Is Intel's X299 Platform Better than the X99? @ [H]

Thanks for this Kyle.
I am still running a 2600 at 4.4 and I keep saying I want to upgrade. When and if there is something good to upgrade to, on that day I will.

I can get more with a GPU than anything intel or amd are offering.
And I will when I see a GPU that is an upgrade with a fair price.
 
sparks said:
Thanks for this Kyle.
I am still running a 2600 at 4.4 and I keep saying I want to upgrade. When and if there is something good to upgrade to, on that day I will.

I can get more with a GPU than anything intel or amd are offering.
And I will when I see a GPU that is an upgrade with a fair price.
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This is where I am at, but it doesn't seem like the 1080ti's are coming down in price much......

I did think about a matx x299 system for a backup computer I am building. I will see how this little itx AM1 5350 quad cpu works.
 
Dan_D said:
As I said, many of the changes found in X299 are back end changes. The feature set isn't really much of an improvement over X99. More importantly, X299 as a requirement to get Skylake-X only makes sense when Skylake-X will be an upgrade for you. We already know the IPC improvement over Haswell-E and Broadwell-E is minimal. The core counts offered over Broadwell-E aren't there yet, but in the future they will be substantial. The differences are potentially huge if you can leverage Skylake-X in it's more core / thread heavy variants. Clock speeds on Broadwell-E were worse than they were with Haswell-E so it's IPC "improvement" counts for nothing. Skylake-X is potentially somewhat better for gaming, but the price / performance ratio is shit if you've got Haswell-E or Broadwell-E today.

So as a workstation part, I think X299 itself isn't a big deal but Skylake-X is. As a gaming platform, it's great but it's not a worthwhile upgrade for most people if you are already on X99, Z170 or Z270.
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Just makes me worried how long the x299 will be around for; investing in that is pricey but will it be more future proof than building a z270 system?
 
darkdashing said:
Just makes me worried how long the x299 will be around for; investing in that is pricey but will it be more future proof than building a z270 system?
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Long as any Intel system...... Not too long.. :)
 
intel has had a long run of reinventing the same thing over and over and calling it new.
 
Hagrid said:
Long as any Intel system...... Not too long.. :)
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X99 launched over three years ago. We've had two processor generations on it and a relatively long life cycle. Alternatively, AMD used some sockets for many years but you practically needed a flow chart to understand what was backwards compatible and what wasn't. Those platforms had extra complexities introduced such as motherboards without VRM's capable of supporting all CPUs. Microcode support in BIOS was a nightmare and led to a host of other problems we've not had to deal with on the Intel side. Designing your processor to work on a 4 or 5 year old motherboard design is not a good idea. You end up being constrained to the electrical and firmware of an ancient design, thus limiting the power savings and potential to move forward on the CPU's design.
 
Dan_D said:
X99 launched over three years ago. We've had two processor generations on it and a relatively long life cycle. Alternatively, AMD used some sockets for many years but you practically needed a flow chart to understand what was backwards compatible and what wasn't. Those platforms had extra complexities introduced such as motherboards without VRM's capable of supporting all CPUs. Microcode support in BIOS was a nightmare and led to a host of other problems we've not had to deal with on the Intel side. Designing your processor to work on a 4 or 5 year old motherboard design is not a good idea. You end up being constrained to the electrical and firmware of an ancient design, thus limiting the power savings and potential to move forward on the CPU's design.
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Yeah, but it was nice to just plop a chip in and go.
 
Hagrid said:
Yeah, but it was nice to just plop a chip in and go.
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In theory, of course.. The reality was pretty far from that at times. First, you needed to make sure that the board would support the new CPU. It was fine if you were upgrading an existing system but another matter if you were building a new system. if you were buying a board for a new build, you could potentially have had issues updating the motherboard to support a CPU the older BIOS didn't originally support. You also had to check and ensure that your board had VRM's that could support higher TDP processors. Then, older motherboards might not support all the C-states or power savings features of newer CPU's. We saw that with the 890FX chipset based motherboards. Having microcode that could support two or three generations of CPUs often left motherboards working better with newer or older CPUs, but not necessarily the CPUs you wanted to use. Using an older motherboard with a newer CPU and vice versa could create problems with systems resuming after suspend, colt boot issues or other problems.

It wasn't as simple as "plopping a chip in and going."
 
Dan_D said:
X99 launched over three years ago. We've had two processor generations on it and a relatively long life cycle. Alternatively, AMD used some sockets for many years but you practically needed a flow chart to understand what was backwards compatible and what wasn't. Those platforms had extra complexities introduced such as motherboards without VRM's capable of supporting all CPUs. Microcode support in BIOS was a nightmare and led to a host of other problems we've not had to deal with on the Intel side. Designing your processor to work on a 4 or 5 year old motherboard design is not a good idea. You end up being constrained to the electrical and firmware of an ancient design, thus limiting the power savings and potential to move forward on the CPU's design.
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when i originally was looking at building an intel based system i felt like i needed a flow chart just to figure out what boards supported ivy bridge, skylake, kabylake, what chipsets were actually better than the other one even though one might be newer.. turned into such a pain in the ass i gave up bothering with it and just waited another year for ryzen. some of the blame i put on newegg and amazon for their half ass description pages making having to search for manufacture spec's for every board i was looking at even more of a pain.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
when i originally was looking at building an intel based system i felt like i needed a flow chart just to figure out what boards supported ivy bridge, skylake, kabylake, what chipsets were actually better than the other one even though one might be newer.. turned into such a pain in the ass i gave up bothering with it and just waited another year for ryzen. some of the blame i put on newegg and amazon for their half ass description pages making having to search for manufacture spec's for every board i was looking at even more of a pain.
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It's not that difficult. Pair the newest chipset with the newest CPU. This has almost universally been true. You'd have to go back to the i820 fiasco to find a scenario where newer wasn't better. Before that, you'd have to go to i440BX. Since then, newer chipsets have always been the better buy, especially once memory controllers became integrated into the CPU. The chipset provides I/O connectivity and feature sets. It has virtually nothing to do with performance. The CPU's you'll find at Microcenter and the like are usually the newest ones. LGA 1151 or LGA 2066 are printed on the boxes and in the specs of the CPU's on any online site. The same is true of the motherboards. Now, some of your issues with description pages are certainly valid to an extent. That's hardly proof that things are more complicated with Intel's CPU and socket compatibility compared to AMD. With Intel, you just pair shit up and look for the socket information. On the AMD side, you have to make sure you have a BIOS that supports the microcode of the CPU you want to use and ensure that the TDP of the CPU is supported by the motherboard. Even then, being stuck to a legacy platform creates it's own issues you simply don't have on the Intel side. With AMD, you might have to borrow an older processor from someone if you bought a CPU that your motherboard doesn't support with it's original shipping BIOS.
 
Dan_D said:
It's not that difficult. Pair the newest chipset with the newest CPU. This has almost universally been true. You'd have to go back to the i820 fiasco to find a scenario where newer wasn't better. Before that, you'd have to go to i440BX. Since then, newer chipsets have always been the better buy, especially once memory controllers became integrated into the CPU. The chipset provides I/O connectivity and feature sets. It has virtually nothing to do with performance. The CPU's you'll find at Microcenter and the like are usually the newest ones. LGA 1151 or LGA 2066 are printed on the boxes and in the specs of the CPU's on any online site. The same is true of the motherboards. Now, some of your issues with description pages are certainly valid to an extent. That's hardly proof that things are more complicated with Intel's CPU and socket compatibility compared to AMD. With Intel, you just pair shit up and look for the socket information. On the AMD side, you have to make sure you have a BIOS that supports the microcode of the CPU you want to use and ensure that the TDP of the CPU is supported by the motherboard. Even then, being stuck to a legacy platform creates it's own issues you simply don't have on the Intel side. With AMD, you might have to borrow an older processor from someone if you bought a CPU that your motherboard doesn't support with it's original shipping BIOS.
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I normally stay out of shit like this but are you going to pretend that X79 and X99 didn't have the exact same cpu/bios chicken and egg problem with Ivy-E and Broadwell-E?
Because I sure do remember microcenter and newegg shipping NIB mobos during new arch launch that were not updated for months, my local MC literally had ZERO X79 boards with an Ivy-E compatible bios the first two weeks.
I vaguely recall some similar Z87/Z97 microcode crap with some cpus too.
 
Aluminum said:
I normally stay out of shit like this but are you going to pretend that X79 and X99 didn't have the exact same cpu/bios chicken and egg problem with Ivy-E and Broadwell-E?
Because I sure do remember microcenter and newegg shipping NIB mobos during new arch launch that were not updated for months, my local MC literally had ZERO X79 boards with an Ivy-E compatible bios the first two weeks.
I vaguely recall some similar Z87/Z97 microcode crap with some cpus too.
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That's a good question. The answer is two fold: 1.) Specifically with X79 and X99, I don't recall any cases where you had to have the updated BIOS for the system to even POST. I'm not saying that never happened, but I don't remember it. 2) X79 and X99 were all in the HEDT market segment. This is a segment where costs are less of an issue for manufacturers. Specifically, parts in that segment would often include a special IC which supports BIOS flashing without even having a CPU or RAM installed. ASUS started this much earlier than anyone else but GIGABYTE, MSI and others do it too. I know ASUS allowed this way back then. It may be more recent for MSI, GIGABYTE and everyone else. Again, I'm not saying these issues never happened, but AMD's socket history has far more instances of motherboards that simply wouldn't POST without using an older CPU to update the BIOS first. You never had issues of motherboard VRM's not supporting the TDP of newer and more powerful CPU's on the Intel side. They too have had VRD/VRM issues on Intel motherboards, but those centered around lack of support for a given stepping or revision of a CPU, not CPU's with different TDP's in that segment. I haven't seen that since socket 478 days and again, far less than I have on the AMD side where it's been a definite problem time and time again.

So no, I'm not going to pretend Intel has never had the "chicken or the egg" problem as you put it. What I am saying is that AMD's excessively long socket cycles make this problem far worse than it is on Intel's side.
 
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britjh22 said:
Threadripper is somewhat appealing, and even Ryzen 7, but for now my 5820k is just fine. I also got the itch to upgrade to one of the new platforms, but decided it would just be because I felt I wanted shiny and new, certainly not needed.
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That's where I'm at right now too.
 
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I was lucky to snag a x99 based system on Craigslist for cheap. 5930k, asrock x6, 32gb ddr4 2400 ram, and a 1080 for $650. Love the setup as I game at 1440p/ 144hz gsync.I kept everything at stock speed and I have no reason to upgrade for a while as I'm not going to be CPU or GPU limited until I Upgrade to 4K and games become more thread/ hz dependant.

Could I squeeze out a few more FPS with a faster IPC and clock speed? Sure, but it's not something I'll notice and not worth the cost for me.
 
dmoney1980 said:
I was lucky to snag a x99 based system on Craigslist for cheap. 5930k, asrock x6, 32gb ddr4 2400 ram, and a 1080 for $650. Love the setup as I game at 1440p/ 144hz gsync.I kept everything at stock speed and I have no reason to upgrade for a while as I'm not going to be CPU or GPU limited until I Upgrade to 4K and games become more thread/ hz dependant.

Could I squeeze out a few more FPS with a faster IPC and clock speed? Sure, but it's not something I'll notice and not worth the cost for me.
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Thats an amazing deal! Congrats! WoW!

My friend is debating on his z75 vs a newer system. Personally I really love my x99 would be great if the newer chips still worked!
 
dpoverlord said:
Thats an amazing deal! Congrats! WoW!

My friend is debating on his z75 vs a newer system. Personally I really love my x99 would be great if the newer chips still worked!
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Pure luck on my part there! I do love the x99 platform and do think it will be suitable for a while, especially since it does support DDR4, NVME and relatively fast USB3 chipsets.
I just hope motherboard stock doesn't dry up, so I'm actually planning to look at deals on x99 boards to get a spare.
 
After owning this 8700K for a week now, and its very fast at gaming but extremely hot, I kind of think for what I paid I should just return it and go x299 but I lose more money in the overpriced motherboard than anything else. I already have a 1950x so x299 doesnt make sense unless I ditched the AMD and I actually love the computing power of my AMD vs. my measly 6 core muhahaha... But the measly 6 core Intel is shit stomping my Threadripper in low res esports frame rates. So its really hard to get rid of one or the other so in the end I am growing more and more towards just keeping them both as they both serve a dedicated purpose. And I absolutely love my cute little fancy Strix ITX board it sits on.

Now to delid the nuclear hot potato 8700k as my next project.

And measly was just a joke btw. The 8700k overclocked, hell even stock, is a friggin monster for its size and class.

Anyways how it compares with x99....I think my biggest turn off with x299 vs x99 is the way Intel did the PCIe lanes spread across the various CPU models. Also the licensing to do nvme raid ...

what in the mother of fuck intel?
 
This thread was a good read, but I think I'll stick with my crappy x79 system for a while.

On a side note, I'm looking forward to people upgrading from x99 systems so I can potentially snag a nice new board and CPU as an upgrade. I'm happy with other people's scraps in this area in life haha
 
I went from a i7 920 to a x5660 Xeon then I wanted thunderbotl and went with a x99 5820k a bit over 2 years ago and really the x58 chipset is still killer. Really I just need 3 new graphics cards and I got a Lan center in my home lol
 
Got my x99 through Craigslist 6900k processor (8 core) but ram to fuel it was killer even though I went 64 gigs. So I save bundle on cpu and mb used rest for new DDR 4 ram. Had X79 before with 4960x and 32 gigs. Modest upgrade but at least I am up 2 cores.,
 
Nice. I'm still hanging onto X99 and my 5960X. I'm looking to replace it, but not for a couple of months.
 
keep em, still pretty good and will run most of anything. The move to ddr4 though is pretty huge though.
 
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