Coffee Lake or Ice Lake?

It's 6 months away at least with little known about Ice Lake and its pricing. If you you need a new cpu now just get the 8700k

Are you happy with your current system's performance? If you aren't, you might as well buy what is available now. If you are still happy with what you currently have, then there isn't much harm in waiting a while longer to upgrade.

Ice lake is far enough off that the exact release date isn't available, let alone performance benchmarks. I'd guess that the gain won't match the benefit from the recent bump in core counts across their CPU lineup though - it'd be hard to match that kind of a big bang again.

Build it now*

*if you need the upgrade

Buy it and enjoy it

If AMD's Ryzen 2000 series manage to achieve ~15% better performance due to optimizations and higher clocks on 12nm, Intel will need another bump to stay ahead which could very well come in the form of 8C16T i7 and 6C12T i5 for Cannon Lake or Ice Lake.

On my end, I'm just glad that I still have no upgrade itch whatsoever and can just wait another year or so for the AMD-Intel pseudo-war to settle.

I'd ask what your current system specs are.

-Wolf sends

Your old build is still pretty solid if you're primarily gaming and not shooting for framerates above 60FPS. If you're getting into high refresh rate gaming, that's where moving to the 8700k is going to help you most. That, or trying to run Ubisoft's open world games like AC: Origins or Watch Dogs 2 at a solid 60FPS, those games are insanely CPU heavy.

I'm not a heavy gamer who needs 200FPS in every game with settings on Ultra and a 4K Resolution, so I'd say your current system is more than enough for you to wait until Ice-Lake/Ryzen 2xxx.

That's just me though. If a game starts to lag, I have no problem turning down the settings in a game. Usually, I'm too busy fighting for my life to actually notice is that bush has 50 leaves or 5000.

-Wolf sends

An i5-4690k is still pretty close to as good as it gets today for gaming if you aren't running CPU-intensive tasks in the background while doing so. There is very little reason to upgrade from that at this point in time as there literally is only a handful of games at the moment where you might be able to notice the difference. I'd just toss the 1080Ti into the i5-4690k, bump its RAM to 16GB and call it good for another year or two.

If you get the itch to upgrade, I say scratch it.
I like your new build.
Every time I upgrade my Son's PC he says I did not think I needed any more, but now that it is here, I can see the difference.

If I might make just one suggestion:
Instead of a $150 AIO cooler, use a noctua NH-D15s.
It will be half the price, cool equally well, be easier to install, be quieter, and.... it will not leak.

Here's my Gibberish:

I get the feeling some weird things are going to happen shortly. There are rumours of 8 core mainstream Canon-Lake (10 nm refresh of kaby/coffee). Both Cannon (desktop) and Ice are supposed to be 2018 though with Ice being an architecture change after the Cannon process change.

I worry that Cannon might get the Broadwell treatment. Meaning; they release one or 2 desktop chips only to give Z370 users an extra "generation" like they did with haswell to broadwell but for the most part skip it entirely until Ice lake comes out. If Cannon releases in June without 8 core it really presents no improvement over coffee (maybe power, not likely any speed) but if it does release with 8 core then ice lake will present no real improvement....That's why I think one of them will get the desktop skip treatment and we'll only see one or the other in any real form.

The facts are that Coffeelake is pretty awesome and selling well despite the deserved flack they got for it. They already annoyed a lot of buyers in that space though when they made it incompatible with Z270 even though it uses the same socket. They also released Kaby and Coffee within 9 months of each other. If they now release Canon and Icelake chips for desktop in 2018 they will have released 4 full "mainstream" "desktop" lineups in under 2 years. Will that mean a new socket, an 1151v3 perhaps? Will users have to buy a new board again? Now that is possible and Zen+/Zen2 may force them to do so but 4 full releases in 2 years is pretty ridiculous and will almost ensure that one (or more) of those lineups is cannibalized by another. For example Kaby is still in full stock but you'd be nuts to buy one now unless you got an insane deal for example because ryzen is better at all but the top end and Coffee is better at the top end and it was never really better than Skylake in the first place unless you delidded...I fully expect to see 7700Ks drop to $200 to eliminate stock.

Now, given your goal of 1440p/60 and streaming I'd suggest two options:

1. Go 8700k and it will do that for most games. For the ones that it lacks native streaming power for use quicksync or NVenc to stream. It is no question the best gaming processor you can get right now.

2. Get an 8 core Ryzen with fast RAM and OC the snot out of it. They will software stream anything right now and have guaranteed upgrades on the socket until 2020.

3. Wait for an 8 core mainstream Intel; this could mean March, August, December or it might even get pushed back into 2019 so I'd advise against it.

4. Go to HEDT Intel or Zen and get yourself 10,12, or more cores of awesomeness. These will stream record and play liek no ones business.


I did notice you only want 60FPS gaming. If you want to get that higher then stick to the Intel side of things for now and 8700k is my preferred option, especially if you like PUBG style games where AMD is just not working as well unfortunately.

There is also info coming out of Intel that Cannon Lake is delayed to December already and Ice isn't coming until mid to late 2019 but Coffee Lake might get an 8 core version later this year....who knows though.

Intel has been changing platform compatibility every other generation for roughly 20 years already. There is very little reason to believe that is going to change now so the answer is almost certainly going to be yes, Ice Lake will require new motherboards.

I can imagine Intel's reason for doing so being simply that the vast majority of PCs will never see a CPU upgrades, therefore it isn't worth Intel's R&D time to support interoperability beyond generational pairs. (Especially when you have a near-monopoly on the high-end enthusiast market, which means that the people most likely to want to upgrade CPUs are stuck with the "suck it" option.)

I'd agree, and it might even be that Cannon (if it gets released at all for desktop) needs a new board too. As long as there is a Coffee Refresh of some kind that would follow their traditional path. Given laptop makers are almost straight skipping Cannon it makes sense that it basically gets dropped entirely.

This particular time around though (with the exact same socket and Asus straight up saying they could make Z170 work) they annoyed users more than usual especially because the same socket was confirmed early on in the Kaby Lake cycle but the non compatibility wasn't confirmed until nearly the end of it. At least a few users bought lower end Kaby chips thinking they could go to higher end Coffee on launch.

You're of course correct; 95% or more of systems even in the DIY custom space never get CPU upgrades (probably 99%+ in the non-DIY). I wonder if more would if this didn't keep happening though. It also makes one further question the logic behind the 7640X 7740X etc which were clearly intended as buy it now upgrade later chips...not that those need further questioning but Intel does seem to like the upgrade camp in some cases, why not in other cases.

Did you get an 8700K? I'd say that's a perfectly good processor for your needs for at least 2 years regardless of what comes down the pipeline and if you do need an upgrade it's more likely to be a GPU than a CPU (not sure what you have for GPU). As you're aware (obviously given you asked) there is always something new and improved around the corner and any time we make a purchase that new better thing might be released the next day. If your rig needed an update the 8700K is unbeatable for gaming and pretty damn great for streaming and any video work. Going to the Skylake X platform with a 7900K would have been way more money for lower pure gaming performance. For software streaming it would be better and for video work it would be better but not so much better to be worth another $600+ for the platform.

I do think (80% sure) there will be an 8 core chip that works with Z370 boards at some point...just not sure if it will be Coffee Lake still or Cannon Lake or Ice Lake and Intel isn't really telling anyone. Also not sure if we get it in the summer or December or 2019. Intel might not know themselves yet given the mad rush AMD forced them into.

Regardless, don't regret your decision. If it does what you want it to do then it was a good choice. Wanting it to do that in three years time is a fool's errand.

If you aren't some sort of enthusiasts, chances are you won't be upgrading your CPU for 4+ years and even AM4 would be obsolete by the time you needed to upgrade. The only non-enthusiasts who might upgrade CPUs are those who grossly under-shot their initial purchase or needed a working PC immediately but couldn't afford the chip they meant to get up-front.

Back when I built my current PC, I estimated that an i3-3220 would be enough for my needs for at least two years but since the i5-3470 only cost $170 at the time, I decided to cough up the extra $40 and most likely not have to worry about the CPU for the remainder of the PC's useful life as I had never kept my main PCs for more than four years before. Fast-forward five years later and I'm still not even feeling the beginning of an itch to upgrade. (Though this may change if Ivy Bridge happens to be one of the architectures that get hit worst by that ring-0 exploit patch.)

I'm on a 6700K and feeling the itch, not so much because it won't do what I need but just cause I'm that kind of nerd. I did build an R5 1600 and quite liked it but it was a sidegrade at best and I sold it off. Funnily enough it's probably worth more than I sold it for now given the RAM kit it had. The Canadian 8700K boxing week bundle deals are tempting me but I'm going to hold off because I know I don't need it. No streaming for me, just CAD work and a bit of gaming, and the occasional youtube video that actually put a load on it. For recorded video NVenc is a better option than software encoding anyways...just crank the bitrate and deal with it in post.

An 8 core mainstream chip within such a short space of Coffee Lake would seem a little ridiculous.. I'm just about to move on an 8700K myself. Surely an 8 core chip would not make sense until at least 2019 or later?