Build Advice New Intel Build for my Brother

[AllanGH]

OK.....I thought I'd do something nice for my brother, and do a new system build for his birthday, in August....so I have time to plan and source components.

I checked with him, and he currently prefers Intel μPs to AMD....I'm not certain as to whether or not he plans on gaming, but will plan on at least some light gaming for the system--nothing hard-core, though.

I'm looking at MSI for the MB (Z370 Krait Gaming), because he isn't really into the bits and bobs of hardware, and I'll be fielding any hardware issues he has in the future, so dealing with an MSI MB will make things easier in that event.

μP selection is a sticking point for me. He is currently running an i5, so bumping him up to an i7 ori9 is the goal, but the price-point on the i9s that I've seen are ridiculous--unless I'm missing something--so i7 is probably the target μP for this build.

I can go with anything from the i7-8086K to the i7-9700K μP in the CoffeeLake architecture which gives me a price point from $545.99 for the 8086K to $437.60 for the 9700K, on NewEgg.

This is counter-intuitive to my expectations, given what I would otherwise expect from part Intel numbering in the past. Is this a matter of sales volume, or is there something more compelling about the 8086K unit?

I do not know what specific i5 he's using now, but he got it used from CraigsList a while back, for @25.00, so I don't think that it's anything to write home about, comparatively-speaking, and that, bumping him up to an i7 will be an overall improvement for him.

What thoughts do those who use Intel consistently have about this and, are there any sources of i9's that have pricing that is more favorable to this project?

 

[DSzymborski]

i9s are simply more expensive and there's no way around it. Except, like, rob a store, but I'm not going to recommend that route for obvious reasons.

No doubt a modern i7 will absolutely murderize any i5 he bought a while back for $25.

Pricing for the 8086K will always be a little weird because it wasn't really marketed as just a processor, but a special, limited-edition tribute to the 40th anniversary of the original Intel 8086 (hence the name). Intel doesn't usually keep the pricing of CPUs like this proportional to the performance. The 8086K performs similarly out-of-the-box to a 9700k.

The core/thread count is a bit different in that the 8086K is a 6c/12t processor and the 9700k 8c/8t. What edges out will largely depend on other things, like how a particular piece of software utilizes such formidable CPU resources.

If you do get a 9000 series CPU, make sure to get a Z390 motherboard, not a Z370. Most of the latter will require BIOS updates.

 

[Finstar]

I'd say go with i7-8700k. It's the same chip as the i7-8086k, only a bit lower clocked. It also has the highest overclocking potential out of Intels current range of i7s and i9s (aside from the 8086ks higher binning) once you delid it.

 

[Finstar]

I'd say go with i7-8700k. It's the same chip as the i7-8086k, only a bit lower clocked. It also has the highest overclocking potential out of Intels current range of i7s and i9s (aside from the 8086ks higher binning) once you delid it.

 

[Finstar]

I'd say go with i7-8700k. It's the same chip as the i7-8086k, only a bit lower clocked. It also has the highest overclocking potential out of Intels current range of i7s and i9s (aside from the 8086ks higher binning) once you delid it.

 

[AllanGH]

A 9700 series just isn't in the cards for him. The budget just isn't going to stretch that far, after we took a soaking on the taxes, this year.

I never did check pricing on the 8700, assuming a linear progression of pricing. Time to check them all, I suppose.

I know that he would never go the delidding route, unless something unrelated to OCing forces him in that direction. He's just not an experimenter.

He might dabble with a mild OC once or twice, though...the days are gone when you could double the system clock and get away with it; but he's more likely to use it at the designed clocking.

Compared with what he's using now, he'll be ecstatic over getting a full i7 build that is turn-key. It's just a matter of how high I can go on the clock speed.

So, more research.....

 

[cryoburner]

What sort of graphics card were you planning on getting? A higher-end processor might be nice, but the graphics card will tend to have much more of a performance impact on things like gaming. If gaming is a thing that he wants to do, that is. : P

 

[AllanGH]

Right now, I'm looking at the RTX 2080 (anywhere from 8GB to 11GB), which seems to be a card of reasonable capabilities for what he does; and I am figuring that he will dabble in games now and then, but it's not a lifestyle for him.....well, at least I don't think so.

 

[AllanGH]

So far, I've got the list worked-out to:

• MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Plus (since it's virtually the same price as a Z370)
• Intel Core i7-8700K μP
• G.Skill F4-2400C15D-16GVR DIMMs
• EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 (memory compliment to be decided later)
• CORSAIR TX850M or HX850 PSU
• Samsung 970 EVO, 1TB, NVMe SSD

I'll load a retail version of W10 on it for him, with a dual-boot installation of Debian 9.8.
It'll all go into a TT Urban S41 tower case that I have sitting around in the garage, and I'm fairly certain that I still have a Neptwin V2 cooler out there, too.
(Time to clean-out the garage, I guess.)

Right now, I'm looking at secondary SATA SSD storage, and deciding what to do about a BluRay drive for him.