Motherboards, Kaby Lake.. possibly upgrading?

[Deleted]

Hey!

I've got an i5 3570k running around 4Ghz, can't push it higher than this unfortunately, with somewhat random Gigabyte motherboard (GA-Z77X-D3H), with pricey Noctua cooler (NH-D14?) I'm not limited by thermals, but probably bad silicon lottery or mobo not being able to provide power cleanly enough. GPU is 1080, and I'm playing on 4k. At the moment I'm limited to 8 gigabytes of RAM, and I can't add more - nor would I want to buy aging DDR3.

So, what I am going to do is either upgrade to Skylake i7 6700k, or wait until Kaby Lake equilavent. i7 mainly due to reliability in future (DX12 makes extra cores useful, and my current CPU is what, 4-5 years old?), plus I might want to record/stream in the future, and I play lots of CPU intensive games (EUIV, Civilization, Cities, not only WoW..) while "multitasking" (watching Twitch streams mostly..) on 2nd screen, so I believe I can make use of those extra cores worth the price. Plus, currently, I'm obviously bit low on RAM side.

So, I have few questions;


1st: What's the actual estimate for unlocked Kaby Lake i7s? I've seen everything from November to next year's March. People speak about Kaby Lake X, but is that the more expensive socket line or does it now include unlocked i7's with socket 1151 too? From what I've heard waiting for Kaby isn't that much of a deal unless you're going for Optane tech or integrated GPUs, I believe former is expensive for multiple years at which point I can upgrade my system again, and latter.. well, I prefer my NVidia. Some extra clocks that come alongside I hope to gain with overclocking, IPC difference should be minimal? Or am I wrong?


2nd: What makes a good motherboard for overclocking? This is the first mobo+CPU+RAM combo I'm paying with my own cash, so I can afford to spend a bit more on the parts, but is it worthwhile? What are the benefits in more expensive ones? Like what's the difference between all of the ASUS Maximus series? All I can see is few more USB ports mostly, some have WiFi.. I want motherboard with what I can push extra power into CPU, I assume all in that price range have enough internal connectors for HDD/SSD/M2s and USBs. If answer to #1 results in not worth waiting Kaby Lake, I'd like to get some suggestions in 200-300 euro range, lower or higher if well argued. Personally I've been looking at this bundle - ASUS Maximus VIII Hero, i7 6700k +some RAM too - not enough but stackable one for 2nd 8gb stick, 16 should be enough. Bundle itself doesn't save much since I could ship stuff from Germany instead of Finland, getting cheaper price, so I'm very far from being set into that motherboard.


Thanks in advance! Not sure if this should be in this subforum or Computer, fits into both.

[Fascinate]

No one really knows when they are coming out, but dont expect much in terms of actual performance upgrade over skylake. I also have a hard time believing you can only get 4ghz out of your chip, i have a 2500k and am running the cheapest motherboard you could buy in 2011 that allows overclocking, a biostar tp67b+ and even on that turd i can get 4.6ghz easily out of my chip. Ive never heard of an i5 in the past 5 years that cant go past 4.0ghz, its possible i guess you got THE worst cpu ever made but i think what is more likely is you arent inputting settings properly in the bios.

All that said, a 4.0ghz 3570k is still a very fast CPU and there is nothing you can do to your system to make a noticeable upgrade to what you have, at least on the CPU side of things. I have no problems doing anything with my 4.2ghz 2500k (what i run at daily) what issues are you experiencing with your rig that is making you want to upgrade?

[Deleted]

Unfortunately I've tried, altough long ago, all sorts of overclocking possibilities, both through BIOS as well as through software, and increasing voltage as well. Always resulted in a blue screen, and due to blue screens disappearing at lower OC so I'm not suspecting Windows Stresstesting showed temps being well within range, but something always crashed the system. It's been many years since I last adjusted, but nothing in relation to CPU has changed over the years, so I doubdt it would have improved.. Originally I was hoping to reach that 4,5 Ghz range, but I fell way short of that.

Mostly I'm expecting increased overclockability as well as having workload thrown into more cores than they are at the moment. Like mentioned I play CPU heavy games, and while they often don't eat up even all of the 4 cores i5 have, the added stuff I keep open does eat the remainder, not to mention how low I am on RAM - and while it would be easy fix to buy up another 8gb kit of DDR3, I would have to remove my CPU cooler to attach them... last time I did that I managed to break the CPU (cooler was like glued to CPU, so it broke off few pins), so I'm slightly afraid of the operation. But even as so, getting ~20%? increased IPC as well as probable 500-800Mhz increasement in raw power, I'd suspect gains to be noticeable even in CPU-bound games that don't take 2+ cores into account. In addition in transition to faster DDR4. None of them worthy reasons alone obviously, but I believe they sum up in quite bit of increase.

So the issues I have is game slowdowns in said CPU heavy games, including WoW, especially if wanting to watch Twitch on another screen (or even worse, play Hearthstone while wow is in background and Twitch running.. I'm bad with running so much stuff), and the fact that I would like to record raid kills again (did that back in MoP)

Obviously I can't expect a miracle in CPU upgrade, and partially I would like to wait for rumored Cannonlake 6-core i5s, but then again, building up a PC you could always wait up for the next thing and never get anything.