44 replies to this topic

[xWiredx]

Official numbers based on Intel's -retail- Skylake CPUs are now blowing up across the interwebosphere this morning and the conclusions are in: Skylake is up to 10% faster clock-per-clock than Haswell and up to 25% faster clock-per-clock than Sandy Bridge.

What does this mean for MWO players? Anybody looking to build a new system should first look at brand new Skylake-based chips for building within their budget. MWO loves CPU cycles and Skylake has shown that it is now the best choice at a given clock speed and core count.

If you're about to pull the trigger on a Haswell-based system to enhance your MWO (and other gaming) experience, I would recommend jumping on the little stockpile of Skylake chips that exists now or waiting for supply to stabilize. It shouldn't take too long.

I also recommend going with an AIO over air cooling. Skylake will do fine with air cooling and has some OC headroom (4.2-4.5GhZ) on air, but temps can get a bit unwieldy the higher you go. Small increases in voltage in Skylake tend to produce much higher temps.

[Tank]

10% in games? Upgrade? OC?



Gaming is the last thing I make my upgrades for, if it's not next Presler - Core2 jump.

[xWiredx]

I'm not saying upgrade if you're on a Haswell system, am I? Don't see that anywhere. I'm saying if you were about to build a Haswell system you should wait. If you're on a Sandy Bridge, Nehalem, or AMD system, though... upgrading is definitely something to consider if you want to crank the graphics settings.

[Lily from animove]

yes buy the new chips on the first days, experience all he roubles as live beta buyer for an average expected 10% more CU performance.

[BARBAR0SSA]

it shows maybe %1 gain in games, if you are using 1080P resolution, witcher 3, shadow of mordor showed not much changed at all. Heck Witcher 3 the FX-8370 was 112 Avg FPS vs 119 for Skylake with all of them posting 99% of frametimes under 12ms.

$350 for a CPU....no thanks there's much better options to get, save money and not really suffer framerate wise unless you're gaming at 640x480

Edited by shad0w4life, 05 August 2015 - 07:42 AM.

[Sarlic]

I always buy the generation before with discounts. Pretty silly to pay full price for hardware when there's enough to buy when its EOL status.

[Desintegrator]

If you like some loud and annoying pump noise even when you CPU is in IDLE, I would also recommend a AIO cooling system !

[xWiredx]

The serious lack of having reviewed gathered and established information here is pretty appalling.

1) MWO is CPU-bound. Games like Witcher 3 are not. Comparing the two is folly. For MWO, the more IPC the better, and Skylake should allow more frame rate stability with things like particles and environment cranked at the same speeds as Haswell.
2) The logic that you can save a boatload of money by going to an older processor because CPUs don't matter for gaming is obviously flawed considering the item above. AMD users suffer greatly without exorbitant overclocks where Intel users do not. Haswell users suffer less than IB and SB users. Follow the trail...
3) AIOs are not particularly loud and I have no idea where you're getting that from. Some are, most of the time it's because there's something wrong with them to begin with. If you're one of those absolutely silent PC fanatics who has noise padding in their case even though they don't have more than one tiny fan on the inside of a small low-power HTPC system, I guess AIOs are not for you. For anybody else they're fine.
4) Again, not advocating upgrading from Haswell for a simple unnoticeable boost. From older systems and AMD systems, it's pretty obvious that building a new system should mean going with Skylake. Intel CPUs do not get giant price cuts when they are no longer the latest and greatest. They don't get huge cuts until they actually are EOL, which is typically about 2 years down the road from their release dates. I suppose if you wanted an Ivy Bridge CPU about now would be the right time to get it... but nobody is advocating for Ivy Bridge over Haswell, and the same logic moving forward for Skylake.

[Hawk819]

xWiredx, on 05 August 2015 - 06:33 AM, said:

Official numbers based on Intel's -retail- Skylake CPUs are now blowing up across the interwebosphere this morning and the conclusions are in: Skylake is up to 10% faster clock-per-clock than Haswell and up to 25% faster clock-per-clock than Sandy Bridge.

What does this mean for MWO players? Anybody looking to build a new system should first look at brand new Skylake-based chips for building within their budget. MWO loves CPU cycles and Skylake has shown that it is now the best choice at a given clock speed and core count.

If you're about to pull the trigger on a Haswell-based system to enhance your MWO (and other gaming) experience, I would recommend jumping on the little stockpile of Skylake chips that exists now or waiting for supply to stabilize. It shouldn't take too long.

I also recommend going with an AIO over air cooling. Skylake will do fine with air cooling and has some OC headroom (4.2-4.5GhZ) on air, but temps can get a bit unwieldy the higher you go. Small increases in voltage in Skylake tend to produce much higher temps.

I don't dispute what you say, dude. However like everyone else here: i'm going bottom line. . . Cabbage/Moola/Dough, etc.

I get what you're saying and that's good, but for the money, i'll stick to what I picked in the Haswell-E LGA 2011-3 5820 k CPU. I doubt your word on the Skylake, but for me, it's already too late to change things this late in the game. I've already chosen my board, memory, and cards, and I should be ready to overhaul this machine. Cause it is long overdue for one. Thanks for the info. Gives me some food for thought.

[xWiredx]

Hawk819, on 05 August 2015 - 08:00 AM, said:

I don't dispute what you say, dude. However like everyone else here: i'm going bottom line. . . Cabbage/Moola/Dough, etc.

I get what you're saying and that's good, but for the money, i'll stick to what I picked in the Haswell-E LGA 2011-3 5820 k CPU. I doubt your word on the Skylake, but for me, it's already too late to change things this late in the game. I've already chosen my board, memory, and cards, and I should be ready to overhaul this machine. Cause it is long overdue for one. Thanks for the info. Gives me some food for thought.

Yeah, for us Haswell-E adopters there's no reason to move to Skylake. We'll have a drop-in upgrade for our current systems with Broadwell-E. DDR4 speeds should be going up in the near future and its prices should be going down, which is also good news since our platforms need faster than 2666 in order to start gaining ground compared to high-end DDR3 RAM.

[Tank]

Found some Polish tests of Skylake in Crysis 3:







Source: http://pclab.pl/art65154-16.html

Even with Sandy I would think twice before upgrading.

[xWiredx]

Tank, on 05 August 2015 - 09:31 AM, said:

Found some Polish tests of Skylake in Crysis 3:







Source: http://pclab.pl/art65154-16.html

Even with Sandy I would think twice before upgrading.

Just judging from these graphs, it would depend on which game you were going to play.

That's a massive difference in Far Cry 4. Not so much in Crysis 3. The performance issues we've had with MWO are CPU-based, though, and of the 2 here Far Cry 4 has proven to be the more CPU-limited (not that either of them particularly are). Crysis 3 was patched to eat more cores, which helped greatly compared to how it was initially demoed (early versions up to the launch version, maybe even the launch version itself, were limited to 4 cores and it demanded more CPU power, much like MWO). With that advantage, Crysis 3 runs better on 6-core and 8-core Intel chips with lower clocks than it does on quad-core chips with slightly higher clocks. MWO doesn't have that advantage.

To my knowledge, Far Cry 4 is still limited to utilizing 4 cores and adding 2 more cores does almost nothing for it (like... 2fps difference best case scenario, again like MWO). Want to know what kind of effect upgrading to Skylake can have? Start looking at CPU-bound games and benchmarks. Of the above 3 benchmarks, Far Cry 4 is probably the better one to go by but I wouldn't hold it to be very accurate when comparing to MWO.

[Mystere]

Meh!

A liquid nitrogen based cooling system coupled with a highly overclocked last generation processor will serve you much better than the latest CPU with a questionable cooling system.

Edited by Mystere, 05 August 2015 - 10:43 AM.

[Golrar]

With Skylake using the LGA1151 and Haswell-E using LGA2011, which socket are we thinking will have the greater longevity? Do you think there would be one to chose over the other? I ask because I am not too good on the Intel side of the game, and were I to upgrade I'd want the one that will live longer. Is it obvious that the LGA2011 with DDR4 is the way to go for the long run?

Just don't want to make another mistake (see signature).

[xWiredx]

Golrar, on 05 August 2015 - 01:40 PM, said:

With Skylake using the LGA1151 and Haswell-E using LGA2011, which socket are we thinking will have the greater longevity? Do you think there would be one to chose over the other? I ask because I am not too good on the Intel side of the game, and were I to upgrade I'd want the one that will live longer. Is it obvious that the LGA2011 with DDR4 is the way to go for the long run?

Just don't want to make another mistake (see signature).

Both actually use DDR4, so that isn't a factor.

Haswell-E's 2011-3 is suppposed to also support Broadwell-E but isn't slated to get anything beyond that. Skylake's 1151 is too new for anybody to say whether future CPU architectures will end up being compatible with the same boards/sockets.

What I can say to you is this: you're on a system that was outdated the minute it was released. People on newer Intel systems tend to get 2-4 years out of their systems before they start to notice the performance gap. 2011-3 is already a year old, so you'd probably get an extra year or year and a half of pleasure out of a Skylake system than a Haswell-E system.

[darqsyde]

Based on reviews, if I were buying today, and playing games was my primary concern, I'd go with Skylake.

The CPU is a better performer than Haswell/Devil's Canyon yes, but not by much. However, the Z170 series chipset is a major improvement over Z97 and, arguably, X99.

If you are only going to be running one(the vast majority of people), or maybe two GPUs, then Skylake/Z170 is the way to go. Many of the Z170 motherboards have USB 3.1(10Gbps) support, and several have TB3 instead/as well. In addition to a bunch of SATA/SATAExpress and one or more M.2 slots. X99/2011-3 is only better in terms of the number of CPU cores and PCIe lanes, not to mention that a 5820 and the cheapest X99 board is likely 100$ more than a 6700 and midrange Z170.

[Flapdrol]

xWiredx, on 05 August 2015 - 03:06 PM, said:

Both actually use DDR4, so that isn't a factor.

Haswell-E's 2011-3 is suppposed to also support Broadwell-E but isn't slated to get anything beyond that. Skylake's 1151 is too new for anybody to say whether future CPU architectures will end up being compatible with the same boards/sockets.

What I can say to you is this: you're on a system that was outdated the minute it was released. People on newer Intel systems tend to get 2-4 years out of their systems before they start to notice the performance gap. 2011-3 is already a year old, so you'd probably get an extra year or year and a half of pleasure out of a Skylake system than a Haswell-E system.

There's a few ddr3 boards for skylake too, not many, I guess that's because ddr4 prices have fallen spectacularly.

If I were building new I guess I'd probably go for the skylake i5

[chaas]

Having the newest and greatest chip is fine but where games are concerend, the bottleneck is still going to be at your GPU.

[xWiredx]

chaas, on 06 August 2015 - 07:17 AM, said:

Having the newest and greatest chip is fine but where games are concerend, the bottleneck is still going to be at your GPU.

You've apparently never read anything here in the hardware subforum before. Welcome!

Now read before spouting nonsense. MWO eats CPU cycles like you wouldn't believe and it is well-established that MWO relies on having extremely high IPC to keep stable frame rates (and max out certain settings like particles, environment).

[Túatha Dé Danann]

I have an Intel Core I7 4970K with 6C/12T @4.4 GHz. I'm not CPU bound - in fact, my CPU starts to idle around when I throw MWO at it. I might have to upgrade the GPU to a (or 4) Titan X or similar before I come even close to saturation-levels.

I had a (roughly) 25% frame rate increase by upgrading from a 4C to a 6C CPU. The benchmarks above show just something like 5% on raw IPC pwer. Don't know where those 25% clock-per-clock comes from.

You would have to downgrade the frequency to the same levels and start the benchmark again.

The 6700K might be a nice CPU for its price-tag, but to be honest, 4C/8T is a little outdated if you really want to push the limits to be prepared for the next 5 years or so.

Games these days try to heavily use the advantages of multi-threading - so a 6 or 8-core CPU is worth more than the raw clock-per-clock raw power. We even see the use of GPU-based calculation approaches, and a GPU shader is weaker than any dedicated CPU-core. So the importance of IPC raw power gets spread out by the core-count.

Another thing: MWO is pretty much NOT optimized. If I take the power MWO uses up from my system and compare it with another game... well, I was able to have 60 fps in my hangar with a ship that has... 3 million polys? (+ the hangar itself and all additional objects, may end with something like 5 million polys)

edit:
The primary bottleneck for CPUs right now are the draw calls. Once DX 12 hits the mainstream, many older CPUs are valid again.

Edited by Túatha Dé Danann, 06 August 2015 - 07:47 AM.