TR Forums

CPU:[/b ]Intel - Core i5-8600K 3.6GHz 6-Core Processor ($256.79 @ OutletPC)
[b]CPU Cooler: be quiet! - Dark Rock Pro 3 67.8 CFM Fluid Dynamic Bearing CPU Cooler ($89.79 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: Gigabyte - Z370 AORUS Gaming 5 (rev. 1.0) ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($151.98 @ Newegg)
Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory ($204.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung - 960 EVO 500GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive ($227.79 @ OutletPC)
Video Card:EVGA - GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB FTW3 GAMING iCX Video Card ($840.00)
Case: be quiet! - Silent Base 800 w/Window (Silver) ATX Mid Tower Case ($139.90 @ Newegg Marketplace)
Power Supply: be quiet! - Dark Power Pro 11 650W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($139.90 @ Newegg Marketplace)
Total: $2051.14
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-01-30 23:52 EST-0500

Budget is ~$2k

Looking to game on ULTRA/HIGH settings in 1080P @ 144hz (already own monitor) Possibly move into 4K stuff later this year. I'll also be getting a VR headset in the near future.


Looking at the gaming benchmarks, I figured I'd go with a i5-8600K and overclock it, instead of going for an i7-8700k. Although I am open to changes...
I had also looked at the Gigabyte - Z370 AORUS Gaming 7 instead of the Gaming 5, but I'm not sure the features are worth the price, considering I'd have to also get a separate WLAN card with the Gaming 7 mobo.

Open to suggestions for any parts.
Except the GFX card, as I've already purchased the 1080 ti.

I'd go for an i7-8700 (non-k) and use MCE. Hyperthreading is starting to become useful, and the doubled threads will give more performance in CPU-heavy stuff than the 300-400MHz you might get from overclocking.

In a bunch of stuff i7-8700 is almost identical to the 8700k if you don't overclock (just 100MHz more in both all-core and max turbo speeds, identical if you push bclk of the i7-8700 to 102.5), and it's faster than an i5-8600k even pushed to 5.1GHz. Think of the stock i7-8700k in these charts as identical to an i7-8700:

Render:


Game:


GamersNexus Review where the above screenshot came from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJGJ0RzPyL0

TPU's comparison charts: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Int ... 0K/18.html

CPU: same
Cooler: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 6835186153
Motherboard: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 6813157790
Memory: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 6820313842
Storage: same
Video Card: same
Case: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 6811108483
Power Supply: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 6817151186

I agree with jihadjoe. 8700 and MCE or MCA or whatever your board vendor calls it. You should be running 4.6GHz minimum at all times like that, maybe more if the MCE is aggressive.

The reason the Ryzen5 was so popular with gamers on a budget last year is because despite the lower clocks and lower IPC compared to the more expensive i5-7600K, those extra threads really helped in a lot of newer games, especially RTS and single-player games with a lot of AI/physics. In games like Witcher 3, Crysis 3 and ACU, the much slower 3.2GHz R5 1600 was outpacing a 4.8GHz overclock on the i5. Perhaps there wasn't a lot of difference in average framerates, but the 99th percentile scores painted a vastly different picture, because the i5 was dropping down to 50fps for the heavy scenes but then rendering easy scenes at almost 200fps, skewing the average. Meanwhile the Ryzen5 was only rendering at 130fps but never dropped below 80fps. A lot of websites are showing minimum framerates now, which is better than solely relying on average framerates, but minimum framerates are almost meaningless; what matters is the 99th percentile, which is a representation of "how fast will this CPU/GPU typically run when it matters most?" For VR this is the single most important statistic. You want to render every single frame quicker than 1/90th of a second. 91-1000000 fps doesn't matter, 88fps is a juddery disaster.

For multiplayer, high-refresh gaming (and only that sort of gaming) where a lot of the processing is distributed between clients or run on the server, the clockspeed and IPC are the only thing that matters, which is why in a few games the 7700K still does very well. This sort of gaming is what makes the higher-clocked, low-thread-count processors look good in benchmarks. The thing is, multiplatform games these days really need to be optimised for 8 threads to get the most out of the consoles and anything less than that seems shortsighted for a CPU you're probably going to keep for the remaining lifetime of the current console generation.

kLeos wrote:

i5-8600K
...
1080 Ti
...
Budget is ~$2k

Yeah, good luck with that. What with the mining fiasco and...

I've already purchased the 1080 ti.

Oh. Good call.

I'd also go for the i7. If I was building a new machine now that's what I'd use since I'd be planning to keep it until something died, or it was old enough to make me nervous that something might.

Good suggestions here already, so I'll just put in another vote for the i7-8700. Jet.com has the non-K version for $310, that shouldn't be hard to shave $50 off other areas of the build if you're up against your budget wall.

If not, the i5-8600K is no slouch. 6 cores will last a good long time.

Thanks all I appreciate it.
FYI I did get the 1080 ti at MSRP from evga. If you sign up for the email notifications, when the card gets in stock, you've got about 1-2 minutes to log in and buy it before it sells out

Let me throw a wrench in here and say that I can extend my budget by a few hundred bucks.

Would AMD be a better choice for future proofing my new rig? Is the AM 4 socket expected to last for a while?

I was looking at the Ryzen 1700 and 1800x.

My understanding is that a lot of games just aren't taking advantage of all cores in AMD processors, so can we expect gaming benchmarks to favor AMD CPUs over the next few months / year?

The difference between the 1700 and 1800X if you apply a bit of overclocking to both is essentially nothing. AM4 is expected to live on for the Zen refresh coming next quarter, I haven't seen anything suggesting (or denying) it'll live to see Zen2.

I don't think AMD can match an i7-8700 for gaming. Even the Ryzen+ refresh due to arrive soon is unlikely to allow the 1800X successor to match an i7-8700 unless AMD release a 5GHz chip, which I don't think is likely.

Ryzen is amazing at muti-threaded workloads. It's faster than similarly-priced Intel solutions, and its more power-efficient than pretty much anything Intel make at the moment, but it's definitely a slower architecture for gaming. A lot of people won't care because they'll be GPU-limited anyway and Ryzen is plenty fast enough to not matter - but if you're a 144Hz low-resolution gamer, then you'll need the IPC advantage and higher clockspeeds that come with an Intel system.

I built a similar system but based on the 8700K late last year (details in my signature).

Based on my experience, two suggestions:

1) Don't rely on MCE. In my case, when I had it enabled and also enabled the XMP for my RAM, the system wouldn't even boot into Windows. I had to apply a manual overclock to get it to run stably -- and if you are going for a non-K chip, you won't have that option. Now, it's likely I lost the silicon lottery, but then, you may too....

2) If you are going to MCE, you probably want a beefier cooler. At high clocks the 8700 series put out a lot of heat. What you've listed would probably be fine if you stuck to an 8600 though.

Intel?

1080p?

End User wrote:

1080p?

kLeos wrote:

1080P @ 144hz (already own monitor) Possibly move into 4K stuff later this year. I'll also be getting a VR headset in the near future.

emphasis for your clarification.

4K?

kLeos wrote:

My understanding is that a lot of games just aren't taking advantage of all cores in AMD processors, so can we expect gaming benchmarks to favor AMD CPUs over the next few months / year?

What Chrispy_ said, mostly. Without some architectural changes I doubt that's going to happen on its own any time soon. Even though consoles have 8 cores, they're not as powerful as we see in a PC, so 6-8 Coffee Lake threads are most likely going to be enough for the foreseeable future.

kLeos wrote:

My understanding is that a lot of games just aren't taking advantage of all cores in AMD processors, so can we expect gaming benchmarks to favor AMD CPUs over the next few months / year?

-pay particular attention to the lower right hand graph: "Frame-time (ms)".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RMbYe4X2LI

..of course the i5 7600K has *4* cores (..not the 6 of the 8600K).


Note the bump with memory (..and they aren't testing with freq. as high as the Ryzen, nor are they overclocking the K):

https://youtu.be/xrO7s2IrWSY?t=258

-again, look to the Frame-time (ms) between the i5 8600K (and its 6 cores) vs the Ryzen (and its 12 threads) - but again, note that the memory freq. is not equal:

https://youtu.be/xrO7s2IrWSY?t=390


Of course the i7-8700K provides the same 12 threads as the Ryzen, but with its considerably higher frequency.

Chrispy_ wrote:

I don't think AMD can match an i7-8700 for gaming. Even the Ryzen+ refresh due to arrive soon is unlikely to allow the 1800X successor to match an i7-8700 unless AMD release a 5GHz chip, which I don't think is likely.

Ryzen is amazing at muti-threaded workloads. It's faster than similarly-priced Intel solutions, and its more power-efficient than pretty much anything Intel make at the moment, but it's definitely a slower architecture for gaming. A lot of people won't care because they'll be GPU-limited anyway and Ryzen is plenty fast enough to not matter - but if you're a 144Hz low-resolution gamer, then you'll need the IPC advantage and higher clockspeeds that come with an Intel system.

Agreed on all points, and will add that the 8700k is competitive with the fastest consumer (8C16T) Ryzen CPUs for nearly all thread-happy workloads on top of being faster for workloads dependent on single-core performance like many games, and that this situation isn't likely to change until Zen 2 cores (not the upcoming Zen+ stuff) in whatever Ryzen release that happens to be.

And from the other direction- you can build a Ryzen system with eight cores pretty cheap, and if that's fast enough for you (game depending), you won't get faster for your money today!

..as listed on Techreports weekly deals.

-a nice Ryzen board for quite a bit less than the Intel variations:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 00524&SID=


-however, if interested: make sure to pair it with compatible RAM.