 isn't necessary.
10) Case with good airflow.

Even with light gaming having a powerful GPU is nice so you can turn on the eye candy. It really does enhance the experience significantly to have things like shadows at full and high anti-aliasing even in ancient games like SWTOR.

*Depending on how good your cooling is. The board will do 4.4 without messing with the BCLK but that can require quite a bit of CPU cooling to be Prime stable. How high you go will depend on your noise tolerance and how aggressive your CPU cooling fan is. The board will handle 4.5 GHz on air but I suggest staying at 4.4 max to avoid messing with BCLK.


Now, if you are exclusively sticking with Photoshop and with very poorly-threaded games like SWTOR the Anniversary Pentium overclocked is your best bet. Photoshop benefits from high clocks and few threads/cores, like MMOs and games like Starcraft. However, the Anniversary Pentium will choke on more demanding/modern games, especially paired with a higher-end GPU.

If you're planning to do a lot of video encoding then Kaby Lake is worth a look since it apparently will ship with HEVC/H.265 hardware-accelerated encoding. If you're planning to encode with H.264, though, the AMD 8320E will do well enough in Handbrake. Maybe H.265 has been more optimized but it wasn't doing a good job of loading the 8 cores when I tested it months ago. The extremely slow pace to encode even a DVD was brutal but the quality was definitely better than H.264.

 

[Torn Mind]

For your needs the best price-performance will come if you have access to a Micro Center.

1) AMD 8320E CPU
2) cheap 140mm single tower cooler (shop Newegg or Amazon for best pricing)
3) Gigabyte UD3P motherboard (with rebate and $40 off with CPU bundle pricing)
4) Decent brand 80 Plus gold or platinum PSU you can find. Shop Newegg for power supplies on sale.
5) Two sticks of cheap 1866 DDR3 RAM.
6) Install the stock CPU cooler fan on an angle blowing out to the back and partially down to cool the VRM sink.
7) Turn off APM and the other power stuff and set a 4.1 to 4.3* GHz static overclock using the multiplier.
8) Pair with a 4 GB 480 GPU or find a deal on a 290/390 card (making sure your PSU can handle it) or a second-hand GTX 970.
9) Cheap 256 GB or 512 GB SSD. Even a 2nd generation Sandforce controller drive is good enough. M.2 isn't necessary.
10) Case with good airflow.

Even with light gaming having a powerful GPU is nice so you can turn on the eye candy. It really does enhance the experience significantly to have things like shadows at full and high anti-aliasing even in ancient games like SWTOR.

*Depending on how good your cooling is. The board will do 4.4 without messing with the BCLK but that can require quite a bit of CPU cooling to be Prime stable. How high you go will depend on your noise tolerance and how aggressive your CPU cooling fan is. The board will handle 4.5 GHz on air but I suggest staying at 4.4 max to avoid messing with BCLK.

The fondness for yesteryear's slow tech is laughable in this thread(not just AMD, but Sandy and Ivy Bridge as well). SATA III is not fast enough and the ones who blabber stuff out has too much time on their hands to wait for copy operations to complete. You start with the ultimate and pare down as budget allows, not the other way around.

Overclocking is playing with fire and should be an option of last resort if anything sensitive is being done on that computer.

 

[superstition]

The fondness for yesteryear's slow tech is laughable in this thread(not just AMD, but Sandy and Ivy Bridge as well).

Everyone has a budget and needs. Not everyone needs the latest thing or needs to spend a ton to meet their needs.

I have a guy who is running an AMD Sempron 3100+ system with Windows 8.1 64-bit and he's happy as a clam. That's a 90nm SSE-3 chip on socket 754. The system has 2 GB of RAM and meets his needs.

He's clearly not a gamer because that system chokes on the Sims 2! I tested it just for a laugh. The stutter was unbearable. Part of that, though, could have been from using XP 64.

SATA III is not fast enough

Oh, really?

I ran a SATA II SSD in a 2008 Macbook Pro that ran it at SATA 1 speed and it was just fine for what it was used for. A bit more speed would have been nice but it wasn't essential.

Overclocking is playing with fire and should be an option of last resort if anything sensitive is being done on that computer.

Nope. Overclocking an AMD FX 8 core (non-9000 series) is rather easy and completely safe, provided you take the necessary steps, like getting a board that's decent, reading the recommended voltages for specific clocks, putting a fan to the VRM sink, turning off APM, and using Prime + HWINFO to test for stability. Anyone who can handle building their own system can handle overclocking one of these within reason.

The reason it's so easy and safe is because the overclocks are within the stock margins for the processor and board and don't require fiddling with BCLK.

 

[Torn Mind]

Everyone has a budget and needs. Not everyone needs the latest thing or needs to spend a ton to meet their needs.

I have a guy who is running an AMD Sempron 3100+ system with Windows 8.1 64-bit and he's happy as a clam. That's a 90nm SSE-3 chip on socket 754. The system has 2 GB of RAM and meets his needs.

He's clearly not a gamer because that system chokes on the Sims 2! I tested it just for a laugh. The stutter was unbearable. Part of that, though, could have been from using XP 64.


Oh, really?

I ran a SATA II SSD in a 2008 Macbook Pro that ran it at SATA 1 speed and it was just fine for what it was used for. A bit more speed would have been nice but it wasn't essential.


Nope. Overclocking an AMD FX 8 core (non-9000 series) is rather easy and completely safe, provided you take the necessary steps, like getting a board that's decent, reading the recommended voltages for specific clocks, putting a fan to the VRM sink, turning off APM, and using Prime + HWINFO to test for stability. Anyone who can handle building their own system can handle overclocking one of these within reason.

The man did not state any budget. He just wants to know the lay of the land. And as of now, the i5-6600(K) and i7-6700(K) are the top cats of the mainstream platform and also the most powerful CPUs with an iGPU. The 8320, Sandy Bridge, and Ivy Bridge are not worth buying given their age. The limited mobo selection and lack of significant new tech are severe minuses.

Never mind that your cooler and dGPU are also budget excesses in their own right. His light gaming could be extremely old games or games of maybe three years ago. If the former is true, iGPU gaming could very well suffice.

I have used CPUs as slow as Atoms and Celerons from the Pentium 4 era. People who are fine slow computers simply have grown too used to the slow experience.

 

[superstition]

the i5-6600(K) and i7-6700(K) are the top cats of the mainstream platform and also the most powerful CPUs with an iGPU. The 8320, Sandy Bridge, and Ivy Bridge are not worth buying given their age. The limited mobo selection and lack of significant new tech are severe minuses.

1) The motherboard selection for AM3+ is just fine. There are even models with M.2 if that's super-important.

2) The 6700K has no relationship, budget-wise, to the 8320E/UD3P rebate+bundle I posted about. The bundle is $130 with tax and rebate. Yes, one should invest a little into a better cooler but that's an investment that carries over to future system upgrades and Intel's stock coolers are nothing to write home about either.

Never mind that your cooler and dGPU are also budget excesses in their own right.

No, they aren't. They carry over to future builds and provide benefits to the current build.

His light gaming could be extremely old games or games of maybe three years ago.

Even the Sims 2 benefits from maxing out anti-aliasing. Even with a 7870 GHz GPU I have seen a slow framerate with the highest settings at 1440. At 1080 having one of the GPUs I suggested will provide the ability to turn on the eye candy for not only ancient games but for many more recent ones as well. One never knows when a more recent game will catch the eye.

The 480 even offers the necessary power for VR as does the CPU when overclocked to the level I suggested. So, if he finds that a VR title catches his eye he'll be able to go that route, too, without having to do anything other than buy the headset. Yes, VR is expensive right now but the headsets will come down in price. While I doubt the OP will be into VR in the short-term it's nice to know one's system is ready for it.

If the former is true, iGPU gaming could very well suffice.

If he were to get the 5675C then I could agree. Otherwise, no. The problem with that strategy is that that CPU still costs $275 plus the cost of a board — all for the benefit of getting lame integrated graphics.

It's particularly ridiculous to talk about buying an i7 for Photoshop. An overclocked Anniversary Pentium would be just fine for that. For a super-cheap Photoshop build I'd cut the cooler to a 120mm single tower model and keep the GPU at something very cheap like a 7870.

 

[MajinCry]

Also, the performance increases beyond Sandybridge have been incremental. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/23

If you get rid of that outlier that's emulation (Haswell got a decent bump for some reason), the difference is, what, 20%? 25%? over Sandybridge. Considering that CPU prices have been increasing quite a bit, whereas Sandybridge can be gotten on the cheap, with an i5 2500k costing around £80 on the ol' Ebay...Nah, go Sandybridge.

 

[escrow4]

Stop buying old trash. You want AMD wait for incoming AM4, you want Intel wait for incoming Kabylake or buy Skylake now. Old trash is fit for the bin. If you can't afford anything you shouldn't be buying it in the first place. Sandy Bridge is obsolete, Ivy Bridge is teetering on the edge.

 

[Roland00Address]

elitejp (the OP who posted the original thread)

I want to emphasize something someone already posted

Also, the performance increases beyond Sandybridge have been incremental. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/23

If you get rid of that outlier that's emulation (Haswell got a decent bump for some reason), the difference is, what, 20%? 25%? over Sandybridge. Considering that CPU prices have been increasing quite a bit, whereas Sandybridge can be gotten on the cheap, with an i5 2500k costing around £80 on the ol' Ebay...Nah, go Sandybridge.

That is information from the 6th generation (Skylake review), here is another more recent article from anandtech that compared the top i7s of

2nd generation i7 (2011), Sandybridge
3rd generation i7 (2012), Ivybridge
4th generation i7 (2013), Haswell
5th generation i7 (2015) with ed ram, Broadwell
6th generation i7 (2015) with ddr3 memory, Skylake
6th generation i7 (2015) with ddr4 memory, Skylake

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/9

Depending on the tests there is less than 10% improvement (tests where the cpu is less important and the gpu is the more important thing like gaming), to dramatic increases in performance, 30 to 50% higher speeds and some tests higher than 50%.

Here is anandtech bench where you can compare two processors side by side

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/39


AMD has not been competitive in the high end even, as an afterthought since Phenom 2. In the middle and high end AMD just flat out disappoints (note Phenom 2 was competitive to Intel's middle end but phenom 2 was 2009 to 2012).

On the low end the best current AMD cpus still are slower than intel i3s in almost all work loads. AMD has been so non competitive that I want to throw out terms (that make cause some people emotions to rise) and these terms are laughable or just sad and depressing. Note I am an AMD fan, but AMD is not the competitive AMD it used to be (due to manufacturing process, and lack of resources money wise and engineers). AMD has been an afterthought for almost 5 years, and has been losing for 9 years and in 3 months that number will be 10 years.

But this may all be different in 6 months or so. Note it can be earlier than 6 months, or later than 6 months, but we are expecting a new architecture from AMD in 2017, a new architecture from the ground up and on a competitive manufacturing process to what Intel is currently doing. How good Zen will be right now is speculation. We also do not know prices since prices in the cpu world are based off performance where you price your silicon to be as competitive in price to performance compared to your competitor by the other company.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Stop buying old trash. You want AMD wait for incoming AM4, you want Intel wait for incoming Kabylake or buy Skylake now. Old trash is fit for the bin. If you can't afford anything you shouldn't be buying it in the first place. Sandy Bridge is obsolete, Ivy Bridge is teetering on the edge.

I agree with you that no one should be buying Sandy Bridge if they need a new system now unless they're on a budget, but SB isn't obsolete by any stretch of the imagination. Skylake is 25% faster on average (and it took almost 5 years to build that gap!) and that isn't worth an upgrade if you currently own SB IMO unless the other platform gains are worth it to you. Personally, I think that will be the upgrade driver for the next few years - the platform gains, rather than the CPUs themselves.

 

[nerp]

Skylake i3-6100 is cheap and fast as hell. Go modern. Go Skylake. Go for the WIN!!

 

[nerp]

In January of 2017, buy an i7-7700K + Cryorig H7 + Z270 chipset motherboard + 250GB Samsung 960 Evo PCIe SSD for Windows 10 OS. Come back in 5 years.

For "light" PC gaming at 4K, an RX480 8GB or GTX1060 6GB is a good start. It's hard to call 4K gaming as light gaming though as this level of pixels generally needs at least a GTX1070/980Ti for a decent performance in modern AAA titles.

I vouch for this cooler. It's really impressive. Just nearly as good as the Noctua top of the line dual tower cooler for $35. Dead silent. When this thing can keep you at less than 60C oc'd to the hilt under load, plus silence, why bother with water and all the hassles of pump noise and possible leaks?

 

[MajinCry]

-snip-

The article still mirrors the same sentiments; except for one or two edge cases, the performance uplift compared to Sandybridge is fairly meh (~25%), especially considering the price difference between a used i5 / i7 k processor between the architectures.


And aye, AMD has been pretty dead as far as games are concerned. You can get by, but once draw calls start getting heaped on, like in Fallout 4 or a modded Skyrim, AMD's draw call deficit becomes readily apparent. About >3x worse than their intel equivalent in performance, when 'em draws reach the low thousands.

Hopefully Zen will have resolved it, but it's a wait-and-see ordeal.


As tae the other posters, unless you are running some hyper intensive software that needs every ounce o' single threaded 'n' parallel might, or ya just have a bunch of cash ta burn...Skylake's kinda way out there.

But eh, I'm broke 'n' all that so it's probably not too common a sentiment.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Also, the performance increases beyond Sandybridge have been incremental. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/23

If you get rid of that outlier that's emulation (Haswell got a decent bump for some reason), the difference is, what, 20%? 25%? over Sandybridge. Considering that CPU prices have been increasing quite a bit, whereas Sandybridge can be gotten on the cheap, with an i5 2500k costing around £80 on the ol' Ebay...Nah, go Sandybridge.

The 2600K can only be purchased used, so right off the bat there are significant disadvantages there (no warranty, you don't know how much the previous owner abused it, etc.). Beyond that, the 2600K requires DDR3 memory, which won't carry over to a future platform (whereas DDR4 likely would). And, of course, one would need to buy a used Z68/P67/Z77 board since those aren't really available new anymore, so all of the used product caveats apply here. There's also the fact that the old chipsets are woefully dated from a platform perspective.

Recommending that somebody buy an old used Sandy Bridge setup as a substitute for a new 6700K+Z170+DDR4 is poor advice, IMO. Penny wise, pound foolish.