Haswell vs Skylake on a budget

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jamesp81

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I'm looking to build a new machine, as my current one is really showing it's age in a bad way. I'll be doing some moderate gaming on this machine (DA Inquisition, Starcraft 2, and similar). I'm also wanting to do some virtualization tasks.

Because I'm looking at virtualization as a way to have a lab without having a bunch of physical hardware, I'm really wanting an i7 so I can get eight logical cores to spread out among a 3 testing VMs. To that end, I'm also wanting 32gb of ram, with the option to upgrade to 64gb later.

However, my budget is not unlimited. Do I cripple myself over the next 5 years if I go with a Haswell i7 (looking at i7-4790, not the 'K' version) as opposed to the quite expensive Skylake i7 and DDR3 instead of DDR4?

Basically, what I'm trying to determine is if I can go ahead with a Haswell / DDR3 build, or if I should hold out, save my pennies, and the get a Skylake / DDR4 machine.

If it weren't for the virtualization, I'd just roll an i5 and be done.
 
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LGA115x/2011 Xeons work fine on regular desktop boards with the same socket. The different chipsets for server chips simply provide an IO mix more adequate for server use.

Using a Xeon CPU merely provides the ability to use ECC memory. To use non-ECC memory, you simply disable ECC in the BIOS.

As for 'hobbling' yourself with an i7 or Xeon, look around for the countless threads of people with i5/i7-2xxx who want to upgrade to something newer but cannot find anything that is a large enough improvement over what they already have to be worth upgrading to. At the abysmally slow pace Intel CPU performance has been improving over the past five years, something like an i7-4790 is not going to go out of style by much within the next five years.
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Titan
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May 18, 2007
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If you want to have the possibility of 64GB RAM in the future, you will have to either go with Skylake and 2x16GB DDR4 (premium price on high density DDR4), i7-5820k and 4x8GB DDR4 (more affordable mainstream DDR4 module density), or i7-4820k and 4x8GB DDR3.

The ability to have 64GB RAM comes with a rather steep price tag at the moment.

You may want to consider the Xeon chips: ironically, some of them are cheaper than their equivalent non-K mainstream counterparts.
 
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jamesp81

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I assume with Xeon the consumer chipsets (H97 / Z97) would not work, correct? I'd need an actual server motherboard, which also means ECC memory?

Let me ask a similar question with the Xeon...am I hobbling myself over the next 5 years by going with a Haswell Xeon and DDR3?
 
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InvalidError

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
May 18, 2007
23,815
5,265
108,890
LGA115x/2011 Xeons work fine on regular desktop boards with the same socket. The different chipsets for server chips simply provide an IO mix more adequate for server use.

Using a Xeon CPU merely provides the ability to use ECC memory. To use non-ECC memory, you simply disable ECC in the BIOS.

As for 'hobbling' yourself with an i7 or Xeon, look around for the countless threads of people with i5/i7-2xxx who want to upgrade to something newer but cannot find anything that is a large enough improvement over what they already have to be worth upgrading to. At the abysmally slow pace Intel CPU performance has been improving over the past five years, something like an i7-4790 is not going to go out of style by much within the next five years.
 
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