Computer Upgrade Questions

[RAM4all]

Hello all,

This is my current loadout:

GIGABYTE GA-Z270-HD3P ATX CROSSFIRE
OEM INTEL CORE I7-7700K 4.20GHZ 8MB INTEL SMART CACHE
GTX 1070
ADATA 8GB DDR4-3000 XPG Z1 MEMORY (x4, 32 GB total)
PSU: CORSAIR CS850M 80PLUS 850W CSM SERIES GOLD

I have spare money atm and wanna upgrade my computer to be a powerful workstation as well as gaming rig. I'd like to upgrade to an 8700k with either a 1080Ti or a 2080.

Can you guys offer any suggestions for Motherboards and CPU coolers? I'm willing to pay for quality parts but I'm not looking to spend top-of-the-line money on these components. I don't really have experience overclocking CPUs but I'd like to have that option available (I have a Mid-Tower case just so size is kept in mind).

Thank you!

 

[1LiquidPC]

I'm very happy with my ASUS Maximus X Hero motherboard. Bought right at Z370 launch. No problem recommending it. It's got a strong feature set, but not being over the top and crazy expensive either. Brand-wise, I'm either using ASUS or Gigabyte for motherboard when building. Regarding cooler, are you looking at aircooling or watercooling? For aircooling, I almost always use Noctua these days. High quality for the cost. Also used Be-Quiet! and a Cryorig. They worked for their purpose, but had some issues I didn't care for in my usage. What case in particular are you looking at?

 

[Viking2121]

If you don't mind me asking, you said powerful workstation, while I'll agree that the 8700k is a beast of a CPU, there are other options such as a Threadripper or the 8 core i7 or i9's or the upcoming i9's, What are you planning on doing with the system, do you need more cores threads, RAM? Need Expansion cards? Need to see how much PCIE lanes the CPU has.

The 8700k only has 16pcie lanes , they so adding in a GPU could take up almost all of the PCIE lanes as most boards do have a few lanes but are slower and if you want to SLI down the road or want a NVME drive, well there goes all the lanes...

Now something like a i7 7900 as 44 lanes and 10 cores and 20 threads, you can run 2 cards a few nvme drives and some expansion cards and be fine. a cheaper i7 7820X 8 core 16 thread has 28 lanes, of course less lanes, means less things you can run.

Of course Threadripper has 64 PCIE lanes so expansion card heaven with that CPU, But it will perform slightly worse in gaming compared to Intels offerings.

These are the higher end of a workstation. While for gaming your i7 7700k is good for gaming, the 8700k is better for CPU heavy games like BF5 and good for light workstation use, but again it depends on what you are doing or wanting to do.