Building Now... Z270 or take the X299 Plunge?

Audiochris

[H]ard|Gawd
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Dec 23, 2000
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Like the title says, I need a system now but I'm torn on which direction to go. X299 seems to be a bit of a shit show right now but i'd be good for a while. Z270 is well tested at this point but I wonder if I'd be wanting something better 6 months from now.

System will mostly be Pro Tools, Lightroom, Handbrake / FLAC encoding, Moderate Gaming.

What would you do?


Please don't suggest Ryzen. I already know I don't want to go that route.
 
I'm going from the system in my signature to the other system in my signature. I do about 50% gaming and 50% productivity. We'll see in a few days how it works out. I too wasn't interested in Ryzen mainly due to clock limitations and quirks of past AMD CPU's.
 
Well considering Coffeelake will need a new chipset if you were thinking "future" proofing I would wait if you were going to use a Z270.

Especially considering the things you want to do you'd be best to wait for CFL.
 
Yeah, I’ve pretty much decided that I can live with my current system til October. It will give me a chance to see the reviews for more x299 boards as well as the x370 boards. October is just a self imposed deadline.
 
Why is x299 a shit show?

Its not. There were a couple quirks when it came out and a couple bad board designs and now everyone is saying it is garbage. Most of those people haven't even touched an X299 platform. With the latest BIOS and new nVidia drivers my X299 is ridiculously good. I'm getting smooth awesome performance at 6K resolution for hours on end without issue. Amazing platform.

I understand people want to support the underdog, AMD, and I'm happy they are making great stuff again. But X299 it fantastic. My 5GHz X299 platform (Mobo+CPU) is faster than Ryzen and cheaper than Threadripper.
 
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Its not. There were a couple quirks when it came out and a couple bad boards designs and now everyone is saying it is garbage. Most of those people haven't even touched an X299 platform. With the latest BIOS and new nVidia drivers my X299 is ridiculously good. I'm getting smooth awesome performance at 6K resolution for hours on end without issue. Amazing platform.

I understand people want to support the underdog, AMD, and I'm happy they are making great stuff again. But X299 it fantastic. My 5GHz X299 platform (RAM+CPU) is faster than Ryzen and cheaper than Threadripper.

Oh I know, I was asking the op. See my rig in my signature
 
Its not. There were a couple quirks when it came out and a couple bad board designs and now everyone is saying it is garbage. Most of those people haven't even touched an X299 platform. With the latest BIOS and new nVidia drivers my X299 is ridiculously good. I'm getting smooth awesome performance at 6K resolution for hours on end without issue. Amazing platform.

I understand people want to support the underdog, AMD, and I'm happy they are making great stuff again. But X299 it fantastic. My 5GHz X299 platform (Mobo+CPU) is faster than Ryzen and cheaper than Threadripper.

Man, I'd really like a 7800x. Looks like you can overclock them pretty good too, based on your sig.

I know they aren't a super popular product, but I don't think they get a fair shake.
Do they have much of an advantage though over the forthcoming 8700?
 
Man, I'd really like a 7800x. Looks like you can overclock them pretty good too, based on your sig.

I know they aren't a super popular product, but I don't think they get a fair shake.
Do they have much of an advantage though over the forthcoming 8700?

From a CPU standpoint - not sure. The 8700k might be faster than a 7800x if it uses a ring bus instead of the mesh.

The 7800X and x299 offers more PCIe lanes (x16/x8) which might matter for things like SLI. Also quad channel memory. I'm also interested in the future 2066 chips if they offer a 32+ PCIe lanes with high clocks/better thermals. Only reason I didn't get a 7900x was the clockspeed/temperature issues.

I felt like longterm the X299 offered more options as the HEDT sockets are typically supported for a longer period of time and have more overall capability with lanes and other features. Historically I've only upgraded motherboards about every 5 years, but usually upgrade the CPU once and video cards twice during those 5 years so I needed something to grow into.

The 7800X does indeed overclock well, but I bought a binned and pre-delidded chip from silicon lottery which was rated at 4.9 at a low voltage. Took a lot more juice to get it to 5.0 but works great still.

I do 50% gaming and 50% professional workstation stuff so I really wanted the best of both worlds.... high clockspeed and system bandwith but almost 6 or more cores and I felt like the X299 was a good fit. YMMV though. Good luck!
 
I am looking to build a 50/50 rig (gaming/professional work), but on the ITX platform, so PCI lane count is not really so much of an issue...

But I keep waffling about with 6c/12t varients of Ryzen, Coffee Lake, & Skylake-X...

Stability & single-core performance makes me lean towards Intel, cost makes me lean towards Coffee Lake...
 
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