8350 on water vs. i7-4790k on air?

[Rave]

Hi all,

First time I've done a PC build in a couple of years. . I've been tasked with building a gaming rig for a friend of a friend's son. He's been on a custom PC builder's website and ended up speccing up a system with an AMD 8350, Gigabyte 990FX mobo, Corsair H100 water cooler, and a 980GTX for just under £1100 including vat. I've just been on Scan and chucked a load of stuff into the basket and found that I could get a similar system, albeit in a cheaper case, using a Z97 mobo and an i7-4790K processor for similar money. If I ditch the H100 in favour of an air cooler I could get an SSD for the operating system thrown into the mix.

I don't know if the lad is an overclocker, but I assume he knows what he's doing. Looking at the gaming benchmarks though it does seem that an i7-4790K generally shows the 8350 the way, and the Z97 is a much more modern chipset?

I'm inclined to go for air anyway as I have no idea how to go about installing the H100 radiator without major case butchery, and I'm not one of life's great case modders if I'm perfectly honest.

Any thoughts appreciated. Need to get this ordered quick as the lad's birthday is on Saturday...

[dfour]

I would go air on the 4790K as its the faster chip overall. Just dont skimp on the air cooler or see if you can get a reconditioned h80/h80i cheaper and that should satisfy him.

Ninja edit.

If this is a pure gaming rig I would ignore the i7 and just buy an i5 as the i5 will be just as good as the i7 in 90% of games and use the money saved for a better case and cooler/bigger ssd.

[RobbieRoy]

I recently built my i7 4790K rig for under £1,100 and have that on air, on an Asus Z97 mobo, overclocked to 4.4GHZ and never goes above above 60c.

[kalniel]

For gaming, I'd go with the i7 4790k on air (and don't expect much overclocking headroom). Even without the overclock it does better at single threaded gaming type tasks.

If the question was about other uses then not so easy.

[MrRockliffe]

As above, I'd go i5 every time and spend the other money on aesthetic improvements if that's his thing.

[Rave]

As above, I'd go i5 every time and spend the other money on aesthetic improvements if that's his thing.

Thanks all. I'm thinking the Hyperthreading capabilities of the i7 might make more of a difference in the future with Mantle etc.?

Seems a bit of a bad time to be buying TBH, if it was me I'd wait for Intel's mainstream DDR4 kit to be released (which I assume it will be fairly soon?) But the i7 / Z97 combo is still a lot newer tech than an 8350...

As the the Aesthetics- he was going with a Cooler Master HAF912 case which albeit more expensive than the one I've specced is hardly top end. How would one go about fitting an H100 into- or on top of- a case? Can you pull the coolant pipes off to thread them through? I thought it was a sealed system...

[MrRockliffe]

If you're going to spend that sort of money on an i7, you'd get better 'future proofing' out of a 5820k with 6 cores. Problem there is that you'd then need a MRE expensive motherboard and at the moment its not worth the upgrade. Honestly, I cant see companies taking advantage of more than 4 cores any time soon.

[kalniel]

Thanks all. I'm thinking the Hyperthreading capabilities of the i7 might make more of a difference in the future with Mantle etc.?

Unlikely but the i7 is still worth getting for the clock speed advantage if you're after ultimate gaming pace - dropping down to an i5 is better from a price/performance perspective, but it is a drop down.

Seems a bit of a bad time to be buying TBH, if it was me I'd wait for Intel's mainstream DDR4 kit to be released (which I assume it will be fairly soon?) But the i7 / Z97 combo is still a lot newer tech than an 8350...

Agreed.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would get a GTX970/R9 290/R9 290X instead of a GTX980 but there could be new AMD cards out in a few months too.

[Rave]

I wouldn't buy a GTX980 for myself but that's what the lad specified. I'm trying to get him a better spec in every way. I'd certainly not buy one for myself. IDK, he may well have a 4k monitor...