Should I buy i7 8700K or wait for Cannon Lake instead ?

nenzin

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Oct 6, 2017
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Hello

ATM, I have i7 2700K/GTX 1070 and I am going to buy Volta XX80 Ti GPU in future. Should I buy i7 8700K or is it going to bottleneck Volta XX80 Ti GPU ? Should I wait for Cannon Lake instead ?
 
Solution
What we already know is that 8700K is most powerful gaming CPU right now. But will some GPU in the future will be bottlenecked by it, now only God knows. We will know once the card is out and tested and reviewed. Not a day faster.

nenzin

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Oct 6, 2017
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Not really, I am going to buy Volta XX80 Ti, but I do not want to have CPU bottleneck. Not sure if i7 8700K is going to be enough. But thank you for nothing.
 
What we already know is that 8700K is most powerful gaming CPU right now. But will some GPU in the future will be bottlenecked by it, now only God knows. We will know once the card is out and tested and reviewed. Not a day faster.
 
Solution

nenzin

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Oct 6, 2017
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Yeah, so I should wait for Cannon Lake. I can handle one more year with this set-up. Thank you for not being sarcastic comedian.
 

ryandb2

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Aug 16, 2017
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Wow, I think you totally missed his point. Why upgrade CPU now when you are waiting on a part that is probably a year out or more? Also you probably need to clarify what you intend to run as output, CPU bottleneck for 1080p, 1440p, 4k, VR? Also we have no clue what the Volta Ti model will push. In general though, the top CPU from the previous generation should not bottleneck a newer Ti.

Short answer, how would anyone know, but based on previous generations and a reasonable assumption of your use case, you should be fine.
 

nenzin

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Oct 6, 2017
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Because I have "old" pc - can not buy new motherboard with Sandy Bridge socket. It is s slow timed bomb. You know - I would rather buy pc because I want to - not because my old pc died and now I have to buy new no matter what - instantly.
 

JustSayn

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Aug 31, 2016
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I am going to go out on a limb and assume that i7-2700K is on a Z68 based motherboard. The Z68 chipset supports in total only 8 PCIe version 2.0 lanes. So even your GTX 1070 will likely be bottlenecked in some scenarios. Going with a i7-8700K / Z370 chipset system will let your graphics card run at full potential. As others have stated, what games you run and how you run them will always be bottlenecked by either the CPU or the GPU.
To get the answer you want, you need to specify what game at what settings and what desired framerate to determine if a CPU or GPU would be a bottleneck an unacceptable percentage of the time.
There will always be something better in the pipeline, so if you wait that is another year of not playing the latest and greatest.
 

nenzin

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Oct 6, 2017
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Not really, mostly playing 4K resolution, ATM, I can live with 5 FPS MAX bottleneck, better than buying new set-up.

But I can not live with 20 FPS+ bottleneck - and that could be realistic scenario with XX80 Ti Volta and 8700K. So I am going to wait for Cannon Lake.
 
Sep 30, 2013
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10,810

I wouldn't expect much higher performance from cannon lake expect AVX performance where it will get AVX 512 support like the HEDT -X models have now.
It will also be 10 nm though so likely lower power draw or slightly higher clock whichever they go for.

Bottlenecking becomes a question per title and on graphics settings. Unless AVX I would expect massive performance difference and the more demanding graphics settings the less difference. If you buy Volta in spring 2700K will hold you back half a year I guess but for current cards 2700K isn't too bad in most titles either.
 

razamatraz

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Feb 12, 2014
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Volta is goign to be on the same process as Pascal so expect a 20% to 30% improvement over a 1080Ti MAX. If you turn the settings up on a 1080Ti and run at 1440p or 4K even a 3570K generally doesn't bottleneck it so for normal use cases I'd say no an 8700K won't bottleneck it. Will there be a game that it does bottleneck on? probably but it likely won't matter because the niche settings that cause it won't actually be used by anybody..Do you run at 720P and very low? I doubt it. IF you're buying an XX80Ti you should be looking at 4K and an 8700K will still be among the best...I don't think Cannon Lake will actually be much of an improvement since it is finally the process change rather than the architecture change that we've been waiting 4 cycles to get...

although Intel could surprise us all and release mainstream 8 cores with a whole new chipset so our motherboards and RAM are all garbage again........I doubt it though, the 9700K will probably be a 6C/12T with 0.2 more GHz.
 

wkingmilw

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May 29, 2015
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Having built 5 machines and performed 5 upgrades over 25 years, theres always going to be something better.
When you get ready to build, buy the best CPU for your usage and stuff it in the best motherboard you can afford. Video is the expensive monster, so I use the strategy I use for cars. I've never owned Corvettes, but I've had 4 bitchin Camaros.
Take your 2 year old card/cpu thats loosing 5 fps vs a new card/cpu that losing 20, buts running 4 times faster because of improvements. Are you really loosing that much? Save your money for retirement.
 

razamatraz

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It's true that the Z68 chipset only supports 8 PCI X 2.0 lanes as does Z77 but those are not the lanes the GPU uses, those are the lanes the chipset used for things like storage and PCI-X 1X slots and sound.

The PCI lanes for the GPU come directly from the CPU and sandy bridge chips had 16 lanes of 2.0 while Ivy bridge chips had 16 lanes of 3.0 that was supposed to need an ivy bridge chipset to use (but a lot of sandy boards could do it with ivy cpus). So I don't think your PCI-X is likely a bottleneck for a 1070 yet but probably would be for an 1180Ti or whatever it gets called...not that the OP asked that but it needed clarifying: CHIPSET PCI-X LANES DO NOT EQUAL GPU LANES.

 

nenzin

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Oct 6, 2017
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Yeah, but Volta Ti GPU is coming in late 2018 - or spring 2019 - at the time, I am expecting new Intel/AMD CPU generation. I do not want to combine my 2700K with Vota Ti.
 

razamatraz

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So, Steve at Gamer's Nexus tested this sort of. They used a Volta Titan with 8 versus 16X PCI-X 3.0 and found that 8 lanes was starting to bottleneck it a little bit when they used niche settings but 16X was fine....so no an 8700K will still handle it easily unless you want to run two of them.
 
Sep 30, 2013
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I think you should buy the ThreadRipper 2900 this summer once available.

Or a cheap Ryzen 2xxx.

ThreadRipper 1900 cost close to the same as i7 8700K now but have 2 more cores and you can quad-channel memory support, support for more RAM I guess, a lot more PCI-express lanes.

If you care so much about it why settle for something worse? Also the socket alone is so fucking cool. See all the posts about bent pins on Intel (the socket there look the same on AMD but the mounting solution is different.)
I would take Meltdown and Spectre bug fixes into account too. If you don't get patched against that then maybe the additional risk of leaking data may be of interest for you?

The CPU provides 16x PCI-express 2.0 for the graphics card.

The DMI (connection between processor and chipset) is 5 GT/s rather than 8 GT/s for i7 8700K. (Of course the i7 8700K also have 16x PCI-express 3.0 for the graphics card.)

 
May 19, 2018
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First of all Volta may not be the next “GTX” line of gaming graphic cards, According to some sources the next generation of “GTX” graphic cards might be using the “Ampere” or the “Turing” architecture
Secondly, Volta from what I know may be a architecture designed for workstation related task which is why NVIDIA removes the “GTX” tag from the Titan V.
And lastly a 8700k will not bottleneck anything for the next few years providing no major improvements to graphic card pop up.
Your 2700k I believe will actually bottleneck a 1070 so...yeah