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Time to Upgrade - Need Advice!

808 views 37 replies 8 participants last post by  tashcz 
#1 ·
My goodness things have changed! I've done a bit of research, and it seems like now might be a good time to upgrade to the new Coffee Lake processor line. As far as I can tell, I should only need 3 things in order to upgrade my current RIG. Those being CPU, MOBO, and RAM. Below are some commonly asked questions that will help y'all in advising me with my upgrade
smile.gif


Budget
It's a bit complicated, but let's just say for the 3 parts above it will be around $900.

Things I Plan on Doing
  • Gaming
  • Music
  • Web Browsing
  • Nothing extensive like mining or hardcore video editing
How do I plan to cool?
I've been toying with the idea of trying out one of the EK Slim series kits. I'm still nervous about water cooling since I've never done it before, but part of me has the itch to at least try. If I weren't to go with the water cooling thing, I'd probably go with a decent AIO or the Noctua NH-D15 Air Cooler. Not sure which one would offer the best bang for my buck.

How Long do I plan on Waiting Before I Upgrade Again?
Well, this last time I waited about 7 or 8 years (only upgrading my GPU and case sometime during that period). I really have the mindset of building a quality RIG that should last a long time and offer the most bang for my buck over the several years I keep it. If I were to give a time-frame now as to when I'd upgrade again, I'd say every 5-7 years.

There are probably more things that y'all would have questions for me on, I just can't think of them right now. Let me know and I'll be sure to get back to you!

CPU IDEAS
As it stands right now, I really like the idea of getting a 6 core Coffee Lake processor. Not sure if going all out and getting the i7 8700k is necessary, but then again, I really want my RIG to last 5-7 years so I'm not sure if settling on an i5 is worth it. I'll let y'all educate me on that.

MOBO IDEAS
I really like the idea of ASUS again. The MOBO I currently have has been a solid performer and hasn't let me down. I also like the new 5 way optimization tool they have out there for software based OC'ing. Right now I'm torn between two MOBOs of their's. The ROG STRIX Z370-E Gaming and the ROG MAXIMUS X HERO (WI-FI AC). From my research, the only discernible differences between the 2 that would end up mattering to me would be that the HERO has special water cooling connectors and a couple extra USB 3.1 connectors on the back. The water cooling piece of things would only come into play if I were to bite the bullet and really try the water cooling thing out. That's not to say right now, but sometime during that 5-7 year time frame that I own this RIG. There may be more differences, but I couldn't really find them.

RAM IDEAS

Honestly, I have no clue here other than I'm looking at DDR4. No idea how much the frequency differences matter when paired with the components above. I could use lots of educating here!

Thanks in advance for the help!
 
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#2 ·
You should consider adding an m2 ssd to this as well. And considering AMD is not a bad thought either.
I personally went from an i7 950 to an i7 4770k. I did not regret that choice. I also dove headfirst into watercooling at that time. The question here is whether you will be overclocking high or not. I would have gotten an aio or a decent air cooler if I realized I wouldnt be clocking higher than average. But for me it was just fun to put it together.
You cant really go wrong here with the new 6 core intel i5's. AMD has some good offerings at this point too if you didnt mind going that route.
I would take the ac wifi board. I made one for a work project recently and regretted the board not having built in wifi.
 
#3 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by malzmidx View Post

You should consider adding an m2 ssd to this as well. And considering AMD is not a bad thought either.
I personally went from an i7 950 to an i7 4770k. I did not regret that choice. I also dove headfirst into watercooling at that time. The question here is whether you will be overclocking high or not. I would have gotten an aio or a decent air cooler if I realized I wouldnt be clocking higher than average. But for me it was just fun to put it together.
You cant really go wrong here with the new 6 core intel i5's. AMD has some good offerings at this point too if you didnt mind going that route.
I would take the ac wifi board. I made one for a work project recently and regretted the board not having built in wifi.
Thanks for the advice!

Would you say it was hard to watercool? Is the maintenance a pain to keep up with?
I thought about AMD as well, but it seems like Intel is still atop AMD when it comes to gaming from what I've read. That's the key reason I think I'll stick with Intel for this upgrade.
I like the idea of built in WiFi too
smile.gif
. Although I thought the other board also offered the built in wifi? Am I wrong?

Thanks!
 
#4 ·
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#5 ·
You might also consider waiting until February when the new Ryzen CPU's come out. You waited this long what's another few months.

8700k is a good choice I would probably go with an m.2 sata SSD just because it uses no cables. As far as ram goes I'd probably go for some 3200mhz stick's or faster 4000mhz would be great if it wasn't so expensive.
biggrin.gif
 
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#6 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by shilka View Post

Forget about all the CLC coolers and stick with air cooling
http://www.overclock.net/t/1590547/why-you-should-probably-not-buy-a-clc-cooler

And no you should NOT consider an M.2 NVME SSD as they are not better or faster in any way over the older SATA III AHCI drives other then smaller form factor
Thanks for the insight! CLC are now off the list. So let's say I was torn between the EKWB Slim 360 kit and the Noctua nh-d15. Would the price/maintenance of the water cooling kit be worth the temp differences over the Noctua?
 
#7 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by ozlay View Post

You might also consider waiting until February when the new Ryzen CPU's come out. You waited this long what's another few months.

8700k is a good choice I would probably go with an m.2 sata SSD just because it uses no cables. As far as ram goes I'd probably go for some 3200mhz stick's or faster 4000mhz would be great if it wasn't so expensive.
biggrin.gif
Thanks for the advice!

I would like the clean look of less cables, but that extra price tag is nuts!

Is 3200 that much faster than 2400 or 3000?

Thanks!
 
#8 ·
Unless you have a X299 or X399 CPU or have massive overclocks on your CPU its not really worth spending the money on a liquid cooling kit
Air coolers have a much better bang for buck and pretty much all of the dual tower air coolers are going to be pretty quiet and they are maintenance free unlike liquid cooling

As for RAM 3000 MHz is a good middle ground
And again why would you buy an M.2 NVME SSD compared to an SATA III AHCI SSD when they just as fast (or rather slow) in the real world

Spending the extra money just because you are too lazy to plug in two cables is just a silly way to waste money
 
#9 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by shilka View Post

Unless you have a X299 or X399 CPU or have massive overclocks on your CPU its not really worth spending the money on a liquid cooling kit
Air coolers have a much better bang for buck and pretty much all of the dual tower air coolers are going to be pretty quiet and they are maintenance free unlike liquid cooling

As for RAM 3000 MHz is a good middle ground
And again why would you buy an M.2 NVME SSD compared to an SATA III AHCI SSD when they just as fast (or rather slow) in the real world

Spending the extra money just because you are too lazy to plug in two cables is just a silly way to waste money
Very good points. It seems like the Noctua will end up being the way to go! That probably means I should go with the STRIX MOBO instead, huh?
 
#10 ·
There is an S version of the NH-D15 if you worried about losing your top PCI-E slot
The S version only comes with one fan and is off set to one side to give you more room to whatever side you put it at

I have the S version because i used to have an X79 board and two GPU´s so the only way to fit a NH-D15 was the S version
Before that i used to have the smaller NH-U12S and while its not a bad cooler its not as good as the NH-D15

On another note if you dont like the colors of Noctua Phanteks and Cryorig have coolers of similar sizes and prices
 
#11 ·
Well a lot of non-nvme m.2 drives can be found cheaper or the same price as sata. Such as the cruical mx300 or WD blue.

But no difference in performance as said earlier. So get which ever is cheaper that fits the build.
 
#12 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by ozlay View Post

Well a lot of non-nvme m.2 drives can be found cheaper or the same price as sata. Such as the cruical mx300 or WD blue.
I am not too familiar with those so i might have to look into that
If we where talking about the 950 and 960 series from Samsung those cost a lot more then the 850 series and are not faster in any way
 
#13 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by shilka View Post

There is an S version of the NH-D15 if you worried about losing your top PCI-E slot
The S version only comes with one fan and is off set to one side to give you more room to whatever side you put it at

I have the S version because i used to have an X79 board and two GPU´s so the only way to fit a NH-D15 was the S version
Before that i used to have the smaller NH-U12S and while its not a bad cooler its not as good as the NH-D15

On another note if you dont like the colors of Noctua Phanteks and Cryorig have coolers of similar sizes and prices
Sweet deal! I'm thinking I should have enough room since I only plan on using one GPU for the foreseeable future, but I'll have to look into it a bit further. Performance outweighs appearance for me
smile.gif
 
#14 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by ozlay View Post

Well a lot of non-nvme m.2 drives can be found cheaper or the same price as sata. Such as the cruical mx300 or WD blue.

But no difference in performance as said earlier. So get which ever is cheaper that fits the build.
That's really cool! I had to look those up hahaha. I'll definitely keep that in mind for potential future additions.
 
#15 ·
Msi 370 plus 8700k and corsair vengeance ddr4 16gb (2x8), forget water cooling, all benchmarks I've seen suggest air cooling is actually superior even to the best water cooling systems, a Noctua NH-D15 is still the best.

I put the 6/12 core cpu just because you mentioned you might not upgrade for an other 6/7 years. If it wasn't for that even a 6700k or even an i5-6600k will do just fine for gaming.

I currently have the i5-6600k, still have not seen it being the bottleneck for anything other than running multiple instances of mobile emulators (cpu heavy), to be fair I do play at 1440p so GPU is usually the bottleneck.

Ram wise all you need to do is look at the user benchmarks, you'll see some above average performance from very expensive models (trident z c14, c16) at 600+ USD, what you are looking for is either the ones I mentioned before (corsair vengence) or the Hyper Fury DDR4 2400 as they are cheap while being in the top 10 in terms of speeds. I'd strongly advise you stick with 2 ram sticks as 4 just doubles the chances of one breaking and doubles the work needed to diagnose them sometimes.

If you are looking for technical info on RAM, ddr4 has higher clock speeds and timings, lower power consumption, and reduced latency compared to ddr3. Though again, check the benchmarks, frequency changes do very little in terms of fps in-game.
 
#16 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jupitel View Post

Msi 370 plus 8700k and corsair vengeance ddr4 16gb (2x8), forget water cooling, all benchmarks I've seen suggest air cooling is actually superior even to the best water cooling systems, a Noctua NH-D15 is still the best.

I put the 6/12 core cpu just because you mentioned you might not upgrade for an other 6/7 years. If it wasn't for that even a 6700k or even an i5-6600k will do just fine for gaming.

I currently have the i5-6600k, still have not seen it being the bottleneck for anything other than running multiple instances of mobile emulators (cpu heavy), to be fair I do play at 1440p so GPU is usually the bottleneck.

Ram wise all you need to do is look at the user benchmarks, you'll see some above average performance from very expensive models (trident z c14, c16) at 600+ USD, what you are looking for is either the ones I mentioned before (corsair vengence) or the Hyper Fury DDR4 2400 as they are cheap while being in the top 10 in terms of speeds. I'd strongly advise you stick with 2 ram sticks as 4 just doubles the chances of one breaking and doubles the work needed to diagnose them sometimes.

If you are looking for technical info on RAM, ddr4 has higher clock speeds and timings, lower power consumption, and reduced latency compared to ddr3. Though again, check the benchmarks, frequency changes do very little in terms of fps in-game.
That's really interesting about the water cooling thing. Why do people continue to water cool if air cooling is better?

Do you think any of the i5 6 cores would suffice? Or is it the hyper-threading piece that makes the 8700k worth it?

I think I'll be playing at 1080p for a while hahah. Still have yet to get a newer monitor.

Great advice on the RAM! I'll definitely look into user benchmarks.
 
#17 ·
I suggest getting a 6-core Xeon from eBay and waiting for Z390 motherboards to hit the market. Like Coffee Lake, it appears Intel rushed Z370 to market and these boards might be less capable than Z390 boards. Your motherboard is compatible with the X56** CPUs. I personally got an X5670 because I wanted more multipliers than the i7-930 it replaced.

As far as SSDs are concerned, the Samsung 850 Evo drives are all still the best value on the market. There's drives that perform nearly as well for a little less, but that choice is up to you. I wouldn't get a NVMe SSD until prices get more competitive. You would only see the performance difference in benchmarks and drive-intensive tasks, like loading Windows. You won't save nearly enough time to justify the cost.

Speaking of which, I wouldn't consider Ryzen unless you plan on doing a lot of CPU-intensive tasks like video rendering. Intel is still the superior choice for gaming. Ryzen is great for budget workstation builds.
 
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#18 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by chessmyantidrug View Post

I suggest getting a 6-core Xeon from eBay and waiting for Z390 motherboards to hit the market. Like Coffee Lake, it appears Intel rushed Z370 to market and these boards might be less capable than Z390 boards. Your motherboard is compatible with the X56** CPUs. I personally got an X5670 because I wanted more multipliers than the i7-930 it replaced.

As far as SSDs are concerned, the Samsung 850 Evo drives are all still the best value on the market. There's drives that perform nearly as well for a little less, but that choice is up to you. I wouldn't get a NVMe SSD until prices get more competitive. You would only see the performance difference in benchmarks and drive-intensive tasks, like loading Windows. You won't save nearly enough time to justify the cost.

Speaking of which, I wouldn't consider Ryzen unless you plan on doing a lot of CPU-intensive tasks like video rendering. Intel is still the superior choice for gaming. Ryzen is great for budget workstation builds.
Interesting idea with the Xeon Processor. What do you think would be a reasonable price to pay for an x5690?

How long do you think it will be before the Z390 MOBOs hit the market? I read somewhere that it will be 2H of 2018?
 
#19 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gohan_Nightwing View Post

That's really interesting about the water cooling thing. Why do people continue to water cool if air cooling is better?

Do you think any of the i5 6 cores would suffice? Or is it the hyper-threading piece that makes the 8700k worth it?

I think I'll be playing at 1080p for a while hahah. Still have yet to get a newer monitor.

Great advice on the RAM! I'll definitely look into user benchmarks.
I think water cooling might have been the best at one point, as I said I just go off the benchmarks I've seen and they overwhelmingly suggest that air cooling is either better or just as good as water cooling, while being cheaper, less risky, easier to clean and maintain.

Yes for sure. The latest i5 8600 will run everything just as well as the 8700 in terms of pure gaming. Tuth is most people do multitasking and having HT does pay off in those situations. I'm assuming you do no rendering or run cpu based applications (emulators) as those would greatly benefit from having HT. Again, sorry to be boring, but look at benchmarks of two cpu at the same speed but one with HT, it barely registers and sometimes is even worse than an i5.

When it comes to resolution, think loooooong and hard, because that, along with frequency, is what will determine your pc requirements for the most part. I currently play on a 144hz 1440p and the requirements are insane compared to 60hz 1080p, not to mention the switch from IPS to TN (some monitors do offer 144hz+IPS but you are looking at $$$$). For gamers I actually suggest starting your build with your monitor as that will guide you to the necessary hardware.

If you plan to stick with a 1080p, even perhaps with 144hz for fast-paced fps's (csgo, ow) then you should take a good look at cheaper options such as 6700k or even i5 6600k with a gtx1060, as that will be an overkill with most AAA games. Tomb raider for examples will average over 90fps at 1080p with a 1060 and only 68fps at 1440p (average, meaning it will drop below 60fps at times).
 
#20 ·
CLC's do perform a bit better. Let's say you'd get 3-7C less on the cores (that was my case). But the constant noise and high RPM fans needed to keep the liquid cool were just too much. I got a NH-D15, must say I made a compromise between a bit higher OC and noise, but all in all I'm happy.

Either get a 360 EK kit or go with a NH-D15. The biggest issue you may encounter with the D15 is tall ram sticks. The first intake fan might have to go a bit higher in order to fit. Currently there's no need to be scared your first PCIE slot will be in the way since the first PCIE is usually an x1 slot, not for the GPU.
 
#21 ·
I wouldn't pay more than maybe $50 or $60 for one of these Xeons. It depends on your maximum or preferred base clock. My maximum is around 211, but I prefer to run 160. I can't tell a difference between 4.2 GHz and 3.84 GHz.

Original estimates had Z390 coming out early next year, but I'm not sure anymore. I've seen roadmaps that have it coming out second half of next year. Upgrading to the Xeon will at least give you more cores, threads, and cache and you might feel like you don't need to upgrade. I'm not sure how much you feel your system is holding you back, but it's an inexpensive experiment to find out.

Custom water cooling is one of the best cooling solutions short of something more exotic like liquid nitrogen. It's the all-in-one liquid solutions that aren't that great, especially for the money. The expandable options are better, but I'm not going to spend that kind of money to cool a mainstream processor. The only way I would get my CPU cooling costs into that territory is by purchasing a delidding kit, which would give me a much greater return on investment than an AIO liquid cooler. For the money, mid-range air coolers are usually the best bang for your buck. It depends on how much cooling you need. If you need anything more than a dual-tower cooler, you have an expensive processor and a custom loop makes more sense.
 
#22 ·
Well said. But for longivety of the cooling system and user-friendliness, the dual towers do the job quite nicely. Downsides... no mater how much I tried, it couldn't perform as my Nepton 240M or the MasterLiquid 240 Pro. Had to go down by 100MHz. Other than that, it's the aestetics. It covers half of the ATX board. But I'm fine with that.

And case airflow makes a VERY BIG factor in air cooling!!! While I was using CLC's it almost didn't matter (just needed air over the components, VRMS etc) but right now it's just a question of how much cold air I can get to the Noctua.
 
#23 ·
I had a Nepton 140XL and it failed on me in less than a month. I don't plan on ever trying liquid cooling again. I usually leave my system running overnight for software updates and other things I don't care to run while I'm using my system. I couldn't do that with the Nepton in the system because the pump was unbearably loud. I have a 120x38 fan on my TRUE spinning at 2500rpm that isn't nearly as loud.
 
#24 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gohan_Nightwing View Post

Thanks for the advice!

Would you say it was hard to watercool? Is the maintenance a pain to keep up with?
I thought about AMD as well, but it seems like Intel is still atop AMD when it comes to gaming from what I've read. That's the key reason I think I'll stick with Intel for this upgrade.
I like the idea of built in WiFi too
smile.gif
. Although I thought the other board also offered the built in wifi? Am I wrong?

Thanks!
It wasnt so hard as it was time consuming in the research and the building stage. It depends on how you make your loop as you can make it easy to maintain with drain and fill ports and the such.
It may be true that intel is above, personally I think that difference is negligible. I would take the AMD just in case I need the better multicore in the future.
I did not take a look at that. If it does, then either one would be good. Ill have to check it out myself as I will be in the market soon for a new system as well.
 
#25 ·
It's rather straightforward as far as which direction to take. It all depends on how you plan on using your system. If you plan on doing more core-intensive tasks, go with a Ryzen R7. If you won't be doing many core-intensive tasks, go Intel. If you're gaming with no intentions of streaming, go Intel. If you want to stream with Intel, get a Coffee Lake i7. I was waiting for Ryzen a year ago, but the difference in gaming wasn't enough for me to move on from Westmere. Coffee Lake trounces Ryzen in the vast majority of games on the market today. Zen 2 might close the gap, but there's no telling by how much. By the time Zen 2 comes out, Intel might actually give us a new architecture. I don't know what will happen in 2019 so it's impossible to know quite yet.
 
#26 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jupitel View Post

I think water cooling might have been the best at one point, as I said I just go off the benchmarks I've seen and they overwhelmingly suggest that air cooling is either better or just as good as water cooling, while being cheaper, less risky, easier to clean and maintain.

Yes for sure. The latest i5 8600 will run everything just as well as the 8700 in terms of pure gaming. Tuth is most people do multitasking and having HT does pay off in those situations. I'm assuming you do no rendering or run cpu based applications (emulators) as those would greatly benefit from having HT. Again, sorry to be boring, but look at benchmarks of two cpu at the same speed but one with HT, it barely registers and sometimes is even worse than an i5.

When it comes to resolution, think loooooong and hard, because that, along with frequency, is what will determine your pc requirements for the most part. I currently play on a 144hz 1440p and the requirements are insane compared to 60hz 1080p, not to mention the switch from IPS to TN (some monitors do offer 144hz+IPS but you are looking at $$$$). For gamers I actually suggest starting your build with your monitor as that will guide you to the necessary hardware.

If you plan to stick with a 1080p, even perhaps with 144hz for fast-paced fps's (csgo, ow) then you should take a good look at cheaper options such as 6700k or even i5 6600k with a gtx1060, as that will be an overkill with most AAA games. Tomb raider for examples will average over 90fps at 1080p with a 1060 and only 68fps at 1440p (average, meaning it will drop below 60fps at times).
Thanks for the feedback! I'll probably stick with 1080p until 4k becomes commonplace in TV broadcasts. Which I have no idea when that will be lol. I know there are a few channels now, but not like there are 1080p. So perhaps I should look toward the lower end CPUs of the new line like you suggested...
 
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