5th gen vs 6th intel

[Dreamurr]

So im building a new rig and recently came across people not too happy with pairing DDR3 with Skylake and this was my original plan. I could probably cash out for DDR4 for the better processors but was wondering if it may just be worth it to buy the highest end 5th gen. I pretty much just want to max out games and don't have too much of a need for multi threading. If you think i should just go 1 gen back would you mind pointing me in the right direction.

Thanks all!

 

[Karsten75]

Anywhere between Haswell Refresh (Devils Canyon) and Broadwell, choose an i5 processor and you'll not have a problem gaming. Skylake proces are insne at the moment, they're selling for a bunch over Intel's MSRP - so much that I recently built an i7-5820K rig for less than an Skylake i7-6700K would have cost.

 

[Dreamurr]

Anywhere between Haswell Refresh (Devils Canyon) and Broadwell, choose an i5 processor and you'll not have a problem gaming. Skylake proces are insne at the moment, they're selling for a bunch over Intel's MSRP - so much that I recently built an i7-5820K rig for less than an Skylake i7-6700K would have cost.

So ya don't think ill lose out too much if i go with a High quality 5th gen? And should i just dump that money I save into an even better GPU? I jsut don't want to pick up a 5th gen and in a couple years see it start to be subjected to the ever progressing tides of high quality gaming

 

[Swordkd]

Right now, if money is tight, buy the Haswell Refresh over Skylake i5. The performance difference isn't much, and certainly not worth the price premium you pay for it.

 

[photonboy]

1) I agree on Haswell.

2) DDR3 + Skylake is an absolute bad idea. It can easily kill the CPU.

3) Best CPU?
It really boils down to BUDGET.

For gaming, I'd suggest the i5-4590 if the savings are enough to justify a GPU upgrade (if not, perhaps get the i5-4590K). It's probably "only" about $40USD so suit yourself. It's also enough to go from 8GB to 16GB DDR3, or upgrade to a higher capacity SSD or whatever.

Other:
To be clear, when gaming the bottleneck is usually the GPU. Especially if you have an i5-4590 or better.

Other:
You can often TWEAK a few CPU settings. For the i5-4590, if you can adjust the turbo values then I'd do that. It's not overclockable but Turbo has a max settings and drops about 100MHz as more cores are active (so may drop to about 3.4GHz with all four cores used).

The CPU may be stable at, or near, 3.7GHz even with all four cores used. So go into the motherboard BIOS (after system is built and tested for a week) and then adjust the turbo values if possible to their highest (i.e. 3.7GHz for 1,2,3 and 4-cores active).

 

[photonboy]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/intel-haswell-refresh_4.html#sect0

It's important to note a few things:
1) CIV5 benefits a lot from more than TWO cores, but then difference between good 4-core CPU's is minimal

2) Metro LL on low vs higher resolution shows that the benchmark tends to shift towards the GPU at higher resolution. The i7-4790 performance gap at 1280x800 mostly disappears at 1920x1080

3) When CPU performance is SIMILAR in a chart between CPU's, it also means the game is mostly bottlenecked by the GPU. So faster CPU doesn't benefit much, but faster GPU does a lot.

Other:
The newer GPU's are still several months away so it's tough to recommend them. NVidia is estimated at October 2016 currently. AMD is estimated slightly sooner but these are very, very rough estimates.

Even then, availability is likely to be an issue (not to mention the VALUE may not even make sense).