buy broadwell or wait for skylake
- Thread starter spiwar
- Start date
Are you building a new pc or do you have one right now?
If you do have a pc right now, what are the specs?
These are known features of Skylake:
14 nm manufacturing process
LGA 1151 socket
Z170/H170 chipset (Sunrise Point)
Thermal design power (TDP) up to 95 W (LGA 1151)
Support for both DDR3 SDRAM and DDR4 SDRAM in mainstream variants, using custom UniDIMM SO-DIMM interface with up to 64 GB of RAM on LGA 1151 variants.
Support for 20 PCI Express 3.0 lanes (LGA 1151)
Support for PCI Express 4.0 (Skylake-E/EP/EX)
Support for Thunderbolt 3.0 (Alpine Ridge)
64 to 128 MB L4 eDRAM cache on certain SKUs
Up to four cores as the default mainstream configuration
Support for SATA Express
AVX-512 F, CDI, VL, BW, and DQ (only for Xeon SKUs)
Intel SHA Extensions: SHA-1 and SHA-256 (Secure Hash Algorithms)
Intel MPX (Memory Protection Extensions)
Intel ADX (Multi-Precision Add-Carry Instruction Extensions)
Skylake's integrated GPU supports Direct3D 12 at feature level 12.0
If you do have a pc right now, what are the specs?
These are known features of Skylake:
14 nm manufacturing process
LGA 1151 socket
Z170/H170 chipset (Sunrise Point)
Thermal design power (TDP) up to 95 W (LGA 1151)
Support for both DDR3 SDRAM and DDR4 SDRAM in mainstream variants, using custom UniDIMM SO-DIMM interface with up to 64 GB of RAM on LGA 1151 variants.
Support for 20 PCI Express 3.0 lanes (LGA 1151)
Support for PCI Express 4.0 (Skylake-E/EP/EX)
Support for Thunderbolt 3.0 (Alpine Ridge)
64 to 128 MB L4 eDRAM cache on certain SKUs
Up to four cores as the default mainstream configuration
Support for SATA Express
AVX-512 F, CDI, VL, BW, and DQ (only for Xeon SKUs)
Intel SHA Extensions: SHA-1 and SHA-256 (Secure Hash Algorithms)
Intel MPX (Memory Protection Extensions)
Intel ADX (Multi-Precision Add-Carry Instruction Extensions)
Skylake's integrated GPU supports Direct3D 12 at feature level 12.0
Murissokah
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- Aug 12, 2007
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According to all leaked roadmaps I have seen about this, Broadwell chips scheduled for Q1'15 launch are the dual-core low power models, aimed at ultrabooks and NUCs. The more powerful models should be release Q2'15 and beyond. Skylake should start shipping Q3'15, a date which Intel has vowed to keep despite delays in Broadwell schedule.
If you need to upgrade now and have the money, do it, I don't usually wait unless there is a release in the coming weeks or so. There will always be something to wait for. If, on the other hand, you are saving up and considering the purchase in more than 3 months, I'd wait another 2 or 3 until Skylake, as it is a much more significant change in architecture.
Skylake is expected to support PCI-E 4.0, Sata Express (next sata version), Thunderbolt 3.0 and DDR3/4 (both). Broadwell will only support DDR4 in server versions and will not support PCI-E 4.0 and SATA Express, since it is essentially a die shrink (Tic release).
If you need to upgrade now and have the money, do it, I don't usually wait unless there is a release in the coming weeks or so. There will always be something to wait for. If, on the other hand, you are saving up and considering the purchase in more than 3 months, I'd wait another 2 or 3 until Skylake, as it is a much more significant change in architecture.
Skylake is expected to support PCI-E 4.0, Sata Express (next sata version), Thunderbolt 3.0 and DDR3/4 (both). Broadwell will only support DDR4 in server versions and will not support PCI-E 4.0 and SATA Express, since it is essentially a die shrink (Tic release).
- Dec 13, 2013
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I already have a computer back in 2012:
i3-2120
gtx 560 ti
4gb ram
500gb hdd
z77-ds3h
I'm looking for a SIGNIFICANT upgrade, but doesn't know what to decide. I have enough money to get an i7 or i5 with 8gigs of ram, for graphics card i'm gonna save money until i can buy a decent one. I want to futureproof my build this time, and gonna be upgrading graphics card or hard drives in the future
i3-2120
gtx 560 ti
4gb ram
500gb hdd
z77-ds3h
I'm looking for a SIGNIFICANT upgrade, but doesn't know what to decide. I have enough money to get an i7 or i5 with 8gigs of ram, for graphics card i'm gonna save money until i can buy a decent one. I want to futureproof my build this time, and gonna be upgrading graphics card or hard drives in the future
Murissokah
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- Aug 12, 2007
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Well, an upgrade to a current i5 or i7 will be significant, as you are currently using a dual-core CPU. The whole idea of future-proofing is a bit bogus because by the time you need to replace something it is usually time to replace the whole setup. Graphics cards are a more common exception to this, as they have significant improvements each year.
The things I would look for in a computer to last the next 5 years or so would be:
1. Decent power supply, since you don't expect to change it again in the near future;
2. Fast storage. SSDs are the most relevant change in consumer computer electronics in the last few years. No point in having a super fast computer that is stuck with a single 7200 rpm disk drive.
3. Decent GPU. You mentioned you intend to purchase one later and I agree you should if you can't afford a good one now.
4. Enough CPU power. Unless you intend to run any specific high-demand applications or an hypervisor, a current quad core CPU should last you those 5 years. Hyper Threading would be desirable, and that would be an i7.
Broadwell won't bring much in per-core performance, as it is mainly a die shrink. Performance improvements in broadwell will mostly derive from new instructions, and I don't expect anything significant here. Skylake will definitely improve per-core performance, but again I don't expect any game changer. Intel has been all about less power and heat for the last few years, and it still makes sense to continue on that direction.
5. Enough memory. 8GB right now is about all you need, although I'd at least leave room for another 8GB, considering the time you expect to keep this. DDR4 is yet to become mainstream, and I believe it will take a good while before it is actually a better alternative than DDR3. For now it is more expensive than DDR3 at the same performance point.
6. Expansion slots. Skylake will bring to the table, alog with DDR4, PCI-E 4 and Sata Express. While PCI-E 3 is hardly exhausted, SATA 6Gb/s has been holding back SSD performance for a while, and this can be a considerable improvement.
In short, I don't believe there are enough significant changes in the new products to justify waiting another 6-10 months for an upgrade.
- Dec 13, 2013
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1. I won't need anything higher than 500W. One graphics card is enough. I will never run SLI because of the weak performance improvement and the problems assoiciated with it.
2. Getting a 500gb SSD and 1TB for the next build.
3. Getting a very decent one. Probably the the 970 (or the 1070 if it ever comes out). Probably won't upgrade until the next
2 generations leap
4. I only need a decent one just enough to run gaming and encoding at decent speed. the i3 served me well back when I only needed gaming, but now i do video editing and encoding, the i3 is too slow for me to work.
5. Yeah RAM doesn't effect much in real world performance so i'll just stick with 8gb
6. what about mSATA or M.2 ? can someone explain to me what it is and where it plugs into? can mSATA or M.2 bottleneck SSD performance?
Also, i'm going to be using the intergrated GPU for awhile until I can get my graphics card. Is the one in Skylake a lot better than the one that is in broadwell?
M.2 is better than mSATA, they can use native PCIE express lanes.
In theory, it should be faster than a SSD connected to a SATA port but probably not noticeably.
M.2 provide different interfaces like PCIe, SATA, SATA express or USB.
It's more useful to have no 2.5 inch in your case. You can add it onto a PCIE x4 add in card for higher IOPS etc.
In theory, it should be faster than a SSD connected to a SATA port but probably not noticeably.
M.2 provide different interfaces like PCIe, SATA, SATA express or USB.
It's more useful to have no 2.5 inch in your case. You can add it onto a PCIE x4 add in card for higher IOPS etc.
Murissokah
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Suztera is right, but since this whole M.2 vs mSATA is a bit confusing, I'll try to elaborate more.
mSATA (mini-SATA) is essentially a smaller sata connector. Motherboards with an mSATA connector route this connection to the SATA host controller. It is SATA in every sense of the way and thus limited to the current 6Gbps.
M.2 is a standard developed to replace both mSATA and mPCIE. It was designed to be used for many purposes, such as WWAN, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, USB, Displayport and others, aside from the obvious PCIe and SATA. There are keys (unused pins) that mark what kind of device is connected, and also prevent connection of certain devices to a port that was designed for a specific function.
Depending on the implementation, M.2 can allow up to 4 PCI-e lanes. At current PCI-E 3.0 standard, each PCI-e lane can achieve 1GBps in bandwidth (notice the big "B", this is a lot more than SATA 3's effective ~600MBps, and with a single lane). So, M.2 has the potential to remove any interface restriction from consumer storage, if properly implemented. I keep writing "if properly implemented" because one of the ways to use an M.2 connection is as a SATA port, in which case there will be no difference whatsoever.
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