Making the switch from AMD to Intel, and need advice...

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Wiebob

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Jul 30, 2015
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I'm currently running a water cooled AMD FX9590 Black Edition cpu on an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX r2.0 mainboard, with 32GB of RAM (offhand, can't remember the brand), powered by a Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1200W power supply. I'm running a Zotac Geforce GTX980 Ti Amp Extreme card, and plan on adding a second in the next 2-3 months.
Aside from gaming, my computer needs to be able to, hopefully, handle both a 4K tv and 4K display smoothly.
Because of some issues I've been having on and off with my current mainboard, I've decided, after a LOT of reading, to make the switch to Intel. Man, that was a hard decision, I've been an AMD guy for more years than I can remember. ;)
What I'm looking for is advice on mainboard/CPU combinations. Price isn't an issue, but from what I've read to this point, I'm not convinced that the highest end Intel CPU's are worth the extra cash.
Any thoughts? I'm hoping to order them as soon as possible... ;)
 
Solution
techgeek
If you want to re-use your RAM, you'll either have to find a Skylake motherboard that supports DDR3 (the IMC does, just need a motherboard with the correct slots) or go with Devils Canyon. If you don't plan on re-using your RAM then Skylake with DDR4 is the route I'd take.

If you only plan to go as high as SLI with two cards then Skylake / Devils Canyon is all you need, it will work in X8X8 mode which is fine. Make sure that you get an SLI certified motherboard, not all of them are.

As for 4K TV, even the iGPU should be able to handle that. As for gaming at 4K smoothly, SLI will be OK, but I don't feel like any solution has 4K @ 60Hz nailed down perfectly yet. Maybe the next generation of cards (Pascal / Polaris) will be able to...
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junkeymonkey

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Nov 11, 2013
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well when I did the switch all I did was get a [at the time] a z87 and a 4650 use the rest pull off the AM3+ 150 for the board 200 for the chip 70 for win-7 oem

reused memory - cpu cooler - hard drive - case - vid card - opt, drive ect???? basically just swapped the board and chip ? fired it up and never looked back and cant say it was the wrong move to go intel ...

A LINUX RUN ----
Processor(s): Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4670 CPU @ 3.40GHz
> Logical Cores: 4
> Physical Memory: 16,756,445,184 bytes ( 15.6 GiB )
> CPU Frequency: 3,398,990,144 Hz
> Program Version: 0.6.7 Build 9457 (Linux - x64 AVX2 ~ Airi)
> Constant: Pi
> Algorithm: Chudnovsky Formula
> Decimal Digits: 1,000,000,000
> Hexadecimal Digits: Disabled
> Threading Mode: 4 threads
> Computation Mode: Ram Only
> Working Memory: 4,859,459,952 bytes ( 4.52 GiB )
> Logical Disk Usage: 0 bytes ( 0 bytes )
> Start Date: Wed Feb 25 03:01:59 2015
> End Date: Wed Feb 25 03:05:01 2015
> Computation Time: 174.334 seconds
> Total Time: 182.220 seconds
> CPU Utilization: 385.460 %
> Multi-core Efficiency: 96.365 %


Processor(s): AMD FX(tm)-9590 Eight-Core Processor
Logical Cores: 8
Physical Memory: 16,720,162,816 bytes ( 15.5 GiB )
CPU Frequency: 4,715,679,744 Hz

Program Version: 0.6.8 Build 9461 (Linux - x64 XOP ~ Miyu)
Constant: Pi
Algorithm: Chudnovsky Formula
Decimal Digits: 1,000,000,000
Hexadecimal Digits: Disabled
Threading Mode: Thread Spawn (1 Thread/Task) -> ? / 8
Computation Mode: Ram Only
Working Memory: 5,092,016,776 bytes ( 4.74 GiB )
Logical Disk Usage: 0 bytes ( 0 bytes )

Start Date: Mon Aug 3 10:54:20 2015
End Date: Mon Aug 3 10:59:00 2015

Computation Time: 265.643 seconds
Total Time: 280.166 seconds

CPU Utilization: 737.512 %
Multi-core Efficiency: 92.189 %


so I'd say a little bit of a improvement ??

 
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techgeek

techgeek

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Apr 11, 2004
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If you want to re-use your RAM, you'll either have to find a Skylake motherboard that supports DDR3 (the IMC does, just need a motherboard with the correct slots) or go with Devils Canyon. If you don't plan on re-using your RAM then Skylake with DDR4 is the route I'd take.

If you only plan to go as high as SLI with two cards then Skylake / Devils Canyon is all you need, it will work in X8X8 mode which is fine. Make sure that you get an SLI certified motherboard, not all of them are.

As for 4K TV, even the iGPU should be able to handle that. As for gaming at 4K smoothly, SLI will be OK, but I don't feel like any solution has 4K @ 60Hz nailed down perfectly yet. Maybe the next generation of cards (Pascal / Polaris) will be able to manage it.

The only real upside to going with Haswell-E is the higher core counts (not really necessary for gaming) and with 5930K and higher you get more PCI-E lanes, which is needed if you plan to SLI more than 2 cards.

It's debatable whether the highest end CPU's are worth it. There are two competing parts to that equation. Some games (RTS's, high count mutitplayer FPS's like BF 4) benefit from higher core counts. However there are still a lot of games that don't lean heavily on core counts and benefit more from clockspeed. My personal opinion is a quad core (hyperthreaded or no) with a base clock of 3.5GHz is plenty for gaming.
 
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Solution
Archaic59

Archaic59

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Jan 6, 2015
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No need to spend a lot. A Skylake i5 with a decent Asus board and some fast DDR4 will do the job.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($238.99 @ SuperBiiz)
CPU Cooler: CRYORIG H7 49.0 CFM CPU Cooler ($34.50 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: Asus Z170-A ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($139.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Kingston Savage 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2400 Memory ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $463.47
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-04-11 17:49 EDT-0400


AMD :gun:

INTEL :ouimaitre:
 
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why_wolf

why_wolf

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Aug 28, 2015
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For the money you're spending you might as well get an i7 either 4790k (haswell) and you can keep using your DDR3 RAM or 6700K (skylake) and switch up to DDR4. Not really much point in getting the 5820K (uses DDR4) unless this is a production rig and you really want those extra cores.

You can drop down to non K if you straight up don't care about overclocking or the higher stock speeds and save a little bit as well.
 
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junkeymonkey

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if you go propritory skylake and use ddr3 be sure its 1.35v memory

just to ponder on that?

http://wccftech.com/skylake-does-not-support-ddr3-damage-ddr3l-only/

don't know how this will end up ?

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skylake-users-given-18-months-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/

then skylake is limited in chip selection as well

I'd go haswell and keep things ''open'' not hands tied
[opinion]

good luck

just to ask whats was the deal on that sabertooth that makes you want to change ??? don't it work well issue free ??
 
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Wiebob

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Hmmmm...been shopping around, and haven't settled yet, but looking at Intel Core i7-6700K Processor 8M Cache 4GHZ Base 4.2GHZ Turbo FC-LGA1151 and the Gigabyte G1 LGA 1151 Intel Z170 2-Way SLI ATX Motherboard GA-Z170X.
And now I can barely keep my eyes open, off to bed, 4am comes early... ;)
 
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Wiebob

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Jul 30, 2015
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Been having some trouble with the system locking up on the Sabertooth board. This was originally caused by some settings in the BIOS when I first built it, and I've since tweaked again, since I flashed it a couple of days ago. If all goes well, I'll stick with what I have for now. I put the same board in my son's computer a few weeks ago, and again had to tweak some settings to keep it from locking up. His has been okay up to now. So far mine's freeze free since I finally got back into the BIOS, but as of when I posted this, I was sure I was changing.
 
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