Decision time, 4790k vs 5930

[Knytestorme]

So tax time is coming and it's time to upgrade but I'm not sure which direction to take or even if I need to upgrade CPU at this stage.

I'm currently running a 3770k and trying to decide between upgrading to 4790k, 5930k or staying where I am for now for the following use-cases;

1. Gaming - will be going with SLI Titan-X or 980Ti to run triple 4k for iRacing, Elite and X-Plane (in 1080p is need be for frame-rates) and in single 4k for everything else

2. VM's - Am a developer by trade and would like to lock down my environments to VM's rather than still physical machines

3. Video/Audio creation and editing - I do music as a hobby and would like to get in to video editing for livestreaming and actually putting content up on my YT channel.

4. Livestreaming.

5. Blu-ray conversion to 720p so my library is stored on my NAS and discs don't get handled much after purchase.

I was originally looking at the MSI X99S Gaming 9 board due to the onboard streaming engine but then I started wondering if the 5930 would be able to handle software encoding in to Xsplit by itself anyway since it would have cores spare for the most part and then that got me wondering if a 4790 would be able to do so as well given my 3770k seems to be up to the job currently (mostly due to being capped at only 800k bitrate due to crappy upstream bandwidth).

I'm thinking that having more cores and being able to push 64Gb will be better for my VM plans, and the extra ram will also allow me to put most games I am playing in to a RAMDisk as I play them but I'm not sure the added cost of new mobo + ram + cpu will be worth the time I save on rendering.

I know that there is no difference for gaming so we can leave that out of the equation, will the X99 be enough of an upgrade over haswell for productivity to be worth the puchase and if so will the addition of hardware 264 encoding be worth it for streaming over just going for a different board...and if not, will I see enough of an upgrade from the 4790 to justify an extra $475 for just a cpu upgrade?

 

[LTC8K6]

I would wait for Skylake at this point. Also to see what graphics cards come out.

 

[jji7skyline]

Go for the X99 platform.

 

[pj-]

Where do you live? If there's a microcenter nearby you can get a sweet deal on a haswell-e + motherboard.

The 5820k + Asrock extreme4 is $430 in store.

http://www.microcenter.com/site/brands/intel-processor-bundles.aspx

From what I've read, the 5830k is a pretty pointless upgrade over the 5820k. The extra pcie lanes mean little to nothing for gaming performance, even in SLI configurations. The cost difference between x99 and z97 is shrinking constantly, and it's already to the point where it's not crazy to go x99 for a gaming + other stuff machine.

 

[Knytestorme]

Where do you live? If there's a microcenter nearby you can get a sweet deal on a haswell-e + motherboard.

The 5820k + Asrock extreme4 is $430 in store.

http://www.microcenter.com/site/brands/intel-processor-bundles.aspx

From what I've read, the 5830k is a pretty pointless upgrade over the 5820k. The extra pcie lanes mean little to nothing for gaming performance, even in SLI configurations. The cost difference between x99 and z97 is shrinking constantly, and it's already to the point where it's not crazy to go x99 for a gaming + other stuff machine.

I live in Australia, currently to go for 5930 (and want that for the extra lanes in case I decide to go tri or 4-way in future ) + Gaming 9 ACK + 32Gb G.Skill = $1987

Cost isn't really the issue, more getting value and benefit for the cost...for example, if I stay with my haswell setup and just get a 4790k I have $1500 to spend elsewhere.

 

[LTC8K6]

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/551?vs=1260

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/551?vs=1316

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1260?vs=1316

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1260?vs=1320

 

[aaksheytalwar]

Wait for sky lake E or buy 5960x and upgrade to sky lake e later

 

[Dave3000]

Where do you live? If there's a microcenter nearby you can get a sweet deal on a haswell-e + motherboard.

The 5820k + Asrock extreme4 is $430 in store.

http://www.microcenter.com/site/brands/intel-processor-bundles.aspx

From what I've read, the 5830k is a pretty pointless upgrade over the 5820k. The extra pcie lanes mean little to nothing for gaming performance, even in SLI configurations. The cost difference between x99 and z97 is shrinking constantly, and it's already to the point where it's not crazy to go x99 for a gaming + other stuff machine.

The same thing can be said for 6 cores for gaming performance. 6 cores does very little for gaming performance at best and most of the time a 4790k beats a 5820k in gaming, at least in this day and age. A fast quad core CPU is the best choice for gaming right now because you can't buy a 6-core or 8-core CPU that is as fast in single and up to quad core peformance, ie, i7 4790k 4 GHz vs. i7 5930k or 5960x. In my opinion a the Z97 motherboard and an i5 4690k or i7-4790k is the way to go for gaming right now.

 

[Dave3000]

I live in Australia, currently to go for 5930 (and want that for the extra lanes in case I decide to go tri or 4-way in future ) + Gaming 9 ACK + 32Gb G.Skill = $1987

Cost isn't really the issue, more getting value and benefit for the cost...for example, if I stay with my haswell setup and just get a 4790k I have $1500 to spend elsewhere.

In my opinion you are better off buying a 4790k and using the money you save by not buying the 5930k towards a Titan X if it's for gaming.

 

[Knytestorme]

In my opinion you are better off buying a 4790k and using the money you save by not buying the 5930k towards a Titan X if it's for gaming.

SLI Titan-X is already budgeted along with 3 x 4K AOC monitors. Question though isn't really regarding the choice for gaming as I know there isn't much of a difference between them, more about the ability to do so while streaming/recording and productivity tools when not gaming.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I think the answer here is "yes". Either setup will be an improvement over your 3770k. The 5930 will obviously be better for VMs.

That being said, if you are adamantly opposed to any kind of overclocking, you may be disappointed with the clockspeed of the 5930 from time to time. Overclocking could alleviate that little problem.

 

[Knytestorme]

I think the answer here is "yes". Either setup will be an improvement over your 3770k. The 5930 will obviously be better for VMs.

That being said, if you are adamantly opposed to any kind of overclocking, you may be disappointed with the clockspeed of the 5930 from time to time. Overclocking could alleviate that little problem.

Nope, not opposed to overclocking, hell one of my first AMD64 boards was an ASUS specifically for overclockability

Corsair H110 is in build to make things a little easier, along with MSI board if I go X99 for the ease of OCing it.

 

[beginner99]

SLI Titan-X is already budgeted along with 3 x 4K AOC monitors. Question though isn't really regarding the choice for gaming as I know there isn't much of a difference between them, more about the ability to do so while streaming/recording and productivity tools when not gaming.

IMHO you will need to turn off the VM's anyway while gaming and when not gaming it's mostly a RAM issue depending on what kind of VMs and how many we are taking about. But you can't use them all at the same time anyway and you can also put a ton of RAM in a z97 rig (actually cheaper because you already have DDR-3 and DDR-3 is cheaper anyway).

For productivity 6-cores are probably better especially for x264 encoding. However you also loose quicksync. (Non-issue if you did not use it with your 3770k)

EDIT: And about gaming, the 4790k will probably be better in most games and especially poorly threaded ones like Stracraft II.

 

[Knytestorme]

IMHO you will need to turn off the VM's anyway while gaming and when not gaming it's mostly a RAM issue depending on what kind of VMs and how many we are taking about. But you can't use them all at the same time anyway and you can also put a ton of RAM in a z97 rig (actually cheaper because you already have DDR-3 and DDR-3 is cheaper anyway).

For productivity 6-cores are probably better especially for x264 encoding. However you also loose quicksync. (Non-issue if you did not use it with your 3770k)

VM's will be Linux LAMP stack, Windows 2012 R2 with SQL2014, OS-X and Windows 8/10 with VS2015. Again, if I go with X99 it will be with 64Gb (hopefully being able to use a lot of it for RAMDisk to keep whatever I'm playing on tap) but yeah, can see the point to turning off most of the VM's.

I'm wondering too if the extra cores will make CPU encoding on the fly at either 1080p or 4k (depending on game) feasible and thus allowing me to go for a different mobo or if they strain would still be enough that the streaming engine card on the Gaming 9 will make it the only board worth going for.

At this stage the 5930 has worked it's way in to my shopping cart but given I want to wait until I get back from the US to pull the trigger I'm still open to being swayed

 

[cbn]

So tax time is coming and it's time to upgrade but I'm not sure which direction to take or even if I need to upgrade CPU at this stage.

I'm currently running a 3770k and trying to decide between upgrading to 4790k, 5930k or staying where I am for now for the following use-cases;

1. Gaming - will be going with SLI Titan-X or 980Ti to run triple 4k for iRacing, Elite and X-Plane (in 1080p is need be for frame-rates) and in single 4k for everything else

2. VM's - Am a developer by trade and would like to lock down my environments to VM's rather than still physical machines

3. Video/Audio creation and editing - I do music as a hobby and would like to get in to video editing for livestreaming and actually putting content up on my YT channel.

4. Livestreaming.

5. Blu-ray conversion to 720p so my library is stored on my NAS and discs don't get handled much after purchase.

I was originally looking at the MSI X99S Gaming 9 board due to the onboard streaming engine but then I started wondering if the 5930 would be able to handle software encoding in to Xsplit by itself anyway since it would have cores spare for the most part and then that got me wondering if a 4790 would be able to do so as well given my 3770k seems to be up to the job currently (mostly due to being capped at only 800k bitrate due to crappy upstream bandwidth).

I'm thinking that having more cores and being able to push 64Gb will be better for my VM plans, and the extra ram will also allow me to put most games I am playing in to a RAMDisk as I play them but I'm not sure the added cost of new mobo + ram + cpu will be worth the time I save on rendering.

I know that there is no difference for gaming so we can leave that out of the equation, will the X99 be enough of an upgrade over haswell for productivity to be worth the puchase and if so will the addition of hardware 264 encoding be worth it for streaming over just going for a different board...and if not, will I see enough of an upgrade from the 4790 to justify an extra $475 for just a cpu upgrade?

How important is overclocking to you?

If you decided that the i7 5930K was right for you, I would throw this E5 Xeon processor into the decision making process as well. (It's the same price as the i7 5930K, but with 100 Mhz higher turbo clock. The major difference though is the RAM capacity: 768GB vs 64 GB for the i7 5930k)

While 768GB RAM is obviously way overkill, it would give you the option to max out RAM on inexpensive motherboards like ASRock X99 Extreme 4 (which is rated for 128GB RAM).

 

[beginner99]

I'm wondering too if the extra cores will make CPU encoding on the fly at either 1080p or 4k (depending on game) feasible and thus allowing me to go for a different mobo or if they strain would still be enough that the streaming engine card on the Gaming 9 will make it the only board worth going for.

Depends on games and if you plan to play on all 3 4K displays, eg. nv eyefinity version, then you will be GPU limited from A to Z anyway and some strain on the CPU will be less noticeable. With focus on less. I'm sure encoding on the fly will impact FPS of the game. How is it now? I mean if it works now it will only work better with either CPU.

 

[Knytestorme]

How important is overclocking to you?

If you decided that the i7 5930K was right for you, I would throw this E5 Xeon processor into the decision making process as well. (It's the same price as the i7 5930K, but with 100 Mhz higher turbo clock. The major difference though is the RAM capacity: 768GB vs 64 GB for the i7 5930k)

While 768GB RAM is obviously way overkill, it would give you the option to max out RAM on inexpensive motherboards like ASRock X99 Extreme 4 (which is rated for 128GB RAM).

Main problem with hardware is purchasing options. ATM I'm looking at http://www.pccasegear.com.au as one of the few places to buy from for heavy purchases and they don't have the Xeons listed any more. I'll be in the US in two weeks and would love to take advantage of things there, like buying the 5930 + mobo saves me ~$300 over buying here but then I have to factor in loss of warranty or parts being DOA when I get home without having ben able to test them, etc.

 

[Knytestorme]

Depends on games and if you plan to play on all 3 4K displays, eg. nv eyefinity version, then you will be GPU limited from A to Z anyway and some strain on the CPU will be less noticeable. With focus on less. I'm sure encoding on the fly will impact FPS of the game. How is it now? I mean if it works now it will only work better with either CPU.

Well for a lot of games like WoW, D3, FPS's etc I'll likely only run a single screen with nvSurround being used for iRacing, X-Plane, Elite etc. Currently recording locally at 60Mb/s on a single 1080p display it seems to have little impact but I don't stream due to only 0.8Mb/s upload....will be getting 40Mb/s upload soon though so will want to stream more often once that is hooked up.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Since you want to overclock, you won't see any major loss of clockspeed going with the 5930. The 4790k is near its limit as it is; at best, you can expect maybe 100-200 mhz higher clockspeed limit on a 5930 versus what you could get out of a 4790k.

Just expect that 5930 to get stupid-hot somewhere past 4.2-4.3 ghz.

Regardless, for your use case, the 5930 seems more practical, and you have the option for future upgrades to Broadwell-E.

 

[ClockHound]

For use cases 2 and 3, it's the hex-core no question. For video/audio/VM work you can never have too many fast cores...which makes the 5960x a viable candidate if the budget is no object.

If you're visiting the US and near a MC, well...that could be an enjoyable tourist attraction. Worth taking a warranty chance on the 8-core HW-E memorabilia.

If you do go OC'd HW-E and value your hearing, don't bother with the Corsair CLCs - they only achieve good temps by abusing your ears - that's the DAWs job isn't it? Better to consider the Swiftech 240x or full custom water. Or get a top tier air cooler like the D15 or R1 Ultimate.