Considering an upgrade 1150/z87 to LGA2011-3/x99

[Jonathan Cave]

Hello,

I'm toying with the idea of an upgrade from my spec in my sig to an i7 5820k, M/B and DDR4 RAM. Skylake doesnt interest me being only 4 cores and there will be little difference to what i have currently.

Memory wise i'm fine to sort that myself but i intend on overclocking my CPU to the maximum therefore i need recommendations on a mid-high end motherboard - somewhere in the region of £200 - £300 - the most important feature here is power delivery/phases for overclocking CPU/GPU's

I plan to buy a 2nd 980 Ti and im concious that the CPU has only 28 lanes, therefore is 8x/8x the best i can get?

Additionally i'll need a good air or a water cooled solution. - all suggestions welcome - i am not interested in building a custom loop etc... just the CPU.

thank you in advance, answers on a post card...

 

[Kiril1512]

Good upgrade for your second 980ti. You will benefit a lot with new platform. In some games with an 5gen cpu and 2 980ti you have more 20fps than 4gen cpu and 2 980ti.

Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncaMZfvEnF4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51-CbbX7F88

 

[jimmysmitty]

The i7 5820K only supports up to 28 lanes of PCIe 3.0 as well. So short of the two additional cores and extra cache a i7 5820K wont give you anything better than what you have.

You would need to go with the i7 5930K to get more PCIe lanes if you want true x16/x16.

That said, the actual PCIe is not what would hold you back. right now GPUs barely utilize a full PCIe x16 2.0 lane (which is equal to a PCIe x8 lane). The CPU itself might give you a slight boost but nothing like shown in those YouTube videos, in most cases the gaming will be very similar maybe a few % faster on the X99 platform but hard to justify the actual cost:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1261?vs=1320 - Your current CPU vs the i7 5820K

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1261?vs=1316 - Your current CPU vs the i7 5930K

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GTX_980_PCI-Express_Scaling/ - Review about PCIe scaling

As you can see, PCIe 2.0 x16, 3.0 x8 and 3.0 x16 all perform well within margin of error because the GPUs are not saturating the bus so spending $570 (CPU) + $300 (decent X99 board or more) + $150-200 (16GB DDR4 RAM) = $1020-1070 for a possible slight performance increase in some games seems pointless.