Oh, I can call you out on that, then. Haswell never had a 350$ CPU. Haswell-E/X99, sure, but not Haswell.
Whereas lolSkylake has a 250-260$ unlocked i5 and a 400$ unlocked i7. 30-40$ overpriced on the i5 and almost 100$ overpriced on the i7.
Oh, it's yet-another-flash-memory-technology. I'm sure it'll go great like the other fifty-thousand that get theorized and never utilized in a consumer product (aka where it actually matters).
Um, any M.2 card? Did you never look them up after launch? Samsung's 951 is basically just a space-heater SATA III SSD. It bottlenecks to SATA III speeds when it gets too hot, so 99% of the time, its benefit of being an M.2 drive is pointless. mSATA and M.2 both have horrific temperature problems. M.2 moreso because it's smaller, meant to perform faster than mSATA, and idiotically goes behind the motherboard and suffocates.
You could opt to use an M.2 drive in a PCI-E adapter slot. You can even add cooling for it. Of course, this rules out Mini ITX or laptops, the two form factors that even really care about the compactness of mSATA/M.2...
That's unfortunate. You could've gotten a really good i5 4690k build at the same price as your Skylake one, have a better CPU and be able to overclock it.
Not really. The CPU alone would've cost at least $30 more, the cost of a good Z97 board would be comparable to the Z170 board I bought, and even if I'd saved $30 on DDR3, I'd have to replace it on my next upgrade anyways. While I'd lose a few less-than-essential features, the 6500 can be OC'd on Z170 boards, and most people aren't having issues getting it at a stable 4.5Ghz, although I'd like better airfllow before actually messing with overclocking. The 4690k does win out as far as base clocks are concerned, but also draws more power under stock settings.
America.
For a technology medium that was supposed to "revolutionalize" the small form factor PC, its worst pricing is in Mini ITX. Want a non-garbage tier Z170 for Mini ITX? Shell out 150$. What the hell. Z97 would be more like 110-120, possibly cheaper with rebates/etc.
Last edited by Dyshonest,
They're not expensive, it's just that the price of the i5-6500 had started to stabilize towards MSRP by the time I started buying parts. Keep in mind that while the 6500 is a great price/performance CPU, it's still a couple tiers down from Skylake's unlocked i5 - the 6500 regularly runs from $190-200, while the 4690k stayed around $225-230. Certainly there were sales on the 4690k, bringing it into the same $200 range, but I paid about $157 for my 6500 after a 20% discount; to get a similar price on the 4690k it would've had to hit the same $195-200 mark at the same store, but it stayed at around $225 - the lowest it could go was $182, a $25 jump up.
Similarly, a standard ATX, feature-complete budget-level board for both Z97 and Z170 would be around $85-90, although where I was buying with the 20% discount I couldn't find much decent outside of $100. On top of that: Z97 boards, being an older design, lack the features for the same price point - a comparable Z97 board in the same range lacked things like USB 3.1/Type-C and a second USB3 header on the board.
You can see the point he's trying to make here, although to accept his argument is to assert that ASRock Z97 boards (the only mini-ITX Z97 boards still in regular production, it seems) are 'non-garbage' whereas their same Z170 boards are, in fact, garbage.
Last edited by FireEmblemGuy,
Let's see... we can get a 6500 for 200$, extra 30$ for DDR4 RAM + mobo, or Z97 + 4690k. Decisions. -_-
"Standard" ATX generally isn't the standard anymore. Also, who the hell needs USB 3.1/Type-C?
ASRock'z Z170 are indeed crap. They've had horrible production problems since they came out and ASRock is refusing to do anything about it. Their Z97 boards are fine, though. Granted, those have had time to mature...
Last edited by Dyshonest,
If you'd actually read the post, you'd see that at no point was the 4690k actually a price-equivalent alternative - anytime I could've gotten the 4690k for $200 or less, the 6500 was cheaper. The board, again, cost the same, and I only ended up spending $65.60 on my 16GB of DDR4 RAM - if you can find me a good 16GB set of DDR3 for $40 or less, I'll concede that one. ATX is indeed still the standard size for an ATX board, and even if microATX is somewhat popular it's nowhere near being the standard. The USB 3.1/Type-C ports were a bonus rather than a deciding feature; I won't be displeased if they become more of a standard during the lifespan of this machine, but given how much everyone still clings to USB 2.0, I'm not counting on it.
The bottom line is this: for just over $700, I put together an i5-6500/R9 390 machine with 16GB of DDR4-2400 RAM, a solid state multi-OS drive, and nearly 2TB of platter-based storage. For a comparable 4690k build I would've had to have spent $25-30 more on the CPU (and slightly higher power bills) and only saved about half of that by downgrading to lower-performance DDR3 sticks (which are guaranteed to be useless in my next build, whereas the DDR4 will be serviceable even if not high-end), for little or no real CPU benefit and potentially cutting smaller parts out to keep within the budget.
I will concede to you on the quality of ASRock's mini-ITX boards, as I've paid no real attention to them; mini-ITX was too cramped and expensive for the scope of my build.
broadwell-e is just gonna be the same chips but made with a 14nm process (and a $1500 10 core cpu)
will this make a big difference? unknown right now, but its still rated at 140w, so heat output will probably be the same, and skylake didnt run that much cooler
wait until reviews get their hands on the chips, but I dont think its worth the extra $75 USD more or so
will this make a big difference? unknown right now, but its still rated at 140w, so heat output will probably be the same, and skylake didnt run that much cooler
wait until reviews get their hands on the chips, but I dont think its worth the extra $75 USD more or so
10 vs 8 cores can make a big difference for something like rpcs3.
RPCS3 still needs numerous more years before it's more than a proof of concept.
By then quad-cores, or if we've adopted it as a standard, hexa/octo-cores will probably be strong enough to run it.
RPCS3 can also likely be brute-forced with a few very strong CPU cores once it's more developed. Remember how hard it was to run Dolphin?
