Originally Posted by
airisom2
Right now, I'd say either the 1700 or the 7700K will be great ones to move up to, leaning more towards the 1700. What the 1700 loses in per-core performance more than makes up in multithread when compared to the 7700K. And since the die is soldered to the IHS, you won't have to worry about delidding to achieve lower temps. It might not be a big deal right now, but knowing that you don't have to fool around with your chip to get lower temps is pretty nice. Also, I really don't see poorer single-thread performance being a big deal. As resolution increases, cpu bottleneck decreases. At 4K, they're essentially equal.
Coffee Lake and X299 are pretty uninteresting to me. While people have been begging for Intel to release a mainstream 6 core, Ryzen diluted that a good bit. Having temperature issues due to a non-soldered IHS sounds like a headache as well. While X299 is actually a really good platform, Intel messed it up. Their chips have paste under the IHS, motherboard heatsinks are doing a poor job at cooling the mosfets (mainly concerns highly overclocked 8+ core chips, watch der8auer's newest video for more info), and their lineup seems really confusing to me, though that really doesn't matter when you have your eyes set on a particular model. I just hope that the unreleased i9 chips are soldered and that the motherboard vendors released revised heatsinks to keep the heat down on the fets. No point in getting a board with a great vrm design if you can't even cool them.
Threadripper is the most interesting platform to me. It really reminds me a lot of X79 when it first released. X79 was the platform that just seemed over the top and had all of the right things going for it when it came out. A coherent processor lineup, all of which performed very well (and was soldered
), quad channel memory, pcie 3.0, 40 pcie lanes, etc. It really ticked all of the boxes, and it wasn't too much more expensive than P67 when you considered what you got. Most of the people who were on 2500Ks and similar have upgraded to Haswell or newer by now, but I still see a good bit of users on X79. X399 gives me the same feeling. We have processors with a bunch of cores, quad channel DDR4 offers more than enough bandwidth, 64 pcie lanes is absurd, and the other features it has will allow it to stay relevant for a long time. Single-thread performance may be a concern, but I think it's safe to say that games and applications will only continue to utilize more cores. 12-16 is still a lot, though. I can see an 8 or 10 core being a very successful chip for X399.
And about the 7700K 5GHz deal, 4.8-5.0 is pretty common on 7700Ks, but replacing the TIM with liquid metal and using at least upper-tier mainstream cooling (a la D15 with faster fans, 240/280 asetek coolers, swiftech custom AIOs) is pretty much mandatory if you want acceptable temps. Other than that, I agree that 5.0 is out of reach on a non-delidded chip unless you have a good custom loop. Intel's response seems like damage control to me. If the IHS was soldered, nobody would be complaining about high temperatures since the temps wouldn't be high to begin with. You fix the temperature problem, and you have yourself a processor that you can safely overclock without running into thermal problems. That means users won't report any temperature related problems which would cause Intel to do what they did here recently.