Should I upgrade to 6th gen i7 from 4th gen Xeon?

[dhershman]

Hello! I find myself on these forums very often so I decided to finally sign up and ask a question!

On my machine I currently have a "Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo) 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1155" server processor. Why did I go server well it was $100 cheaper and only lacked on board graphics until the new editions released.

I've read that the 4th gens wont see much difference in the 6th gens but I was curious if this was the same affect for a Xeon processor? Would the i7 6th gen perform much better than mine?

The main reason I ask is because my motherboard is dying and before I go about buying a pre-used or clearanced motherboard I wanted to know if instead it would just be worth upgrading. I found a few motherboards that support DDR3 along with the Skylake processor, or should I go all in with DDR4 as well?

I don't mind dropping the funds for a CPU upgrade if its worth the price. Thank you!

 

[synphul]

How worth it to you it is to upgrade is up to you and your needs. Is your pc too slow doing the tasks you use it for? The i7 6700k will be faster yes, so will an i7 4790k. Both are clocked considerably faster out of the box than that xeon. With a base speed of 4ghz and turbo of 4.4 for the 4790k or 4.2 turbo for the 6700k they're around 20% faster aside from further improvements in ipc being newer designs.

In real world performance, it really depends on what you do with your pc. For basic web browsing and office tasks you probably won't see a huge difference. For gaming you may see higher fps depending on the game. For video editing and other tasks you'll probably see a larger improvement. If you want to keep your ddr3 ram I'd suggest going with the 4th gen i7 4790k, it's nearly the same in performance to a 6700k but it less expensive and officially supports ddr3.

For skylake, intel doesn't officially support ddr3. It supports ddr3L which is different, a low power version of ddr3 or ddr4 depending on the motherboard. There are a small handful of motherboards that offer ddr3 ram slots but it runs at higher voltage than the ddr3L/ddr4 and may cause issues with the integrated memory controller on skylake cpu's according to intel. May being the operative word, how badly it will affect them using plain ddr3 at higher voltages isn't clear but intel has made sure to point it out.

Skylake has some platform improvements, some additional pcie lanes as well as dmi 3.0 vs dmi 2.0 of the previous platforms, additional usb ports, additional m.2 and sata express ports, increased bandwidth between the cpu and pcie lanes supporting faster m.2 drive throughput and of course ddr4. The safer bet would be to go with ddr4 if going with the new platform and take advantage of the improved technologies. A dying motherboard can very well be a good reason for a platform shift since you have to replace it and reinstall windows anyway.

 

[dhershman]

How worth it to you it is to upgrade is up to you and your needs. Is your pc too slow doing the tasks you use it for? The i7 6700k will be faster yes, so will an i7 4790k. Both are clocked considerably faster out of the box than that xeon. With a base speed of 4ghz and turbo of 4.4 for the 4790k or 4.2 turbo for the 6700k they're around 20% faster aside from further improvements in ipc being newer designs.

In real world performance, it really depends on what you do with your pc. For basic web browsing and office tasks you probably won't see a huge difference. For gaming you may see higher fps depending on the game. For video editing and other tasks you'll probably see a larger improvement. If you want to keep your ddr3 ram I'd suggest going with the 4th gen i7 4790k, it's nearly the same in performance to a 6700k but it less expensive and officially supports ddr3.

For skylake, intel doesn't officially support ddr3. It supports ddr3L which is different, a low power version of ddr3 or ddr4 depending on the motherboard. There are a small handful of motherboards that offer ddr3 ram slots but it runs at higher voltage than the ddr3L/ddr4 and may cause issues with the integrated memory controller on skylake cpu's according to intel. May being the operative word, how badly it will affect them using plain ddr3 at higher voltages isn't clear but intel has made sure to point it out.

Skylake has some platform improvements, some additional pcie lanes as well as dmi 3.0 vs dmi 2.0 of the previous platforms, additional usb ports, additional m.2 and sata express ports, increased bandwidth between the cpu and pcie lanes supporting faster m.2 drive throughput and of course ddr4. The safer bet would be to go with ddr4 if going with the new platform and take advantage of the improved technologies. A dying motherboard can very well be a good reason for a platform shift since you have to replace it and reinstall windows anyway.

It's a heavily used pc for everything from large amounts of playing games, programming and design, and more. So regardless maybe I will upgrade to one of the i7's if anything for better performance. I have noticed latency and real hang ups which I figured were from the motherboard going bad.
Thank you! I will take your answer with me when I go to purchase my components. Appreciate it

EDIT: for anyone curious I decided to go with a upgrade to 6th gen only because the local shop by me was having a really nice combo deal. and since I don't really overclock I went with the i7 6700 setup. Now I will have a solid performance system for years to come.