Skylake 6600K or Haswell 4690K? Upgrading from Core 2 Duo PC

[Srujan_G]

I have an extremely old PC which has a Core 2 Duo E4500 CPU and no discrete graphics of any kind and I'm going to upgrade everything in it except the hard drives. I have most of the new components figured out (except the RAM and motherboard, which depends on the generation of the CPU I'm going to choose) and I'm not yet decided on the CPU.

Should I go for the i5 4690k or the i5 6600K? I'll be using a Zotac GTX 970, if that's relevant. Is there any caveats in Skylake which is not good for future-proofing?

 

[Karsten75]

If I were in your position, I'd look at the price difference between the two proposed platforms and then decide if the 8-10% performance improvement was cost-justified.

 

[Max_x2]

^^ This. You most likely won't see any real-life difference in performance. A quick shopbot search showed a 20$ difference between the two in Canada. One caveat of Skylake could be that Microsoft said that from Skylake and up, they would only support Win10. So if you prefer 7 or 8.1, that might be an issue. Keep in mind that you might still be able to install both, but they might lack some patches. Microsoft could also backtrack on this one, even tho I think it's unlikely. In comparison, try to install ios 4 on an iphone 6s, or try to install Android Gingerbread on a Nexus 5x/6p, or OS X snow leopard on a shinny new Mac, or (...) you get the point.

Good luck!

 

[Karsten75]

. One caveat of Skylake could be that Microsoft said that from Skylake and up, they would only support Win10.

This is not quite accurate. For Skylake processors, the support period for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 is 18 months. For older processors, the support period is 5 years. For newer (Kaby lake, etc.) processor, there will only be support for the then-current [strike]processor[/strike] operating system.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9964/microsoft-to-only-support-new-processors-on-windows-10

 

[bob0011]

If i were you i would go with the skylake, if the money was available and not to much of an issue.
It has a bit better performance wile also allowing you toi make the leap to DDR4 so you can always re-use it in a future build e.g. in 5 years or so. WIle also allowing more.

Good luck

 

[Max_x2]

. One caveat of Skylake could be that Microsoft said that from Skylake and up, they would only support Win10.

This is not quite accurate. For Skylake processors, the support period for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 is 18 months. For older processors, the support period is 5 years. For newer (Kaby lake, etc.) processor, there will only be support for the then-current processor.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9964/microsoft-to-only-support-new-processors-on-windows-10

True, my bad for not mentioning this, but if he wants to persist with win7, he might have some issues at some point.