Hacker News Reader

Comment by snake117 | Hacker News Reader

So I'm planning on building a new gaming rig because my current PC is still running Sandy Bridge. Would you guys recommend Skylake? I found this MoBo + CPU + Memory package on Newegg for $500:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=19-117-601

From my understanding, the i5 CPUs are great for gaming and i7 is great for running multiple applications at the same time. I appreciate any help, thanks!

View on HN

The biggest thing I've seen that Skylake provides for high-performance gaming is 26 PCIE lanes.

This means you can run a PCIE 3.0 4x+ lane NVMe SSD like the Intel 750 while also running a 3.0 16x GPU (or two GPUs in SLI/CrossFireX). Given an appropriate board, anyway - I haven't looked at Skylake boards.

The performance increase of PCIE NVMe SSDs over SATA SSDs is amazing. SSDs are already great of course, but the Intel 750 can decrease load times by another order of magnitude.

Looking at the linked motherboard, its PCIE 3.0 slots are shared bandwidth, which isn't taking advantage of Skylake at all.

Edit: Actually, looking at the launch boards in Anandtech's review, most of them are routing the extra PCIE 3.0 lanes to M.2 ports (potentially a step backwards from U.2 but forwards from SATA). Getting maximum performance out of a NVMe SSD is seemingly still going to be restricted to only certain high-end boards for the time being.

At a glance, it looks like the "MSI Z170A Gaming M9 ACK" board has a dedicated 3.0 x4 slot separate and supports U.2, so there's at least some available, but it's $400.

Edit2: Apparently Skylake M.2 slots can provide full 3.0 x4 performance, so they're probably fine.

Note that most/all of the current M.2 SSDs are running as AHCI devices, not NVMe. There's an OEM Samsung NVMe unit not available for retail yet. Apparently the performance difference between the AHCI and NVMe version isn't big, anyway.

Reference: http://anandtech.com/show/9396/samsung-sm951-nvme-256gb-pcie...

Edit: here's the key line regarding a modest improvement for small random access:

> Typically the NVMe version offers about 10-20% improvement in average latency over the AHCI version, which is a healthy boost in performance given that the two utilize identical hardware.

I'm about to build a new rig as well and was waiting on Skylake to see if I wanted to jump in. After seeing the reviews and price points, I'm going to pass and go with Haswell. The pros do not justify the price premium to me. Right now the difference for me is around $150, which I'd rather sink into the video card.

Also, I've read that the Skylake CPUs don't come with a cooling solution, you have to buy your own third-party cooling solution which adds to the cost. I know many people think the stock cooling sucks, which it does for overclocking. But if you don't overclock, the best reason for a third-party cooling solution is to reduce noise.

Currently I'm planning on an i5 as I've never seen an advantage to having an i7 for gaming. An i5 and a good video card is all you need.

I can recommend the i5 4460 which is about ~$180. It's a locked 4690k for about $60 less but honestly is able to play even the most demanding games on Ultra settings (Witcher 3 / GTA 5) if pared with a good GPU. I would advise picking up a Z97 Motherboard to go with it so if you do want to upgrade the processor in a few years you have a path to the higher end of the Haswell line.

If you buy a locked i5, consider a H97 board instead. Z97 allows for overclocking, which you can't do with a locked CPU. Just match the features you want for a bit less. Most H97 boards will cover the Haswell line just fine, just no or limited overclocking.

Of course, if you find a Z97 that has what you want at a similar or lower price, then by all means go for it.

Z97 is useful because if you decide to upgrade to one of the higher end overclockable CPUs in the future you can. I found the difference in price can be really small or the same. I went with a Gigabyte Black board which is around ~$135 on Amazon and supports SLI. http://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK-Motherboard-I...

I think I said all that, more or less. Except for the SLI part, as that might be an issue with H97 that needs to be checked before purchase.

If you care about spending an extra $30 on a CPU cooler, I'd say Skylake is definitely not for you.

If you're getting Skylake for gaming you should probably be planning to drop $400 (or more for a bigger size) on an Intel 750 SSD.

When pricing on a budget, yes, $30 can be a big deal. Let's see, $250 CPU + $30 cooler (realistically, should be higher) versus $200 CPU that suits my needs just fine. Gives me an extra $80 to maybe upgrade elsewhere that might make a bigger difference to my goals.

Why exactly is a $400 SSD suggested to go with Skylake for gaming? Why not a $100 SSD? What does the size of the SDD have to do with Skylake? I'm failing to understand your point.

If you're not interested in spending the money to get top-tier performance, there's absolutely no reason to buy Skylake right now.

The Intel 750 is NVMe, the next generation of storage interface. The 750 can outperform a SATA SSD by 10x in reads, and even versus an outstanding SATA SSD will get you at least a 4x increase.

Load times are actually pretty important for games, and after a GPU I don't think there's anywhere you could spend extra that would give you more quality of life.

You'd already be looking at $250 for a similarly-sized high-performance SATA SSD, so the price difference isn't that large. You aren't getting high performance even as far as SATA for $100.

I cannot disagree, I think that you actually supported my point for the most part.

The two currently released Skylake CPUs are both unlocked (K) models. It may be worth waiting for the rest of the roll out to see what happens. It might be that Intel will ship a stock cooling solution for their locked models.

Locked models are reported to come out in Q3. I would imagine pricing will be similar. I doubt the performance would be much different so I can't see reasons for me to wait. If there was a thought it would drag prices of other CPUs down then it would be worth considering. But all the costs associated with Skylake at the moment with the new RAM type, new motherboard type, new CPU type and with all the premium pricing for these components is too much for too little to me.

The i5 is fine for running multiple applications at once. The i7 adds hyperthreading, which allows each core to act like two virtual cores to run parallelized calculations more quickly, but in some cases it actually comes out slower than with hyperthreading turned off. The only way to know for sure is testing, but games are almost certainly not optimized for this.

For a gaming rig, I wouldn't bother.

Save your money and get an older processor. Skylake gives petty performance increase which you won't even notice to be honest. Unless you're literally going to use it convert videos or stuff like that, it's useless

Pick a build from one of these: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/Newt0580/saved/#view=39vRsY

Reply on news.ycombinator.com