I Was Waiting for Kaby Lake But Sandy Bridge Has "Fallen Down" On Me

[roninmedia]

My original plan was to using my current build until Kaby Lake came out and build myself a Gaming/HTPC system for about $1500 excluding a nice 1440p monitor, software and peripherals. Some of the new native features aimed towards the HTPC crowd was one of the reasons I was waiting for Kaby Lake. However, my Z68 motherboard starting acting up on me last week and it has pretty much died. In the meantime, I have a non-gaming laptop I can use if I choose to wait to Kaby Lake rather than just proceeding with SkyLake.

Some of the HTPC features that are going to be native on Kaby Lake such as HDCP 2.2 support, full fixed function HEVC Main10/10-bit and VP9 10-bit hardware video decoding were actually being handled by my GTX960. The GTX960 was essentially the perfect HTPC video card when it came out, but with the HTPC features being offloaded to the chip, I could aim for a more monstrous single GPU with Kaby Lake and not have to worry about HTPC specific features.

Sky or Kaby?

 

[n0ns3ns3]

You realize that you will have to wait something like 6-8 month ?
Depending on the form factor etc, I guess you can build a very nice build with GTX 1060/1070 which support all the HTPC functions you need (though i lost interest in HTPC once i got Sony android TV).
So it's up to you if you want to wait, personally i see not much difference between kaby and sky.
IMHO Z200 vs Z170 is more interesting as there supposed to be some initial support for optane.

 

[TJ Hooker]

I'm not sure why you couldn't/wouldn't continue to use a discrete GPU for HTPC features?