Upgrade after helping son with first gaming pc

bud1974

Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 12, 2015
Messages
91
Hello Guys and Gals. I am going to be putting a system together for my 12 year old and I think I am going to use the motherboard, cpu, and ram from the build in my signature. Thats leaves me now with a decision on what path to upgrade. I was thinking z170 route with the 6700k. Will that be performance wise, not a noticeable increase compared to my current build with the i7-4790k? Thanks Ryan
 
If you're really only using the motherboard, CPU and memory from your sig, I'd say don't bother tearing your sig computer apart and just build your son a Z170/6700k system because I doubt you'd notice significant difference in performance.

If you could fit a Samsung SM950 Pro M.2 SSD into the budget then that'd make it worthwhile to tear your computer down, use one of the SSDs, motherboard, CPU and memory for a new gaming PC for son and build yourself a new Z170/6700k with the SM950 Pro. You'll notice a difference in boot speed for sure and probably just in general use due to the SM950 Pro being ~2x-4x the speed of the 850 EVO.

Here's a comparison of an 850 Pro to an SM950 Pro: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015...st-pcie-m-2-nvme-ssd-is-an-absolute-monster/s

I upgraded from a very old CPU/Motherboard ("Retired" in sig) with an 840 EVO to Z170/SM951 ("#1" in sig) and noticed a HUGE difference but a lot of my increase was in CPU/memory speed. If I had mine to do over, I'd just do 1x 512GB SM951 instead of 2x 256GB in RAID0 - the RAID0 adds complexity and the SM951 is so fast you don't get a big boost performance-wise RAID0'ing them because you're limited by the chipset bandwidth.
 
Thanks for the response. How do you like the gigabyte g1 gaming 7 mb as that is the same model that I am using right now for the z97 platform. The z170 gigabyte g1 gaming 7 is the exact mb that interests me. Thanks Ryan
 
Thanks for the response. How do you like the gigabyte g1 gaming 7 mb as that is the same model that I am using right now for the z97 platform. The z170 gigabyte g1 gaming 7 is the exact mb that interests me. Thanks Ryan

I'm happy with the motherboard - no problems but I'm just running at stock speed. I have installed all the stuff for Thunderbolt but have no Thunderbolt devices. The USB3 is plenty fast and a nice noticable upgrade over older USB ports for reading large flash media used in a camera.
 
For a 12 year old? Just build him a new rig from scratch. Go with a Skylake i3 setup with a mid-range GPU and 16GB DDR4. No need to break the bank on a 12 year olds system and I doubt you'll notice much of an increase in performance going with a Skylake i5 or i7 build from your current system specs.
 
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