Skylake or wait for next AMD ?

[MrNeil]

At the moment i have a FX6300 housed into a Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3P. Now i am thinking about going for a i5 Skylake cpu to replace my current AMD build ! This could be my 2nd ever intel cpu since my Celeron 633, from that i always had AMD.

The new AMD cpu's are on the way so would it be worth the wait and use my £250 (or don't tell the wife £300) on that ?

Mostly gaming like BF4 and ARma 3 type games but i am not into squeezing every ounce of FPS out off games !

Many thanks
Neil

[DanceswithUnix]

Only you can really answer that, but a couple of thoughts might help:

We can only guess, but it is unlikely that Zen will be any faster than Skylake. So if you buy Skylake now you should get Zen like levels of performance, or at least close enough either way that you can probably measure but not feel the difference.
Zen might be cheaper than an i5, but again we won't know for ages.
Zen will be out towards the end of the year, which is a long time to wait.
I'm not one for overclocking, but in this case a mild overclock just up to FX6350 levels should be relatively safe. If you can't tell any difference, the an i5 won't be much better.
Your 7950 graphics card is still pretty good, though modern cards are better at tessellation which modern games seem to be using more. You might be better off saving your money until the summer, and seeing what new graphics card pricing looks like when Polaris comes out.

[scaryjim]

... I'm not one for overclocking, but in this case a mild overclock just up to FX6350 levels should be relatively safe. ...

I'm going to echo this, and point out that you're running under a closed-loop water cooler and your motherboard has good cooling on the VRMs, so you're never going to get a much safer overclock. You should be good to run at at least 4GHz, possibly faster - just keep an eye on your CPU temperature and general system stability.

[MrNeil]

My other option was actually to get another card but will i get a bottleneck with my FX6300 ? Maybe the new Polais or Nvidia 970 card ?
I have set my cpu to run at 4.1GHz while gaming which i see as being very safe !

Cheers for the input guys !

[Heimanyip]

You could go higher than 4.1ghz with ease, depends on the games you play, 6300 should still be able to do its job.

[Wam7]

I'd be more inclined to spend the money on a GPU. What res are you gaming at? The 970's is a great card which is why it is one of the best sellling GPU's of all time. Though if the rumours are to be believed Nvida are releasing a new GPU in June/July (but who knows when!) so bear that in mind

[MrNeil]

I am using a Samsung S24D300 monitor !
A very good capable monitor

[jamiehard1989]

Try get your cpu to run at 4.5ghz, should be able to do with less than 1.4volts also in bios set the llc to medium to get the best stable vcore, give the 7950 a overclock.

I had that board with a 6300 @4.8ghz, then went 8350 @4.8ghz.

Also bf4 loves more threads, if you went intel now, your mainly see better minimals.

Arma is better on intel as single threaded game, plus runs like crap.

I would wait a couple of months to see when new gpu's come out and we should get more info about zen.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

BF4 should be fine on your CPU but ARMA3 is one of the most single threaded limited FPS games released in modern times - even on Intel setups people complain of poor performance and something like an overclocked Pentium G3258 was duking it out with Core i7 4790K CPUs IIRC!!