Should I upgrade my motherboard?

[dazkyl]

Currently with the Asus Z170 Pro Gaming

Running an i5 6600k @ 4.8ghz , 32gb ddr4 @ 3200mhz and a gtx 1080 founders edition.

I was looking at either one of these.

Asus ROG Strix Z270
Asus ROG Maximus IX Hero Z270
Asus ROG Maximus IX Formula
AORUS Gigabyte - GA-Z270X-Gaming 5 - Intel Z270
AORUS Gigabyte - GA-Z270X-Gaming 7 - Intel Z270

Which one , and why ? I dont see any reason to upgrade but the looks are very nice.

Thanks.

 

[panathas]

You don't need a motherboard upgrade just for the looks alone. If you have money to burn get the board that you like the most. Now the one thing in your system that you could upgrade is the CPU. Sell the i5 and get a new Kaby Lake i7. You'll spend almost the same amount of money but it's a much more useful upgrade and you'll notice the performance increase. That's the only upgrade that makes sense in you case.

 

[geofelt]

Today, no reason at all.
Possibly in the future if optane devices are desired, then a z270 upgrade might be required.

 

[dazkyl]

You don't need a motherboard upgrade just for the looks alone. If you have money to burn get the board that you like the most. Now the one thing in your system that you could upgrade is the CPU. Sell the i5 and get a new Kaby Lake i7. You'll spend almost the same amount of money but it's a much more useful upgrade and you'll notice the performance increase. That's the only upgrade that makes sense in you case.

I only use my PC for gaming. Should I upgrade to the 7700k ? If so , I'm better upgrading the CPU than the motherboard.

7600k or 7700k ?

 

[panathas]

You don't need a motherboard upgrade just for the looks alone. If you have money to burn get the board that you like the most. Now the one thing in your system that you could upgrade is the CPU. Sell the i5 and get a new Kaby Lake i7. You'll spend almost the same amount of money but it's a much more useful upgrade and you'll notice the performance increase. That's the only upgrade that makes sense in you case.

I only use my PC for gaming. Should I upgrade to the 7700k ? If so , I'm better upgrading the CPU than the motherboard.

It's a more meaningful upgrade in your case and you'll get something back in return (more CPU performance).

 

[dazkyl]

You don't need a motherboard upgrade just for the looks alone. If you have money to burn get the board that you like the most. Now the one thing in your system that you could upgrade is the CPU. Sell the i5 and get a new Kaby Lake i7. You'll spend almost the same amount of money but it's a much more useful upgrade and you'll notice the performance increase. That's the only upgrade that makes sense in you case.

I only use my PC for gaming. Should I upgrade to the 7700k ? If so , I'm better upgrading the CPU than the motherboard.

It's a more meaningful upgrade in your case and you'll get something back in return (more CPU performance).

7600k or 7700k ? What if it doesnt reach the 4.8ghz oc that I already have on my 6600k ? Should I still get more performance ?

 

[panathas]

Clock for clock (if they have exactly the same clock speed) the i7 is 30-40% faster. Also the new Kaby Lake CPUs have an additional overclocking headroom by about 300-400MHz. So get an i7 7700k. The 7600K is an i5. The i7 7700K over-clocks easily up to 4.9 or 5.0GHz and even if you get a bad chip that can't exceed the 4.8GHz, you'll still see a big performance increase in certain games that need more than 4 CPU cores. Just don't get in now, wait for a month or two. This will increase the chances that you get a chip with better overclocking capabilities because these CPUs are still new and the manufacturing procedure gets better with time.

 

[dazkyl]

Clock for clock (if they have exactly the same clock speed) the i7 is 30-40% faster. Also the new Kaby Lake CPUs have an additional overclocking headroom by about 300-400MHz. So get an i7 7700k. The 7600K is an i5. The i7 7700K over-clocks easily up to 4.9 or 5.0GHz and even if you get a bad chip that can't exceed the 4.8GHz, you'll still see a big performance increase in certain games that need more than 4 CPU cores. Just don't get in now, wait for a month or two. This will increase the chances that you get a chip with better overclocking capabilities because these CPUs are still new and the manufacturing procedure gets better with time.

Fair enough. Can you name some games that needs more than 4 CPU cores and that I'll benefit from using the 7700k ?

 

[geofelt]

Be careful how you interpret task manager cpu utilizations.
Windows will spread the activity of a single thread over all available threads.
So, if you had a game that was single threaded and cpu bound, it would show up on a quad core processor as 25%
utilization across all 4 threads.
leading you to think your bottleneck was elsewhere.
It turns our that few games can usefully use more than 2-3 threads.
How can you tell how well threaded your games or apps are?
One way is to disable one thread and see how you do.

You can do this in the windows msconfig boot advanced options option.
You will need to reboot for the change to take effect. Set the number of processors to less than you have.
This will tell you how sensitive your games are to the benefits of many threads.
If you see little difference, it tells you that you will not benefit from more cores.
Likely, a better clock rate will be more important.

That lets you decide between a I5 with 4 threads or a I7 with 8 threads.
Kaby lake will generally be faster, but not by all that much.
At the same clock rate, skylake and kaby lake will perform the same.

You have a well binned chip. only some 38% can do 4.8.

As of 1/13/17
What percent of samples can get an overclock
at a vcore around 1.4v.
I5-7600K
5.1 28%
5.0 52%
4.9 72%

I7-7700K
4.9 74%
5.0 56%
5.1 26%
5.2 5%

These stats come from silicon lottery which bins chips and sells the better ones for a premium.

I do not know how the i5-7640K and I7-7740K chips will perform.

 

[dazkyl]

Be careful how you interpret task manager cpu utilizations.
Windows will spread the activity of a single thread over all available threads.
So, if you had a game that was single threaded and cpu bound, it would show up on a quad core processor as 25%
utilization across all 4 threads.
leading you to think your bottleneck was elsewhere.
It turns our that few games can usefully use more than 2-3 threads.
How can you tell how well threaded your games or apps are?
One way is to disable one thread and see how you do.

You can do this in the windows msconfig boot advanced options option.
You will need to reboot for the change to take effect. Set the number of processors to less than you have.
This will tell you how sensitive your games are to the benefits of many threads.
If you see little difference, it tells you that you will not benefit from more cores.
Likely, a better clock rate will be more important.

That lets you decide between a I5 with 4 threads or a I7 with 8 threads.
Kaby lake will generally be faster, but not by all that much.
At the same clock rate, skylake and kaby lake will perform the same.

You have a well binned chip. only some 38% can do 4.8.

As of 1/13/17
What percent of samples can get an overclock
at a vcore around 1.4v.
I5-7600K
5.1 28%
5.0 52%
4.9 72%

I7-7700K
4.9 74%
5.0 56%
5.1 26%
5.2 5%

These stats come from silicon lottery which bins chips and sells the better ones for a premium.

I do not know how the i5-7640K and I7-7740K chips will perform.

Not sure if it's worth selling my CPU and adding the extra 200 something for the 7700k. I'm also at a 1440p resolution.

 

[panathas]

Nobody told you that you should upgrade your CPU. You said that you wanted to upgrade the motherboard just for the looks alone and I told you that with the same amount of money you can do a more meaningful upgrade. I didn't tell you that you absolutely have to change your CPU. In fact your current CPU especially with that big overclock should be pretty fast. If I were you I'd keep my money and get the i7 later when the i5 CPU feels somewhat "limited" in a game or application. Also a CPU upgrade my make more sense down the road when you get a more powerful GPU that gets bottlenecked by the i5.

 

[geofelt]

Worth is something only YOU can determine.