Going from i3-6100 to i7-6700. Expectations?

[Magic Carpet]

Long story short, 6700K is a much more desirable product than 6700. But here we go anyway

Well, I don't OC and I don't have an overclocking board, nor do I feel like messing with OCing. The base clock is a little higher with the K but so is the TDP. . .Figuring I never plan to overclock the non-K made more sense. Was I wrong?

If I were you, I would get the K model. Considering the difference is less than $50 between the two. Also:

There's no reason not to get a "K" version. It has higher clocks. If you decide to get a new board, you can then overclock it. If you decide to sell it, it has higher resale value.

And:

When considering two pieces of hardware, always pick the higher end one.

In your case it was 6700/6700K. No need to bring BDW-E up here

Yup even when I don't plan to OC (and my H110 mobo doesn't support OC'ing), I"m aiming to getting the i7 6700K just for the 4/4.2GHz speed.

My thoughts exactly :thumbsup:

I do feel a bit of buyer's remorse for not getting the K chip. The 6700 is on the way, though and I'm reminding myself I don't have to buy a cooler, don't have to start contemplating Z170 boards, don't have to start choosing a new PSU, etc.

Well, you saved some money, pat yourself on the back. Or you can refuse the delivery

Also, BTW, I ordered a GTX1070. I was about to just order a 1060 but I figured if my plan is to not worry about upgrading for quite some time after this, I should go a step up. At least with the 1070 I won't have to worry about much of anything.

Wise choice there :thumbsup:

And lastly, never doubt yourself. I know you wanted 6700k originally but then started to doubt yourself. $50 plus cooler won't change anything in your life. 4/4.2 GUARANTEED clocks worth the extra, imo. Fastest ST performance currently on the market out of the box. Even BDW-E doesn't have that! And it's very easy to make it a 45W CPU, if it ever comes to it, just reduce clocks some. Maximum control, the Intel way

 

[nerp]

Update: The new chip arrived and installed. Temps are lower than the i3, the cpu fan is slower and my boost frequency is 4ghz. I already feel an improvement and I've barely begun to slam it. Just starting to get some work done with the desktop and I can already detect a notable improvement in responsiveness in Chrome with 20-50 tabs open. Haven't stressed it or done anything crazy yet, but I will. Despite not getting a K, I feel a lot less regret about the purchase now that the chip is in.

 

[Erithan13]

I got a 6700 because at the time of building my system the K version was nearly $200 more expensive. Certainly the extra clockspeed would have been appreciated but not at that sort of price premium. It's easy to ask 'why not just get the K' if it's only $20 more but that may not be the case in other parts of the world.

The way I'm looking at things, by the time the 6700 lags hugely behind a 6700k (overclocked or not) I'll be beyond Skylake altogether and onto something with more cores. Can't argue that the 6700k is the most future proofed option if it can be found at a decent price though.

You might be able to reduce temperatures and power consumption a bit more with some undervolting - mobos tend to err on the side of too much voltage rather than too little. My 6700 is happy with 1.15v.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Update: The new chip arrived and installed. Temps are lower than the i3, the cpu fan is slower and my boost frequency is 4ghz. I already feel an improvement and I've barely begun to slam it. Just starting to get some work done with the desktop and I can already detect a notable improvement in responsiveness in Chrome with 20-50 tabs open. Haven't stressed it or done anything crazy yet, but I will. Despite not getting a K, I feel a lot less regret about the purchase now that the chip is in.

Congrats!!

 

[chrisjames61]

Many users as of late ask if they should upgrade when they don't actually feel their current setup being slow/bottlenecked/inadequate for their needs. I mean really, wtf?

Why should that bother you? If someone wants to upgrade for the heck of it. That is their business.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Just starting to get some work done with the desktop and I can already detect a notable improvement in responsiveness in Chrome with 20-50 tabs open. Haven't stressed it or done anything crazy yet, but I will. Despite not getting a K, I feel a lot less regret about the purchase now that the chip is in.

i3 is the new Pentium, which must die. Here is what happens when I resume my Chrome session. Even a hexa-core isn't overkill anymore for web browsing. We will move one step up on the Intel CPU product ladder within 1-3 years, I reckon.

 

[Crono]

Kind of off topic, but what are you people doing on Chrome that you can get that kind of CPU and memory usage? Have every site you've ever visited open as a tab? Joking aside, I'm genuinely curious what sites/applications you have open. I rarely crack even a few percentage points on Waterfox/Firefox with typical usage. Then again, the last time I used Chrome and had more than a dozen tabs open was 2009 or so, and I don't use a lot of web apps (or flash) concurrently... and I use uBlock Origin, with few other extensions.

I could see having 20-50 tabs open if you are a marketing person or something - or just have ADHD (and if you don't already, you will after doing that for a while ). Even then, I imagine using bookmarks, extensions, and dedicated apps must be more time-efficient than switching between dozens of tabs (somewhere, in the near future, there's someone complaining his 32-core CPU is running slow with 1,000 tabs open and scoffing at me for thinking a few tabs at a time was enough). Not that a resource pig like Chrome isn't a good real-world benchmark.

Where the i7-6700k comes in handy for me is multitasking while image and video editing/transcoding, and gaming. The i3 would practically be overkill for me for browsing (I have a few old Celerons and AMD APUs that can handle that just fine) but anything more would be dependent on workload.

 

[evident]

Kind of off topic, but what are you people doing on Chrome that you can get that kind of CPU and memory usage? Have every site you've ever visited open as a tab? Joking aside, I'm genuinely curious what sites/applications you have open. I rarely crack even a few percentage points on Waterfox/Firefox with typical usage. Then again, the last time I used Chrome and had more than a dozen tabs open was 2009 or so, and I don't use a lot of web apps (or flash) concurrently... and I use uBlock Origin, with few other extensions.

I could see having 20-50 tabs open if you are a marketing person or something - or just have ADHD (and if you don't already, you will after doing that for a while ). Even then, I imagine using bookmarks, extensions, and dedicated apps must be more time-efficient than switching between dozens of tabs (somewhere, in the near future, there's someone complaining his 32-core CPU is running slow with 1,000 tabs open and scoffing at me for thinking a few tabs at a time was enough). Not that a resource pig like Chrome isn't a good real-world benchmark.

Where the i7-6700k comes in handy for me is multitasking while image and video editing/transcoding, and gaming. The i3 would practically be overkill for me for browsing (I have a few old Celerons and AMD APUs that can handle that just fine) but anything more would be dependent on workload.

browsers are just extremely memory intensive. firefox can reach 600MB with just 5 tabs open.

 

[nerp]

I could see having 20-50 tabs open if you are a marketing person or something - or just have ADHD (and if you don't already, you will after doing that for a while ). Even then, I imagine using bookmarks, extensions, and dedicated apps must be more time-efficient than switching between dozens of tabs (somewhere, in the near future, there's someone complaining his 32-core CPU is running slow with 1,000 tabs open and scoffing at me for thinking a few tabs at a time was enough). Not that a resource pig like Chrome isn't a good real-world benchmark.

Where the i7-6700k comes in handy for me is multitasking while image and video editing/transcoding, and gaming. The i3 would practically be overkill for me for browsing (I have a few old Celerons and AMD APUs that can handle that just fine) but anything more would be dependent on workload.

I try to keep the number of tabs I have open down but it's tough. I'm a journalist and my beat is a large geographic territory and I am usually working on 10 things at once (with 100 on the back burner). Sometimes a story will require me to pull data from multiple places. A simple crime story, for example, I might need to pull up someone's criminal record, information from the state prison, a pdf from the PD, past stories I've written, etc. Multiply that story x4, plus add some sudden breaking news I have to jump on -- not to mention a video stream of a city meeting I'm watching on the side and taking notes. . . Many of the tools I use are web-based, too.

One thing I've gotten better at is using this thing called OneTab. It's a decent plugin that lets you compress all the tabs in one browser instance into one tab with links to all the pages you had open. It saves them, too, so I can quickly reopen them if I reboot. I try to do this more often.

One problem is that I always have so much going on that stuff often gets buried. There are times when I go to reboot and I get dialog boxes warning me stuff is unsaved or open and I find there's a slew of things I had minimized or got bured under windows and I had no idea.

I use Outlook and OneNote, which keeps some of my usage in apps instead of in a browser. If I had to use gmail on top of it all, I'd be screwed.

And by hitting up such a large variety of websites all the time, you end up using video codecs, have lots of scripts running and all other stuff happening in the background. Many pages are clunky and not optimized so one cruddy page can be going crazy even if you don't have a ton of stuff open.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Kind of off topic, but what are you people doing on Chrome that you can get that kind of CPU and memory usage?

browsers are just extremely memory intensive. firefox can reach 600MB with just 5 tabs open.

I try to keep the number of tabs I have open down but it's tough. I'm a journalist and my beat is a large geographic territory and I am usually working on 10 things at once (with 100 on the back burner). Sometimes a story will require me to pull data from multiple places. A simple crime story, for example, I might need to pull up someone's criminal record, information from the state prison, a pdf from the PD, past stories I've written, etc. Multiply that story x4, plus add some sudden breaking news I have to jump on -- not to mention a video stream of a city meeting I'm watching on the side and taking notes. . . Many of the tools I use are web-based, too.

One thing I've gotten better at is using this thing called OneTab. It's a decent plugin that lets you compress all the tabs in one browser instance into one tab with links to all the pages you had open. It saves them, too, so I can quickly reopen them if I reboot. I try to do this more often.

One problem is that I always have so much going on that stuff often gets buried. There are times when I go to reboot and I get dialog boxes warning me stuff is unsaved or open and I find there's a slew of things I had minimized or got bured under windows and I had no idea.

I use Outlook and OneNote, which keeps some of my usage in apps instead of in a browser. If I had to use gmail on top of it all, I'd be screwed.

And by hitting up such a large variety of websites all the time, you end up using video codecs, have lots of scripts running and all other stuff happening in the background. Many pages are clunky and not optimized so one cruddy page can be going crazy even if you don't have a ton of stuff open.

I couldn't have said it better myself :thumbsup:

 

[Crono]

I try to keep the number of tabs I have open down but it's tough. I'm a journalist and my beat is a large geographic territory and I am usually working on 10 things at once (with 100 on the back burner). Sometimes a story will require me to pull data from multiple places. A simple crime story, for example, I might need to pull up someone's criminal record, information from the state prison, a pdf from the PD, past stories I've written, etc. Multiply that story x4, plus add some sudden breaking news I have to jump on -- not to mention a video stream of a city meeting I'm watching on the side and taking notes. . . Many of the tools I use are web-based, too.

One thing I've gotten better at is using this thing called OneTab. It's a decent plugin that lets you compress all the tabs in one browser instance into one tab with links to all the pages you had open. It saves them, too, so I can quickly reopen them if I reboot. I try to do this more often.

One problem is that I always have so much going on that stuff often gets buried. There are times when I go to reboot and I get dialog boxes warning me stuff is unsaved or open and I find there's a slew of things I had minimized or got bured under windows and I had no idea.

I use Outlook and OneNote, which keeps some of my usage in apps instead of in a browser. If I had to use gmail on top of it all, I'd be screwed.

And by hitting up such a large variety of websites all the time, you end up using video codecs, have lots of scripts running and all other stuff happening in the background. Many pages are clunky and not optimized so one cruddy page can be going crazy even if you don't have a ton of stuff open.

Ah, that explains it. Figured it had to be a use case like that, otherwise spawning that many tabs seems like more trouble than it's worth.

From what I've read, most of the high memory usage now in modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox (which is a little better in that regard, but still using way more resources than in the past) comes from attempting to make the browser more stable, with each tab operating as it's own process(es) and using more memory. I think browser crashes are part of the reason I stopped using that many tabs at once a few years ago, though I think they've mostly addressed that now.

I've toyed with the idea of using VMs and virtual desktops more to organize stuff I'm working on - I'm not a journalist, I just have a lot of little projects going on - but usually I end up succumbing to laziness some time after setting up the VM. I think I'll do it now after getting more RAM...

 

[nerp]

I posted some pics of my final setup.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=38390848&postcount=1106