i7- 6700k vs i7- 5960X

[PinHead Larry]

I have been having a little trouble trying to choose between the 6700k and the 5960X. The main thing I will be doing will be gaming. I don't stream or record videos just gaming and having Skype open. I know the 5960X has 6 cores with 3GHz and the 6700k has 4 with 4.0GHz. But i'm not completely sure which one would be better to have. I will also be having dual GTX 980 Ti's and maybe add one more in the future when games get more demanding so I would like to know if I do get 3 Ti's if it will bottleneck them. Thank you for any responses!

 

[cheese9k]

If all you're doing is gaming, why not go with a i5 6600k? or even a i5 4690k. Both perfectly good for gaming.

What graphics card will you be pairing your CPU with?

EDIT: What res are you playing at with your two 980 Ti's.

Sorry didn't read through whole question, probably better off with an i7 at least to avoid bottlenecking on those two beasts.

 

[CTurbo]

The 5960x is a $1000 8 core cpu and should almost never even be considered for a gaming cpu.

I would get the i7 4790k or i7 5820k id you REALLY want an i7. The 6700k is overpriced IMO.

Of course all you really need is an i5.

 

[PinHead Larry]

If all you're doing is gaming, why not go with a i5 6600k? or even a i5 4690k. Both perfectly good for gaming.

What graphics card will you be pairing your CPU with?

EDIT: What res are you playing at with your two 980 Ti's.

Sorry didn't read through whole question, probably better off with an i7 at least to avoid bottlenecking on those two beasts.

The VG248QE 1080p 144Hz monitor. Also to provide a little more info the games I will be playing will mainly be open world games like H1Z1, Dying Light, ARK, Reign of Kings etc.. and other games

 

[cheese9k]

You could probably save some money and go i5 with one 980ti. You should be able to push more than enough frames and not need to worry about the issues that can come with SLI (more power needed, higher temps, microstuttering etc).

 

[blazorthon]

I avoid recommending Intel CPUs that have an X in their model number on general principle. There is almost always a much cheaper alternative that is better suited to your needs. If you want to stream, then a quad core i7 would probably be the better bet. The fewer cores is a bit of a handicap, but the difference in performance per core is simply more than enough to make that up and most games would run better even if you aren't streaming because of that.

 

[PinHead Larry]

Would the 6700k bottleneck two 980Ti's?

 

[CTurbo]

No not even a little bit

 

[filippi]

"I would like to know if I do get 3 Ti's if it will bottleneck them."

For GTX 980 Ti 3-Way SLI the $550 40 PCI-E 3.0 Lanes Core i7-5930K is the best cpu right now.

 

[zAustin]

No, even an i5 will not bottleneck a GPU, or two. An i7 can support more PCIe lanes than a i5, so they can support up to 4-way, the 6700K can only support 2-way as far as I know. But for gaming, save the $100 and get an i5 - it is all you will need for gaming, if you did streaming or editing I would say get an i7, but if not, save your money because you won't notice a difference in gaming with an i7 vs an i5.

 

[PinHead Larry]

What would be a great CPU for a future 3-Way?

 

[CTurbo]

The 5820k is the best bang for buck

 

[capt_taco]

I'll echo the current recommendation and say go with the i5-6600k if it's just gaming.

What would be a great CPU for a future 3-Way?

Save your money.

 

[chuck4100]

If you are nit picking at the most minute details like getting 60fps rather than 50-60fps, then all these comments matter. But if you are using the system for just gaming and only gaming, the higher ghz will be helpful as too many games don't even use more than 1-2 cores.

However, if you do ANYthing else with your system, you will be very pleased with the 5960x. As a proud owner of one, I can't stress enough how much basic system task benefit from 8 cores and advanced tasks too like converting 16 songs or videos simultaneously saving literal hours of time. Running multi process browsers like chrome holds huge advantages on 8 cores as well.

Also note that the ghz difference really doesn't mean a whole lot considering most ram will bottleneck a 4ghz cpu unless you have the top line stuff. Also, you can Turbo mode OC the CPU to 3.8 ghz.

 

[blazorthon]

It is a well-known fact that overclocking the RAM has minimal effects on performance in the vast majority of applications. Except for a few niche things such as rendering and cryptography, RAM helps performance very little past DDR3-1600 CAS 9 and is almost completely irrelevant past DDR3-2133 CAS 9 or DDR4-2666 CAS 15. Top of the line stuff is good for nothing other than burning your CPU's memory controller if you aren't rendering or something like that.

There is little to no reason to get an i7-5960X over an i7-5820K or i7-5930K. The performance advantage of two more cores over six is much smaller than getting six instead of four and with six, you can reach higher frequencies, reducing the performance difference. For applications that can't use the full sixteen threads of the i7-5960X effectively or can perform more than well enough on less, it has no real advantage over the 5930K and little advantage over the 5820K.

Why bother turbo overclocking any of these CPUs? BCLK and multiplier overclocking are both available.