Sandybridge till i die! This 2500k is immortal

Hot. Though Skylake Cpus are a questionable upgrade for those with Haswell even...

But future proof for sure.

This is gonna sell out quick. Very hot price!

I upgraded from Sandybridge to Skylake and I would never go back! Massive upgrade.

For a quad core it is, the 5820K is a timely upgrade over it however.

Just a small note, the reviews I'm reading show the performance to be a bit lower than other boards. Seems to be a budget board, so it might not be the best bargain in the long run. EDIT: Forgot to mention, it doesn't appear to do SLI, etc.


At £285, and as good as it is, I think I'll skip that chip.

Their delivery price is a joke.

The 5820k is a very poor upgrade path.

It costs the same price for the CPU as the i7 6700 and performs behind the Skylake in pretty much all games.

The 6700k bests it in some synthetic multicore benches too, as long as you pair it with decent RAM.

Not to mention the motherboards for the x99 are far more expensive, and you don't get the iGPU, which actually has some great uses for transcoding/encoding.

And this is kinda fun... http://www.techspot.com/news/63418-weekend-tech-reading-core-i7-6700k-oced-7ghz.html

Anyway, my point is, if you have to buy a new CPU+Mobo+Ram, go for the 6700k.

If you want an upgrade for the i5 2500k, stick with the 1150 socket and get the 4790k that is floating around... Or just wait longer.

Thoughts on this board? Looking to upgrade to a 6600k from a amd 8320. Thinking this would be a cheap board to get considering I could sell the ram.

No it does not. The extra 2 cores and hypertheading are far more useful going into the future, especially if you plan on keeping the system for the next few years and do more than just gaming on it. Overclocked, single core performance locks horns with the 6700K.

Agree, Overclockers seem rather greedy with their postal rates. Sours the deal for me, what with the lack of some important features associated with a "gaming" board as well.

I may have read it wrong but only has one 16x pcie? Not great for multiple gpu? OK if you have one 980 though

I'm not an expert but wouldn't most people building a PC with a ~£100 motherboard be looking for at least 16GB of RAM?

Do you think its a decent board for a upgrade to a 6600k over a 8320?

The board is on the basic side but that's a good CPU upgrade.

Decent enough though for a single gpu setup and a oc on the 6600k?

What GPU will you pair with it?

g1 gaming 970 overclocked +140 core +500mem. Should be around 980 stock performance. Prob upgrade to the new gen cards when they are out.

I don't think you'll be disappointed :smiley:

Hows overclockers on customer support? Hard to beat amazon lol

Last year I had to RMA a gpu with them and it was pretty straight forward. It was within the last month of the warranty with them, so that was cool. They even bumped me up to a better card when the other one couldn't be swapped!

Alright, cool thanks.

5820k is a wise choice over skylake if you can afford it, you will see better gains with dx12!

Years later, still can not get 5GHz or more. Still using an I7 920.

I think they have the great customer service, good forums, def worth paying the extra to get it from them

While it's no use for this deal, unless you are already a member, OcUK offer free shipping to forum members.

Year-old accounts with 100 forum posts or 90-day with 250 forum posts get free standard mainland shipping.

There's a really good community, the tech support is on a par with the relevant subreddits, and there's a strong UK feel and solid moderation.

You can't spam your way to free shipping, because the mod team will stop your spamming rapidly and ban you. But you won't struggle to get 100 posts in a year if you check in once a week. My OcUK forums account is well over a decade old at this point. I'm not as active on there as I used to be, but still check in now and again. And still get free shipping.

If you're in the PC Gaming Master Race, especially if you are into overclocking, OcUK occasionally have some storming bargains.

Would this be a good package for a VR gaming rig 4K?

Any evidence? have a search on Google there's loads of articles!

One of many articles http://www.pcworld.com/article/2971612/software-games/windows-10s-radical-directx-12-graphics-tech-tested-more-cpu-cores-more-performance.html

Always had problems with Gigabyte boards, never had the same problems with competitors *shrugs*

Weird compatibility issues, even bricked two drives on me.

I bought it this morning, anyone interested in 8gb of ddr4 ram?? :smile:

"Very poor" is quite strong for saying the 5820K is a bad upgrade path. Some people want extra cores (for video encoding etc) so its not just gaming. Also, who knows really if extra cores well help or not with future games? Maybe it will come in to play more. Both the 6700K and the 5820K are good upgrade paths if looking for more cores/threads (imo). If gaming only, I would say 6700K. If planning to do more non-gaming stuff, then 5820K is worth a look.

I'm planning on putting a system together for a friend who does a lot of video encoding/creation. Which CPU setup would you suggest? (he doesn't play games)

I'm far from an expert but the 5820K would be a good choice since it has 6 cores / 12 threads and is relatively cheap (~£300) compared to the 5960X which has 8 cores / 16 threads (~£800).

great deal whilst still available

I'm thinking of getting this to play Fallout 4. What processor would I need to buy to go with it? (I have total budget of £200-£300) Currently I have a P35 AP-S motherboard with a Q6600 overclocked to 3.2ghz and a Geforce 570 graphics card (which I will upgrade separately later).

Hot from me, thanks for posting

It's like night and day.

Also free on the whole basket if you buy one of their mouse mats (or gaming surfaces if you insist). They do one that's the size of a desk!

Edit! Since shipping is ~£10 anyway, you may as well add one of these.

Glad to hear they're still offering top quality customer service

Better than the 6700K then?

For video encoding, yes.

Not my experience, I'd never shop with them again

Damn.. I didn't realize you could do this...

Cancel and re order? Chance your arm? Worth a punt for another item at no extra cost.

Already dispatched, gotta give them that, they don't mess around..

:disappointed:

You interested in 8gb of ddr4?? jk.

Meh don't like intel stuff too expensive and just not very compatible when gaming........Team Elite Ram is good though @2400Mhz, does make a cheap mobo if only you could buy a cheap i7 ..........yeah good luck with that!

Surprised it's that cheap with the word gaming on it, usually warrants £50 extra just for adding that word......

If you use the iGPU (QuickSync) for encoding, the 6700K is much quicker at encoding. And if you look at this review, the 6700K is also quicker at CPU encoding.

https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/core_i7_6700k_processor_review_desktop_skylake,11.html

DX12 does make use of extra threads, but IPC is still more important. VR titles are going to be GPU intensive.

​My bad. Glad its been corrected! :smiley:

You can now download the steamVR performance test if you want to have some idea of your GPU performance for VR.

Do not, I repeat, DO NOT use quicksync for video encoding. You'll find that it degrades the quality of the render. Normal cpu rendering is the best, while a gpu is somewhat close behind.

I'd agree if you were talking about earlier QuickSync revisions. Haswell+ is actually pretty good. 6700K even better.

Could you link a test article which shows this? The last article I looked at around a year or two ago showed what it looks like.

I don't have any reviews showing the benefits, I've just seen them in person with a 6660K compared to a 3770. One of the main focuses in Haswell was image quality so I assume Skylake has improved on that.
The speed of it though is incredible compared to CPU.

That's the problem, though. You recommended it for video encoding as, it's faster while using quicksync, and better quality with the newest generation. I've just done a little research and found that it still has issues, i.e. It produces larger file sizes and is of a lower quality encode. Even worse, the quality was worse between the old and new generation chips. So, in other words, the 5820k is not a good recommendation. Stick to an i7 as they are plenty useful for video encoding.

The thing is, the discussion came from someone saying the 5820K is quicker at encoding when the review I posted shows otherwise. Mentioning QuickSync encoding was just icing on the cake. If you want the best quality then QuickSync might not be for you, but it can cut an hour encode to say 5 minutes, and that could be more important to some.

The 5820K and 6700K are both core i7's.

I think I mentioned the wrong cpu, didn't I? Woops. I meant the 6600k you mentioned, "I've just seen them in person with a 6660K compared to a 3770".

As for that quicksync encode example, i.e. an hour vs 5 minutes - where can I get that cpu?! Seriously, that's a pipedream. Quicksync is not that good. I know because I did some tests a year ago and it was pretty similar to other solutions. And at that point, with larger file sizes, lower quality, etc. You have to question why it would be worth using when video encoding. For transcoding, I could understand, but not video encoding.

Just tested. 3rd gen QSV 5 min, high profile H.264 51 min.

What were you encoding?

Tested again. 8GB H.264 video of a game I made. 2 hours long.
34 minutes QSV. 2 hours and 40 minutes CPU H.264

Original file:

Well, the speed's definitely improved. How about the quality? If you don't mind, could you post a comparison pic? It would be very interesting to see how far they've come since the previous revision was a dud.

Give me a bit I'll upload a sample video, a short one.

​IPC of Skylake is barely beating Haswell(-E) in reality, cores are more important for DX 12 which is the whole point of DX 12.

Sorry, I meant a pic of the same frame from each type, i.e. cpu only and cpu quicksync.

The whole point of DX12 is to reduce CPU overhead and give developers more direct control over the hardware. Yes it makes more use of the CPU, but does that equal higher average FPS (threads over IPC... 5820K vs 6700K)

Got any evidence of that in games?

The image comparison is pretty clear, sure enough. However, do you know that the videos are different resolutions? The QSV is 720x450(!) vs the CPU one at 1920x1200. I think that might be why the QSV one is half the size!

OOS

I just noticed that, that's why I deleted the link and post... I re-did it again. For some reason HandBrake resets the resolution for QSV every time. I knew this before but forgot doing these samples. The time it takes to encode isn't increased much at the sources native resolution.

The file size for the QSV video is much larger but also encoded much quicker. Oh well :smile:

https://www.sendspace.com/file/s55vw5

Thanks for the upload. Here's what I noticed:

The QSV renders lines are not smooth, they're jagged.
The text on the QSV render is a little off in a similar way, maybe. Not quite as much on the sign to the right, though.
There's some lost detail in the flags and leaves on the QSV render. This left them slightly dull of detail overall - not sharp.
I noticed a small contrast difference near the flags, too.
And obviously, the resulting rendered file is more than twice the size of the CPU one.

That's what I took away from it, at least!

This is before Haswell image quality improvements. I don't know of any size reductions.

​http://www.anandtech.com/show/9659/fable-legends-directx-12-benchmark-analysis/3

More cores are more effective at lower resolutions. As resolution increases the workload is shifted more so to the GPU. 6 cores will benefit physics heavy games like a next gen destruction engine.

That benchmark shows an i3 outscaling both an i5 and an i7 in a few too many >= 1920x1080...

Ashes of the Singularity is CPU intensive.



Yes, that's an 8 core 16 thread CPU being out performed by a 4 core 8 thread CPU, with higher IPC.

I'm not going to hold my breath :stuck_out_tongue:

Really why? maybe they changed staff recently, I don't buy from them all the time (price) but my system builds generally I do, as my friends have done for years, for RMA's and advice they have been great on the phone and on emails. Over I'd guess ten years..& I've built quite a few PC systems from them. BTW this is https://www.overclockers.co.uk/ we are talking about.

​4.2GHz 6700K vs. 3.5GHz 5960x. Not really a balanced comparison is it now? 0.7 extra gigahertz makes a huge difference in performance even within the same generation.

Missing motherboard socket pin... Yayyyyy... :/

That's kind of the point. IPC is more important, for now.

Yeah thats them, it was a few years back, I got a gfx card, the bearings on the fan were wonky and it made a hell of a racket and you could actually see the dust where the bearings had ground themselves away, I had to pay signed for delivery to retur it and they sent me back the exact same board and told me it was a ne one. They hadn't even bothered to blow the dust off. Anyway long story short I ended up forking out over £40 in postage with the toing and froing which they never refunded in spite of numerous promises and also ended up buying a second gfx card because it took them so long to sort.

How bizarre that doesn't sound like them at all, I've had them go beyond normal customer service many times, did you ring and talk to them? they are normally very helpful. They have one of the most popular forums for overclocking and PC builders.

I rang them countless times, wrote to them, eventually I gave up because it was making me so angry it wasn't worth the hassle. I'm not unrealistic all companies screw up occasionally and wind someone up to the point where they are homicidal. I'm sure there are many people who recommend them. I'm still shopping elsewhere however. :smiley:

I just returned this motherboard to them as a socket pin was missing and they were great on the phone, full refund in a couple of days.