Is It Worth The Upgrade To Skylake?

[GloryFlopGaming]

I know that this has been asked a thousand times, but I have not seen my position yet answered. I currently have an i7 4790k and was debating an upgrade to Skylake for the DDR4 support and better onboard graphics because of DX12. Would it be worth it to reap the few benefits or not?

 

[Tradesman1]

At this poin, I don't really think so, you have a strong CPU now. Think for most if they were on Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge I think it's a good move, but with your Haswell you should be fine

 

[MathiasVO053]

it's not worth it at all when you have such a powerful cpu, even if you're all the way back in ivy-bridge i woudn't say it's worth it

 

[Supernova1138]

No, it's not worth moving to Skylake if you have a Haswell CPU already. DDR4 currently doesn't help in games, and the better integrated graphics aren't likely to help either as I don't see many developers throwing in multi-adapter support into their DirectX 12 games this early on.

Right now the only reason you might have to move to Skylake was if you wanted to run SLI or Crossfire and an M.2 SSD at the same time, in which case the Z170 chipset has enough PCI-E lanes to let you do that, Z-97 has to make compromises either by throttling the SSD or stealing lanes from one of the GPUs. If you aren't in that specific situation, then you have no reason to upgrade and you might as well sit on what you have for another couple of years and wait for Cannonlake in 2017.

 

[whoratesit]

The onboard graphics are better but you still need a discrete card to game on, so for the most part the graphics improvement makes no difference. The DDR4 support is good if need to buy more memory right now, in which case the DDR4 is more future proof. In terms of performance though, you would be looking at around a 15% improvement, which in the grand scheme of things, is not a lot, certainly if considering the cost of an upgrade.

UserBenchmark: Intel Core i7-6700K vs Core i7-4790K
Effective CPU Speed: 116% vs 100%
Intel Core i7-6700K - 0th / 848
Intel Core i7-4790K - 3rd / 848

 

[Narcissistic_Martyr]

It is my opinion that it's only worth upgrading if you have an AMD rig or a Nephilim or older intel rig. Otherwise the increase in power won't make much of a difference at the moment.

 

[Tradesman1]

It is my opinion that it's only worth upgrading if you have an AMD rig or a Nephilim or older intel rig. Otherwise the increase in power won't make much of a difference at the moment.

_________________________

If on SB or IB and you have the budget, it might well be, the supply line in mobos has been drying and will soon see them down to nothing, if something there breaks , might be forced to and not have then money then

 

[1LiquidPC]

Since your already using the top Haswell 4-Core chip, I would say no...unless your planning an ovehaul of storage such as PCI-E, M.2, or U.2 SSDs due to the DMI upgrade and added PCI-E lanes to the Z170 Chipset.

 

[JoHnDoE416]

I know that this has been asked a thousand times, but I have not seen my position yet answered. I currently have an i7 4790k and was debating an upgrade to Skylake for the DDR4 support and better onboard graphics because of DX12. Would it be worth it to reap the few benefits or not?

As i understand it, at this point DDR4 only makes a difference in large-scale applications (e.g. servers). For a personal user, you won't really notice a difference in performance or power usage. But, as DDR4 becomes the main memory version, you'll already be on the bandwagon. So pros and cons, I guess

 

[jaguarskx]

I know that this has been asked a thousand times, but I have not seen my position yet answered. I currently have an i7 4790k and was debating an upgrade to Skylake for the DDR4 support and better onboard graphics because of DX12. Would it be worth it to reap the few benefits or not?

You will see minimal CPU performance increase going from Haswell to Skylake.

If you simply want better graphics performance, it would be far cheaper to buy a $50 - $75 CPU with DX12 support compared to buying a new CPU, motherboard and RAM just for a slightly more powerful Intel HD 520 / 530 which supports DX12. You can practically buy a nVidia GTX 980 for the cost of upgrading those three components.