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Who's buying Skylake-X? (You may now change your vote)

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Are you buying Skylake-X?

  • Yeah

    Votes: 35 12.5%

  • Nah

    Votes: 244 87.5%
  • Total voters
    279
I am sticking to my BW-E rig for the foreseeable future. If Skylake-X turns out to be surprisingly good, i mean price-performance wise, 10-core for 1000 or less, it will be somewhat annoying for me (although otherwise good obviously), given the fact i paid 700 for 6-core BW-E slightly more than half-year ago, but c´est la vie.... i would need to be in really good financial condition to spend heavy money on new CPU and mobo, especially when i dont really need them. Dont think that´s going to happen.

Additionally, not really keen to unplug all the cables, reinstall heatsink and all the dirty labor, additionally deal with new Windows license/ app reinstall, as i currently have OEM Win, so new one will be needed...feel sick only thinking about all the chore. Some people over here probably enjoy tinkering with their system, i dont. I enjoy only the planning part, where you choose the right components for you, decide the layout inside the case, stuff like that. Doing the manual work after that might as well do someone else.

I am in more need of faster GPUs anyway - thats where my money will go. Not going for 1080Ti, but if 2080 turns to be comparably about as fast as 1080 was against 980Ti, thus cca 20 percent above 1080Ti and potentially 50 percent over 1080, i will strongly consider it. Or even Vega - Octane render shall support OpenCL soon, thus AMD cards as well. I am really curious about the performance, whether it will be actually faster than Octane under CUDA (since AMD cards in Luxmark murder Nvidia). If it turned out its significantly faster, bye bye Nvidia.
 
Perhaps I should amend what I said earlier about whether I was going to buy Skylake-X. I said no initially, but to be honest, I probably will. Just not the first go around. Since getting my 6900K, I've decided I will only buy CPUs on the "tock" cadence and not on the "tick." 😀

The tock is always a refined version of the tick with a usually smaller and denser process node and microarchitectural refinements. Haswell-E had a bug in its memory controller that affected write performance, but Broadwell-E fixed it. That's just one example of what I mean when I say it's better to buy the refined version.

*Edit* I'll only buy the die shrink of Skylake-X if it supports PCIe 4.0.
 
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Carfax83 said:
*Edit* I'll only buy the die shrink of Skylake-X if it supports PCIe 4.0.
Click to expand...

My one regret on current systems. I thought I had waited long enough for PCIe 4.0 - not so. I'll live without it. One interesting point, I noticed that higher end SKX's are expected to have 4 more PCIe 3 lanes than BWE, I wonder if cut down versions of the entry level SKX will also have 4 more lanes - in which case, I have no worries for some time to come.
 
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The more I think about it, the more I feel pretty happy with my 6800K. Its because of what I paid for it. $360 folks. This might be the perfect mini upgrade to carry me until something more exciting comes along, perhaps Zen+ or Icelake-X. I'm not predicting much value for me in Skylake-X. Maybe for once I can stop being such a spoiled man child and learn the importance of the words "GOOD ENOUGH".

disclaimer: I am an untreated hardware addict in the midst of my disease. Future willpower not guaranteed nor likely.
 
moonbogg said:
The more I think about it, the more I feel pretty happy with my 6800K. Its because of what I paid for it. $360 folks. This might be the perfect mini upgrade to carry me until something more exciting comes along, perhaps Zen+ or Icelake-X. I'm not predicting much value for me in Skylake-X. Maybe for once I can stop being such a spoiled man child and learn the importance of the words "GOOD ENOUGH".
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Sounds like a plan. If all your apps/games run fine, why bother with lesser upgrades. Wait and go big or go home 🙂
Then again, there are folks like @AdamK47 who just like to stay on the 'latest and greatest' path :holysmokes:
 
Waiting on SKL-X to see how it turns out.
But then again, I'm not averse to having multiple boxes (ie. a high clock + high IPC 4c/6c "toy" box, and a 12c+ box for MT compute jobs)

The acid test for me is if I got the CPU/mobo/RAM for free, is the performance and/or platform upgrade significant enough for me to actually
bother swapping out existing hardware, validating a new OC, etc.
 
Ajay said:
Sounds like a plan. If all your apps/games run fine, why bother with lesser upgrades. Wait and go big or go home 🙂
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm in the boat moonbogg was in until he bought his 6800k. To be honest, I became bored with PC hardware and that's another reason I haven't updated my system. However, Ryzen changes all of that - I bought a Ryzen 1500x combo for a second gaming system and while it has bugs (particularly issues getting fast RAM to work), I think it is a pretty solid and quick little system, I'll eventually toss it in a better case with a better cooler and play with some overclocking but I'm hoping to get this RAM issue nailed down - it is pretty annoying.

Then again, there are folks like @AdamK47 who just like to stay on the 'latest and greatest' path :holysmokes:
Click to expand...

I think Adam's secret is that he flips his old hardware at just the right time, making the upgrade cheaper. However, with Ryzen 7 offering some pretty strong competition, it may be harder to flip the BW-E chips, though I'd assume his 6950 can still command a premium.

At any rate, I applaud him for having a hobby he is clearly passionate about.
 
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Ajay said:
No hesitation, cool. How many cores you looking for?
Click to expand...

I was an early adopter of SB-E and loved the platform. The only reason I moved off the HEDT platform was because I wanted Haswell and Skylake without having to wait an additional 1.5 years from the mainstream release. So I have been waiting for Skylake-X since the first announcement of Purley back in 2015.

I am looking to get the fastest 8 cores possible for under $1K (cpu only). The only thing that would stop me is if Intel gimps AVX512 from the LGA2066 chips. If that happens, I will simply go with a LGA3647 Xeon and call it a decade. And I would buy a dual socket Supermicro board and throw a Xeon Phi in there as well....just because I can.
 
formulav8 said:
Why would someone buy anything Intel currently when AMD currently has the best price/performance edge? From CPU to motherboard costs/performance, AMD is better. Even if running 2400mhz 14c ram.Its my own experience but I doubt I'm alone.
Click to expand...

For people who want the best performing chip and chipset and are willing to pay a little more for it. When I get around to doing new system builds, that's the category I fall into, I doubt I'm alone. 😉
 
2is said:
For people who want the best performing chip and chipset and are willing to pay a little more for it. When I get around to doing new system builds, that's the category I fall into, I doubt I'm alone. 😉
Click to expand...

Intel's HEDT hasn't offered that in awhile, though. Skylake-X will be the first time in years that they've offered what is more-or-less their most recent core architecture on the current HEDT platform. Haswell-E buyers had a brief window, but once Skylake was out that was over. Intel won't release anything demonstrably "faster" IPC-wise until Icelake, so Skylake-X will be current for awhile.

But then there's X399. So how long will Skylake-X's reign really last? It might not be for a very long time, and Intel will have no real room to pivot.
 
I feel like I finally got around to assembling a sky build at the end of the summer last year... plus I think Vega is going to hurt my rainy day fund soon so I'll likely be skipping any CPU's for another year or so. Plus, I'd have to buy a new board too which is never convenient. Now that I have the Ryzen machine 99% sorted, I'm happy with processing power for the time being.
 
DrMrLordX said:
Intel's HEDT hasn't offered that in awhile, though. Skylake-X will be the first time in years that they've offered what is more-or-less their most recent core architecture on the current HEDT platform. Haswell-E buyers had a brief window, but once Skylake was out that was over. Intel won't release anything demonstrably "faster" IPC-wise until Icelake, so Skylake-X will be current for awhile.

But then there's X399. So how long will Skylake-X's reign really last? It might not be for a very long time, and Intel will have no real room to pivot.
Click to expand...

I wasn't really comparing Intel to Intel, but an argument can be made here too. IPC is but a single metric. There are others like core count and PCIe lanes for multi-gpu configurations. That said, I do agree that it's kind of lame that their HEDT parts came out so late in the cycle.
 
2is said:
I wasn't really comparing Intel to Intel, but an argument can be made here too. IPC is but a single metric. There are others like core count and PCIe lanes for multi-gpu configurations. That said, I do agree that it's kind of lame that their HEDT parts came out so late in the cycle.
Click to expand...

Its beyond frustrating to spend more money for a supposedly high end platform and get straight up beat by something that costs half as much. The HEDT platform should be the best of the best. With Sandybridge it was cool because the 3930K was just as fast as the 3960X for half the cost, so value was there and that was awesome. Also, nothing was faster than a sandy core, so HEDT gave you 2 more of the currently best cores out. Ivy didn't make anyone on sandy feel bad. Then it all went to hell. Ivy-E had more cores but was slower than 4770K and its been that was ever since. Almost seems like Intel has just been trolling us, making us choose between cores and IPC where often times the performance is basically a wash, so choosing is difficult and frustrating. But hey, they had to keep it like that if they wanted to keep charging $600 for outdated 6 core CPU's. If they gave people 6 cores on the mainstream with latest architecture, most people who normally go HEDT would no longer feel the need to do so and that means giving people real value, which is a huge no-no. It also means no more charging $600 for hex core CPU's, which is also a big no-no. Must avoid value to customer at all costs.
 
2is said:
best performing chip and chipset and are willing to pay a little more for it.
Click to expand...

Up to you buddy, your opinion, you're entrusted for your judgement/decision. I tell different for my computer based side business, especially when the bang for the buck is meaningful for my customers involved. To each their own.
 
moonbogg said:
Almost seems like Intel has just been trolling us, making us choose between cores and IPC where often times the performance is basically a wash, so choosing is difficult and frustrating
Click to expand...

Not saying I agree with it, but some of the lag between the mainstream and HEDT CPUs is due to more stringent quality and validation procedures, much like the Xeons which they are descended from. So I think that's always going to be an issue to a degree for HEDT if you want the latest and greatest.

But like I said several pages ago, the best thing about the HEDT lineup is that you can have your cake and eat it too. While most modern games don't scale above four threads, many of them respond very well to the enormous caches that are bolted onto the HEDT CPUs. Your 6800K has nearly twice as much L3 cache as a 7700K, which means that it doesn't have to pay the latency penalty as much as the mainstream CPUs for accessing system memory. And when you add driver optimizations (for NVidia at least) that utilize extra CPU threads for increased performance, then the microarchitecture lag doesn't look as bad as you'd think.

CPU game performance graphs these days tend to favor the big multicore CPUs despite the clockspeed handicap compared to the mainstream parts, which can be solved by overclocking. In fact, here is the latest one from PCgameshardware.de for May 2017:

This is for gaming only, and as you can see, the 6900K is right on the heels of the 7700K despite having a massive clockspeed deficit, which an overclock can easily fix.

muM3Ja.png
 
Intel performing better than AMD STILL isn't an opinion.

Your original post indicated you were confused as to why anyone would buy Intel. Now you know. 😉
 
Carfax83 said:
Not saying I agree with it, but some of the lag between the mainstream and HEDT CPUs is due to more stringent quality and validation procedures, much like the Xeons which they are descended from. So I think that's always going to be an issue to a degree for HEDT if you want the latest and greatest.

But like I said several pages ago, the best thing about the HEDT lineup is that you can have your cake and eat it too. While most modern games don't scale above four threads, many of them respond very well to the enormous caches that are bolted onto the HEDT CPUs. Your 6800K has nearly twice as much L3 cache as a 7700K, which means that it doesn't have to pay the latency penalty as much as the mainstream CPUs for accessing system memory. And when you add driver optimizations (for NVidia at least) that utilize extra CPU threads for increased performance, then the microarchitecture lag doesn't look as bad as you'd think.

CPU game performance graphs these days tend to favor the big multicore CPUs despite the clockspeed handicap compared to the mainstream parts, which can be solved by overclocking. In fact, here is the latest one from PCgameshardware.de for May 2017:

This is for gaming only, and as you can see, the 6900K is right on the heels of the 7700K despite having a massive clockspeed deficit, which an overclock can easily fix.

muM3Ja.png
Click to expand...

Who really games at 720p these days? I game at 4K or 3440x1440 (on ultrawide) and my Ryzen 1700 @ 4ghz is more than plenty fast. At that point, it's the gpu (GTX 1080) that's a bottleneck.
 
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