i5 6400 vs i5-6500 vs i5 6600 vs i5 6600k?

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Supernova1138

Supernova1138

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Mar 22, 2011
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They're all good for gaming, with the 6600k being the best due to having the highest stock clocks and the ability to overclock easily. The 6500 would be a better choice if you're on a tight budget and can't afford the 6600k. I'd avoid the 6400 unless you can't afford any of the others simply because it is clocked rather low, and the 6500 doesn't cost that much more.
 
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photonboy

photonboy

Titan
Jun 20, 2006
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TOTAL BUILD cost would give you the best advice. As said the i5-4690K may be the better choice.

You need to look at the cost (for comparable performance/quality) of:
a) motherboard
b) CPU
c) DDR3/4 memory

If it costs a bit more for the newer setup that's money that could go towards a better graphics card. And...

*There is currently a Skylake BUG that is being corrected with motherboard BIOS updates. I'd investigate to see if that's fixed. Not a huge deal, and a quality company like ASUS has other fixed or soon will fix these (though you must upgrade your BIOS to apply it if needed).
 
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PatrioticPickle

PatrioticPickle

Reputable
Dec 2, 2015
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Agreed, DDR4 has come down a lot as well, for the little price difference between the 6600k and 4690k its defs worth it to get the 6600k and have the latest gear with DDR4 :)
 
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photonboy

photonboy

Titan
Jun 20, 2006
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http://pcpartpicker.com/p/m3PxnQ

There's an EXAMPLE build.

No dedicated graphics card, secondary hard drive, or Windows in the price but it's a pretty solid build.

*Note the ASUS BIOS for this motherboard has been updated several times in the last two months and is likely to have several more updates in 2016, so regardless of what motherboard you buy (especially the newer Skylake) keep an eye on updates.

The cooler I included is pretty nice and one of my new favorite. Make sure to setup a proper fan profile for the CPU (lowest speed in idle, ramp up..) via motherboard fan software (download from support site probably).
 
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photonboy

photonboy

Titan
Jun 20, 2006
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Keep in mind the 3.3GHz for the i5-6400 is a max turbo value. It will drop the frequency by roughly 100MHz for each core so under full load it might be only about 3GHz.

There are ways you can TWEAK that in the BIOS (manually set core frequency for all cores to turbo to 3.3GHz) but I don't know if that's possible in all motherboards or any of them as I don't have any to test.

(My i7-3770K is overclocked, with speedstep so it dynamically lowers voltage and frequency as needed, but I manually set the TURBO values to 4.1GHz when all cores are used and tested to see if that works; 4.3GHz single core. As an aside, the Intel CPU diagnostic keeps forcing my CPU to 3.5GHz. Weird. I actually have to reboot. But using Prime95 shows it stays at a recorded 4.07GHz)

Same goes for the i5-6500, but it's just a bit faster.

(there's been discussion of ways to overclock Skylake I believe but after reading about that I'd just NOT do that. Asus does not offer that either, and I think certain states get disabled if you do so it's complicated and stability is not certain)

The i5-6600K should overclock to at least 4.4GHz (I err on the side of stability), and probably you can tweak to NOT drop below that on full load (as I discussed above with the Turbo scaling).

So the i5-6600K vs i5-6400 we'll say 4.4 vs 3.3GHz, which is a 33% advantage to the i5-6600K which can make a noticeable difference in gaming for demanding games.

(if you don't or can't tweak the i5-6400, and CAN overclock the i5-6600K to 4.6GHz then as a worst-case difference you're talking 4.6GHz vs 3GHz under full load. Or 53%. So tweaking the CPU BIOS settings and choosing the correct CPU for you is pretty important.)

Starcraft 2 for example only uses two cores and even the fastest CPU you can buy will dip low periodically once lots of stuff is going on.
 
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G

Guest

Guest


So basically the i5 6400 is bad?
Right now, I'm pretty convinced of buying the i5-6500.
 
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Ethan Knight

Ethan Knight

Honorable
May 8, 2016
35
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10,540
Hey everyone!

I'm not sure if this is a dead thread or not, but IF you still haven't bought a CPU...

I would say buy in this order: 6600K, 6500, 6600, 6400. The price per performance unit, overall performance, and heat required falls into these ranks. A 91W CPU takes a lot more cooling power than a 65W CPU.

Now another option that may make sense is waiting for a Zen CPU. I'm not a huge fan of AMD, I've been Intel/Nvidia for a while now, but AMD is on their new architecture, being a lot more efficient and faster. It's arriving only in February and will do you good for price.

Anyways hope this helped! Good luck in your build!
 
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L

LongUsername

Distinguished
Aug 26, 2016
22
3
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Very sorry to hijack the thread but you guys are giving the 6400 a bad rep solely based of off some worthless 0.3Ghz in comparison to 6500.

In gaming, the 6400 is pretty much always within 3 FPS but mostly less than 1.

Again this can be seen by actually looking at gameplay performance and not theoretical expectations.
 
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