Exploring Options for New Build - 2011 vs 1150 vs AMD

[Greenslade]

Approximate Purchase Date: September-ish

Budget Range: £1K-2K over time

System Usage from Most to Least Important: Video and Audio Editing / Gaming

Are you buying a monitor: No

Preferred Website(s) for Parts: any

Location: North-East UK

Overclocking: Maybe

SLI or Crossfire: Maybe

Your Monitor Resolution: 2 x 1920 x 1080 (currently), may upgrade one to QHD later

Additional Comments: I want a jack-of-all-trades machine that will last, be somewhat upgradable, run Adobe Premiere CC and act as a decent alternative to buying a PS4/XBox One for games like Fallout 4 etc.

INFODUMP BEGINS

So I'm trying to weigh up some options.

I want a fairly quiet PC with a bit of poke to it, so I have a "standard" pick for various components. Since This purchase is a few months off it may vary in the fine details. I am open to advice on these if people think I'm way way off.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Case: Fractal Design Define R5 (Titanium) ATX Mid Tower Case (£79.78 @ CCL Computers)
Power Supply: Silverstone Strider Gold S 750W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (£102.82 @ CCL Computers)
CPU Cooler: Fractal Design Kelvin S24 62.4 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler (£89.99 @ Ebuyer)

I don't want a flash case with lights and spinny wheels and fireworks. I want a nice sensible one that runs cool and quiet. The R5 comes highly recommended on the internets. I know I probably don't need water cooling unless I'm overclocking but I figure I can keep the noise down if I have it, and it will open overclocking up to me if I want to go there, and the FD Kelvin system is upgradeable if I want to add other bits later.

Storage: Crucial MX200 250GB M.2-2260 Solid State Drive (£80.75 @ Ebuyer)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£74.99 @ Aria PC)

M2 SSD for OS/Applications, 7200RPM HDD for other stuff. So far so standard.

Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 960 2GB Superclocked Video Card (£159.29 @ Aria PC)

I went for the 960 because it seems like a reasonably poky card for not too much money. It seemed worth paying extra over the 750Ti but not really worth it to jump to the 970.

Optical Drive: Pioneer BDC-207DBK Blu-Ray Reader, DVD/CD Writer (£34.99 @ Amazon UK)
Keyboard: Logitech K120 - UK Layout Wired Standard Keyboard (£11.12 @ Amazon UK)
Mouse: Asus GX950 Wired Laser Mouse (£35.57 @ CCL Computers)

So far so standard - just went for what seemed reasonable at this stage, other recommendations are welcome.

Total: £669.30
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-06-09 13:11 BST+0100

Then we come to the question. Assuming I go Intel, do I try to "future proof" myself by going socket 2011-v3/i7, or save some money by sticking to an 1150/i5 build.

Here's the two options I've come up with.

i7/2011v3 build

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor (£299.94 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: ASRock X99 Extreme4 ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard (£167.99 @ Scan.co.uk)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws 4 series 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR4-2800 Memory (£135.38 @ CCL Computers)

+ other bits brings the total to £1272.61

i5/1150 Build
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor (£176.34 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: ASRock Z97 EXTREME4 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£111.45 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-2400 Memory (£89.95 @ Amazon UK)

+ other bits brings the total to £1047.04

The extra £225 will get me a performance bump, but I'm not kidding myself it will be super-duper huge. But it will give me much more room to upgrade the processor, graphics and memory down the line - bump the processor to get 40 lanes of PCIe, memory up to 128Gb as opposed to 32 etc. Both these builds can support adding an additional 960 card in SLI, adding another 16GB of memory, and increasing the storage capacity.

Bearing in mind this can only be ballpark as things will change between now and when I buy it, do people think that the i7 system is worth the extra coin?

For that matter, is Intel the right way to go at all? For the same kind of money I could do this instead:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD FX-9370 4.4GHz 8-Core OEM/Tray Processor (£155.94 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: ASRock 990FX Extreme6 ATX AM3+ Motherboard (£115.41 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-2400 Memory (£89.95 @ Amazon UK)

Video Card: MSI Radeon R9 280X 3GB TWIN FROZR Video Card (2-Way CrossFire) (£169.98 @ Ebuyer)
Video Card: MSI Radeon R9 280X 3GB TWIN FROZR Video Card (2-Way CrossFire) (£169.98 @ Ebuyer)

Power Supply: EVGA 1000W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (£118.92 @ Scan.co.uk)

Everything else stays the same, total: £1227.37

That's a lot more GPU for the money, at the expense of more power suckage, more heat to get rid of, an inferior CPU for the editing tasks that can't use GPU, and less expandability in a year's time. It's an outlier at the moment, but I am not dismissing it out of hand just yet.


Anyone have any ideas to throw at this? Am I making any serious mistakes? Is the additional £225 to go to an i7 2011v3 worth it?

 

[TofuLion]

well, but the time we get to september, intel will (hopefully) have released the next generation of enthusiast grade skylake CPUs based on the Z170 chipset. that's what i recommend.

assuming you were going to build right now, and those are the only options available, it really depends on what you will be doing most. if you were going to do more video editing with gaming being a secondary function, i would say that you would benefit more from the 2011 build. video editing will [almost] always be dependent on your CPU power; it will work your CPU as hard as it can, and that's where the 6C/12T chip will prove to be most useful.

for gaming on the other hand, currently most games barely make use of 4 threads, so the i5 would be much more suited for gaming. as long as you have a quad core, gaming performance is generally determined by you GPU power, and the 4670K will likely keep most GPUs running at their maximum capacity. so if you intend to do more gaming, with video editing as a secondary function, you would benefit most from cutting budget on the chipset/CPU and investing in a gtx 970. the 960 is good for low power consumption and low heat output, but the 280X usually performs much better.

alternately, to get a more "jack-of-all" well-rounded build, you could go with the Z97 build and an i7 4770K/4790K. it has hyperthreading so it will help a bit with the video editing, but still keep the overall price lower, and allow you to upgrade your GPU to the 970 (i highly recommend at least the 970 for 1080p x 2/QHD, you might even consider 970x2 or a 980).

i wouldn't go with the AMD unless your budget was halved. even then, i wouldn't suggest the FX-9*** i would go with FX-83** and overclock as high as possible.

the R5 is a superb case, i have his little brother the R4 and it is a very nice case: good, sturdy build quality, excellent noise reduction, tons of room, etc. that PSU you selected is a nice one, but Super Flower is available in the UK (not in the US ) so i recommend this higher quality unit that is actually a few pound cheaper http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/super-flower-power-supply-sf750f14mg

 

[Greenslade]

Thanks for that.

The big ticket thing I see going 2011 over 1150 is 4 channel memory as opposed to 2 channel. To my mind I can see how this is worth the extra money for high-intensity stuff like video editing, but I do wonder how much difference it makes in practice.

Upping to a 970 in the first build takes me to £1370, and doing the same going to an i7 4790K takes me to £1210. I'd expect these prices to come down a bit by September, but that makes £160 difference for 4 channel memory. Is that worth it? Anyone played to see what the real world difference is? I'm talking editing in CC rather than gaming here.

 

[sora]

I personally would stick with 1150 right now... Maybe in a few years, 2011 will be worth it.

 

[TofuLion]

this review is quite dated (from Nov 2011) but it does give a good example of how memory channels affect performance. http://www.legitreviews.com/ddr3-memory-performance-analysis-on-intel-x79_1779/3

in particular, the video encoding. there are significant gains from single to dual, but diminishing returns thereafter:

i don't think it's worth the extra money for such a low amount of gain. that review ran all tests with a 6 core CPU, however, so it doesn't exactly represent the difference between the 5820K and the 4790K, but it illustrates the difference in memory bandwidth.

you can see here a comparison of the two CPUs in video encoding.

the 5820K offers around 17% better performance over the 4790K for about 13% more cost (if i'm doing the math correctly). that is cost effective, but again i would really wait til intel's next generation of CPUs is released before making any choices.

 

[Greenslade]

Really helpful, thanks.

Since there'll almost certainly be a Skylake out by the time I buy it, I shall re-evaluate closer to the time. The two extra cores do seem like they'd help, but the extra memory channels aren't worth worrying about it seems. If Skylake bumps single-core power on an 1151/Z170 chipset, that will probably be the way to go as you say. On the other hand, if the 5820K gets a knock in price after Skylake (possible but not likely as they're not really directly competing) and the system price gets back down to ~£1,200 with a 270, that might well make as much sense - 6 cores vs 4 faster cores. We'll have to see.

Time to start funnelling money into the savings account...