• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

X99 Gaming Build

I

iLLuSioN

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 7, 2005
Messages
228
I do a lot of gaming at 1440p as well as programming and light graphic manipulation, so most of the power here is for my O/C pleasure and gaming.

Motherboard: MSI X99S Gaming 9 AC (purchased)
Processor: 5820K
Memory: Suggestions?
Video: GTX 980 (no plans for SLI)
Cooling: EK X360 Complete Triple 120mm Liquid Cooling Kit (on the fence about this)

The rest of my parts will be cannibalized off my current system in my sig, the only other thing I was thinking of doing was getting one of those super fast .M2 ssd's to run my OS so any suggestions on that would be great as well.

What do you guys think?
 
So basically, gaming is like 75% or more of your time spent with this PC? If so, cancel the X99 order. The X99 platform doesn't really offer you anything especially considering that you're not going to do a SLI setup. Even if you were, you should be going with the more expensive 5930K since it has all those extra PCI-E lanes.

Not many games takes advantages of multiple-threads/cores and the few games that do don't show a massive increase in performance to justify the extra costs for a CPU with extra threads/cores. In fact, for the majority of games out there, the $200 Core i5 4590 or the $230 Core i5 4690K would provide virtually the same gaming performance as the $390 Core i7 5820K.

So yeah, unless you meant to say that programming and graphic manipulations made up 90% of your time spent on the PC, it's really not worth going X99. You would be fine with the cheaper Z97 platform and all of the extra costs of switching to X99 could be used towards a future faster Intel setup when DDR4 RAM pricing is relatively cheap.
 
I work from home and this is my home office setup so work and gaming are about 50/50 with 100% of my time spent on this computer, I don't feel like my aging 920 is cutting it anymore and if I am building a new system why would I opt for an outdated system just to save some money? I update my CPU/mobo about every 4 years so it makes sense to me to make it as future proof as possible when I am building it.

As far as going for the 5930k I don't see your point, if I am not going to be using SLI what good are those extra PCI-E lanes to me?

Thanks for the input.
 
iLLuSioN said:
I work from home and this is my home office setup so work and gaming are about 50/50 with 100% of my time spent on this computer, I don't feel like my aging 920 is cutting it anymore and if I am building a new system why would I opt for an outdated system just to save some money? I update my CPU/mobo about every 4 years so it makes sense to me to make it as future proof as possible when I am building it.
Click to expand...
Outdated? Both the X99 platform and the Z97 platforms uses Haswell based CPUs. They occupy different market segments but the lower-end Z97 platform is not outdated by any means.

You have to actually use the features that X99 offers over Z97 in order for the X99 platform to be justified. Otherwise, why bother? Here are the key advantages of X99 over Z97:
1) Extra PCI-E lanes for multi-GPU configs (5930K and above)
2) Ability to use more than 32GB Of RAM
3) Extra two-cores which generally only helps out with heavily multi-threaded applications like video editing, virtualization, audio editing, 3D rendering, and massively complex programs.
4) Four extra SATA 6.0Gb/s ports

In addition, the money you save now mean you can use said money on a better and faster Intel platform four years from now when DDR4 RAM will be lower. It's also generally better to upgrade platforms more often then to overspend on the piss-poor hope of "future proofing". TESTED did a great article on that:
http://www.tested.com/tech/pcs/460415-pc-building-pay-more-front-or-upgrade-regularly/

So let's compare the costs:
Your setup as is plus the cheapest 16GB of DDR4 RAM set I could still find in-stock comes out to $1029 shipped. Here's a bang for the buck Z97 option:
$340 - Intel Core i7-4790K CPU
$140 - Asus Z97-A Intel Z97 Motherboard
$158 - Crucial BLS2CP8G3D1609DS1S00 Ballistix Sport 2 x 8GB DDR3 1600 RAM
----
Total: $638 shipped

So really think about this: Are all of the X99 advantages that I mentioned above really worth spending an extra $391? Especially since that extra $391 means you can buy another set of 16GB of RAM for a total of 32GB of RAM? OR that the X99 setup was with the cheapest 16GB DDR4 set possible?

iLLuSioN said:
As far as going for the 5930k I don't see your point, if I am not going to be using SLI what good are those extra PCI-E lanes to me?
Click to expand...
My point was that the 5820K would not be the best choice if you were going to go with SLI.

Even if you wanted to go X99 despite all of the extra costs, that MSI X99 mobo would not be my first recommendation judging from the early Newegg reviews for it. If you're going to spend that much money on a X99 motherboard, I would go with the Asus X99-Deluxe. Seems to be more reliable than the MSI mobo and cheaper too.
 
Last edited:
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
Very compelling argument....I see what you mean now. I think I will return the mobo for now and consider waiting for skylake or going the 4790k route, thanks.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top