jimbothejester :
Is there any reason I shouldn’t go with an i7 8700k right now and wait for Ice Lake? Just curious. I’m trying not to fall in the hole of waiting for the next new tech to release in order to justify my purchase.
Here's my Gibberish:
I get the feeling some weird things are going to happen shortly. There are rumours of 8 core mainstream Canon-Lake (10 nm refresh of kaby/coffee). Both Cannon (desktop) and Ice are supposed to be 2018 though with Ice being an architecture change after the Cannon process change.
I worry that Cannon might get the Broadwell treatment. Meaning; they release one or 2 desktop chips only to give Z370 users an extra "generation" like they did with haswell to broadwell but for the most part skip it entirely until Ice lake comes out. If Cannon releases in June without 8 core it really presents no improvement over coffee (maybe power, not likely any speed) but if it does release with 8 core then ice lake will present no real improvement....That's why I think one of them will get the desktop skip treatment and we'll only see one or the other in any real form.
The facts are that Coffeelake is pretty awesome and selling well despite the deserved flack they got for it. They already annoyed a lot of buyers in that space though when they made it incompatible with Z270 even though it uses the same socket. They also released Kaby and Coffee within 9 months of each other. If they now release Canon and Icelake chips for desktop in 2018 they will have released 4 full "mainstream" "desktop" lineups in under 2 years. Will that mean a new socket, an 1151v3 perhaps? Will users have to buy a new board again? Now that is possible and Zen+/Zen2 may force them to do so but 4 full releases in 2 years is pretty ridiculous and will almost ensure that one (or more) of those lineups is cannibalized by another. For example Kaby is still in full stock but you'd be nuts to buy one now unless you got an insane deal for example because ryzen is better at all but the top end and Coffee is better at the top end and it was never really better than Skylake in the first place unless you delidded...I fully expect to see 7700Ks drop to $200 to eliminate stock.
Now, given your goal of 1440p/60 and streaming I'd suggest two options:
1. Go 8700k and it will do that for most games. For the ones that it lacks native streaming power for use quicksync or NVenc to stream. It is no question the best gaming processor you can get right now.
2. Get an 8 core Ryzen with fast RAM and OC the snot out of it. They will software stream anything right now and have guaranteed upgrades on the socket until 2020.
3. Wait for an 8 core mainstream Intel; this could mean March, August, December or it might even get pushed back into 2019 so I'd advise against it.
4. Go to HEDT Intel or Zen and get yourself 10,12, or more cores of awesomeness. These will stream record and play liek no ones business.
I did notice you only want 60FPS gaming. If you want to get that higher then stick to the Intel side of things for now and 8700k is my preferred option, especially if you like PUBG style games where AMD is just not working as well unfortunately.