Question Comparing mobo combos

[purotainoman]

Currently have an asus x99 board with an 6950X and a rog strix z 370e with an 8900k brother says the x99 is more stable but was wanting to get a second opinion before i choose one and give the other to a friend, what would be better and what things make it better.

Danny

 

[Aeacus]

brother says the x99 is more stable

I'd say: No.

Why?
X99 chipset, despite being server/workstation chipset, is more capricious than consumer grade chipset. E.g it may only work with ECC/RDIMM RAM, which is far more expensive than non-ECC/UDIMM consumer RAM.

Also, X99 chipset was released in 2014, while Z370 chipset was released in 2017. That's 3 years diff, in favor of Z370 chipset. The older the MoBo is - the higher the chance of it dying.

CPU wise, well... there is no CPU which is i9-8900K. Core i9 was 1st released with 9th generation (Coffee Lake Refresh), and not 8th generation (Coffee Lake) of Intel CPUs.
What there are on high-end, are: i7-8700K, i7-9700K, i9-9900K, i9-9900KS.

So, i take that what you have is: i7-8700K.

i7-6950X is 10c/20t, i7-8700K is 6c/12t CPU.
So, if you need cores/threads, i7-6950X is better. But for overall performance, they are equal.
Also, i7-8700K was released 2017 while i7-6950X was released in 2016. So, i7-8700K is 1 year newer.

Oh, CPU power consumption:
i7-6950X - 140W
i7-8700K - 95W

Clock speeds:
i7-6950X - 3 Ghz base, 3.5 Ghz boost
i7-8700K - 3.7 Ghz base, 4.7 Ghz boost

So, unless you need more cores/threads, i7-8700K is better. Newer, higher CPU frequency, less power draw and MoBo it sits on, is 3 years newer compared to X99 chipset. Also, no issue with ECC/RDIMM RAM with this one either.
Oh, you can upgrade i7-8700K to i9-9900KS if need be. Unsure if you could upgrade i7-6950X into anything better.