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So I think it is time for a Sandy Bridge upgrade and am aiming for the September timeframe.

My trusty i7 2600k has been going since early 2011 in a lil microATX build
With skylake having now landed (from the sky?) and new X99 boards with USB 3.1 etc (such as the X99M-WS)

I'm seeking advise weighing up the X99 versus Z170 platforms. That would be 6C12T 5920K v 4C8T 6700k.
My workload is mainly Lightroom photography work with a lot of Nik filters (which are a resource hog) and some Rendering.....
So the image processing side leans toward Skylake, where as he rendering clearly leans toward Haswell-E.

Platform features desired:- Small footprint case (as current FT05) AIO liquid cooled overclock, USB 3.1 Type C, M.2, pref. integral Wireless AC to avoid taking a PCIe slot. Not interested in dual GPU or onboard sound (have dragonfly 1.2)

Welcome some comparative builds. Targeting around the US$1500 mark or thereabouts...
will likely bring across my GTX 970 Reference from my current build and some storage...

Pointers much appreciated...

Cheers,

Sp@rky

What are your most demanding use cases?

If you've got a GTX 970 and SSD storage, you might not notice a CPU performance upgrade. That leaves the question "are platform updates (e.g. USB 3.1, etc.) worth $1,500 to you? That would buy a mighty nice G-Sync display.

I would wait until they release the high performance 14nm line. If you get a skylake CPU now it'll only be like 50% faster. If you get an X99 platform, well it's been out for a while already I wouldn't recommend that.

Thanks all for the input, and apols for the lag in reply.

Kretschmer wrote:

what are your most demanding use cases?

Most demanding use case is 3D rendering (scaling linearly with thread increases, clearly favoring X99) HOWEVER, this workload Im doing less of these days than the photo-editing work (which I believe favors Skylake...)

As I have SSDs and an overclocked GTX 970 in the mix, I am tempted to hold fire a little while until circumstances either change the workload, or DDR4 comes down in price further...

Broadwell-E is expected to show up Q4 this year. I'm not sure if it will come with a new chipset to replace/update X99 but if it does then it might be worth waiting for.

I'm rocking a 2500k at 4.5GHz, and I have zero plans to upgrade until my ASRock motherboard (Z68 Extreme4) finally dies, with gaming and Lightroom being my primary workloads (shooting a 6D, so 20MP max).

If I were doing rendering (3D or video), I'd be going for the Haswell-E for sure, as those can take all the cores you can throw at it, but for photography? Few things will really speed that up. You might even consider the desktop Broadwell CPUs with the 128MB L4 cache.

Haswell E doesnt have working TSX but i dont know if youd benefit from it. I would go with Skylake or wait for Broadwell E.

specialworks wrote:

Kretschmer wrote:

what are your most demanding use cases?

Most demanding use case is 3D rendering (scaling linearly with thread increases, clearly favoring X99) HOWEVER, this workload Im doing less of these days than the photo-editing work (which I believe favors Skylake...)

This is what my company does, and I test/sample and build the hardware for them. Performance prioritisation is for Adobe/Autodesk/animation/renders using as many threads as possible (and some GPU farms). After trying various options we decided to go with higher-clocked 6-core X99 5930K rather than the 3GHz 8-core 59650K. We also looked at Xeons but beyond 6 cores, the lower clockspeeds for higher core counts are too big a penalty for the stuff that doesn't scale with threads, and nothing we do really gains anything from ECC. Haswell S1150 was ruled out at the time due to the 32GB memory limitation. If you're modelling in 3D you probably want to consider your RAM usage for the lifetime of the platform.

Skylake S1151 has just two channels, limiting you to 32GB, realistically, since 16GB DDR4 modules cost so much it's ridiculous. With an X99 platform you can reach 64GB quite affordably. For what it's worth, Skylake is hard-capped at 64GB which is plenty for now, but may not be in the future. X99 options are limited by the board, but I've seen consumer options up to 256GB (Asus X99-E WS, for example).

I would just overclock the 2600k to 4.5 GHz, slap on an AIO cooler and keep on truckin with your current rig.

Airmantharp wrote:

You might even consider the desktop Broadwell CPUs with the 128MB L4 cache.

Good luck actually finding one.