QOTW: Z170 or X99 - which would you choose for a high-end rig?

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It's Intel or Intel these days, so which of the two enthusiast platforms do you favour?

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Read more.

I already upgraded from Z97 to X99, so my answer is X99.

Neither it's all about the z68!

I was hoping you lot were going to tell us

No, it's all about the X58! ;-p

Woohoo!

I'm trying to bold... (clarifying this just ruins the *joke*)

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Originally Posted by idris

No, it's all about the <bold>X58!</bold> ;-p

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Third time lucky?
No, it's all about the **X58!** ;-p

lol how did you bold it in the end?

Main rigs would be x99 (or it's replacement if it's not too far off). There's no point me upgrading to a platform that is limited to just 4 cores when I primarily use my pc for 3D work.

X99...no brainer.

I'd Go x99. Skylake doesn't offer enough of a performance boost and x99 has all those delicious pci-e lanes.

For a full-ATX sized build I'd go for X99 - as a 5820K and x99 motherboard are not that much more than Z170 and 6700K, and not only performs on a par or better now, but allows more room for upgrades down the line, in terms of both PCI-E expansion and sheer number of CPU cores - up to 8 multi-unlocked cores with I7 5960x, or 18 locked cores with Xeon 2699v3 - not to mention the potential of Broadwell-E, so there will be the potential opportunity to significantly upgrade your system with a cheap second-hand CPU a few years down the line, like many on X58 were able to upgrade to a 6-core Gulftown.

With Z170 you are limited to 4 cores, and will be lucky to see 6 with Kaby Lake or Cannonlake if they are even chipset compatible, so there is nowhere near the potential scalability.

Z170 makes more sense for smaller form-factors though where you are limited to single-GPU, dual-channel memory and single m.2/u.2 drive by form-factor constraints.

X99 for the extra lanes alone. The fact that you're not limited to 4 cores either puts it beyond question

X99. The new platform doesnt offer too much of an upgrade over Z97.

Neither. Holding out for Skylake-E, which is no hardship given the lack of significant performance gains since I built an SB-E rig in the spring of 2012.

X99, no contest unless you have a tight budget or only game then I would go skylake. But if you use it for anything other than gaming X99 all the way.

Already built an X99 rig

Intel C236.... Although X99 would make it possible for me to go mATX or even ITX. Is Haswell-E still the powerhog that Sandy/Ivy Bridge-E was?

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Originally Posted by Potbellieddwarf

I already upgraded from Z97 to X99, so my answer is X99.

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Can I ask why ? That is SUCH a small upgrade for not such a small amount of cash

Click the any comment here, it'll lead you to Hex' forum page for the comments on this article where you can edit & format...:clapping:

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Originally Posted by idris

Click the any comment here, it'll lead you to Hex' forum page for the comments on this article where you can edit & format...:clapping:

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I have no idea what this means. Click the "any comment here" ? What does that mean. And the rest is hardly...seriously dude what the shizzle

N/M I see you were referring back to a previous comment talking about editing

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Originally Posted by outwar6010

lol how did you bold it in the end?

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[ b ] [ / b ] (remove spaces obvs)

Depends on your budget really, If your budget stretches to the X99 then it's a no-brainer. If your budget doesn't quite reach the X99 and you still NEED to have a new rig then perhaps Z170 is up your street... or you could save a fair few pennies, grab one of the numerous thousands of X5650 Xeon's that're getting pulled from servers around the globe that're going for about £50 or so grab a X58 mobo for £100ish and throw as much DDR3 as you can afford in and (after oc'ing to 4GHz with ease) get 80%ish performance per clock with a 6-core machine.
With the advent of DX12 it's looking like more cores is better than faster cores so it looks like my machine'll be good for a few more years yet :)

It depends on what you'll be doing. Some (even new) games are so poorly optimised that single or double-core GHz still matter more on the CPU side than the number of cores or GPU grunt. And course the Intel graphics can aid with streaming games too by offloading from the primary GPU.

But for anything productive it would have to be X99.

Not that I care. I too am still on X58 and sticking until it dies. If Intel (or anyone else) aren't interested in investing in decent CPU performance increases then I'm not investing either.

If it was from the Z87/4670k I have now then neither. Huge outlay for such a small gain. If it was a complete new build then I would still probably go with neither. Instead I would most likley buy a second hand 4690k/4790k from another forums members market along with a decent Z97 board and some DDR3. Not counting Broadwell, Skylake has to be the most pointless release from Intel so far.

I would probably go for Z170 since the Skylake processors are more power efficient.

Neither. It's all about waiting for Zen.

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Originally Posted by this_is_gav

Not that I care. I too am still on X58 and sticking until it dies. If Intel (or anyone else) aren't interested in investing in decent CPU performance increases then I'm not investing either.

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It's not really, or at least not just, about Intel being happy with small, incremental changes; meaningful performance increases are also getting more and more difficult to produce. We may never see real-world generational performance increases in the double digits ever again on x86 and somewhere down the line you may well find yourself screaming "die, you X58 bastard! DIE, DIE, DIE!!!".

The Core i7 6700K is a retarded price at £300+ and in terms of longevity I see going with a Core i7 5820K and an X99 motherboard being a better option.

X99 is alot more appealing to me, not that I could afford either right now.

X99, I have an X5650 right now, not going to downgrade to a quad core with less PCIE lanes.

Any idea if we will get some revised X99 boards soon?

I'd be happy happy with either. It all depends on if I'm being given a rig or buying it myself.

*hint hint*

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...
Decisions, decisions. Well, you've seen the reviews and had ample opportunity to pore over the specs, so now it's time to have your say. Which would you choose for a high-end rig, Z170 or X99? As always, let us know your thoughts and reasoning ...

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Well, this one is easy for me to answer. The fallacy is in the "decisions, decisions" bit. Right now, I don't need to make that decision because I'm not looking to buy, and therefore, not looking to spent that kind of money.

And my feeling is that right now I'd probably go X99, because if I had to make the decision right now, it has to be based on products available right now, and X99 has, in most circumstances, the edge.

However, Z170 also seems to have more headway, no, that's the wrong way to put it, less weak links. Any chain is only as strong as the weakest link, and any flow system is limited to the capacity of the narrowest bottleneck. Feed water into a 6" main, then step it down to a 1/2" pipe in the house and it's the 1/2" pipe that determines max flow.

I can't help but feel that overall system performance is best served by a balance of minimised weak links, and Skylake manages that giving a potential for performance, but one not currently realised, i.e. right now, it'd be under-utilised or even wasted potential.

So it's kinda a balance between X99 performance right now, or Z170 future-proofing IF (big if) future products utilise it.

It's also, of course, a case of what you want the system for, and what other hardware it'll have, and what bottlenecks that hadware might come across.

In short, it's easy for me to decide because, right now, neither X99 nor Z170.

As/when I do come to make that call, it'll depend on what I'm going to be doing with the system, what other hardware it'll have and is available at that time, and what weak links that might butt up against.

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Originally Posted by Agrippa

It's not really, or at least not just, about Intel being happy with small, incremental changes; meaningful performance increases are also getting more and more difficult to produce. We may never see real-world generational performance increases in the double digits ever again on x86 and somewhere down the line you may well find yourself screaming "die, you X58 bastard! DIE, DIE, DIE!!!".

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Then prices should be coming down as the die sizes decrease.

I'm not expecting a stunning increase in performance, but if my chip from 2008 is still within probably 20% (certainly no noticeable difference) of the current generation equivalent chip which cost roughly the same (I'm thinking more) then something isn't right.

Look at this graph and tell me the last few generations haven't been hitting a specific target and nothing more...
http://hexus.net/media/uploaded/2015...616645ced1.png

To me i would go for z170, but that is only because i mainly game, and becuase of the reduced power consumption.

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Originally Posted by Saracen

Well, this one is easy for me to answer. The fallacy is in the "decisions, decisions" bit. Right now, I don't need to make that decision because I'm not looking to buy, and therefore, not looking to spent that kind of money.

And my feeling is that right now I'd probably go X99, because if I had to make the decision right now, it has to be based on products available right now, and X99 has, in most circumstances, the edge.

However, Z170 also seems to have more headway, no, that's the wrong way to put it, less weak links. Any chain is only as strong as the weakest link, and any flow system is limited to the capacity of the narrowest bottleneck. Feed water into a 6" main, then step it down to a 1/2" pipe in the house and it's the 1/2" pipe that determines max flow.

I can't help but feel that overall system performance is best served by a balance of minimised weak links, and Skylake manages that giving a potential for performance, but one not currently realised, i.e. right now, it'd be under-utilised or even wasted potential.

So it's kinda a balance between X99 performance right now, or Z170 future-proofing IF (big if) future products utilise it.

It's also, of course, a case of what you want the system for, and what other hardware it'll have, and what bottlenecks that hadware might come across.

In short, it's easy for me to decide because, right now, neither X99 nor Z170.

As/when I do come to make that call, it'll depend on what I'm going to be doing with the system, what other hardware it'll have and is available at that time, and what weak links that might butt up against.

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Actually,the Z170 has some limitations though.

The CPU has 20 PCI-E lanes. The Z170 chipset has 20 lanes too. However,the connection between the CPU and the chipset uses DMI3.0 which is equivalent to 4 PCI-E 3.0 lanes of bandwith.

With the Core i7 5820K the CPU itself has 28 PCI-E 3.0 lanes.

To be honest i do not see any need to upgrade at all.
I had been very unlucky with a window blowing open during the last summer storm.
Which killed my amd 8 core machine. Replaced it with a asrock z97 extreme 6 mobo with a I4690. So i actually am scaling down instead of scaling up.
In fact my main machine is a 3770K and that will not be replaced untill i see a real need for new hardware besides swapping to the gpu to a Fury X as soon as i can get one.
The reason for this is simple for all the games i play there is no need for mutli core cpu's, they all are single or at best dual thread. Those who upgrade hardware for gaming for any other reason are in my view silly people. I checked all the new games and even those so not use more than 1 core in most cases. For them the gpu is more important than anything else.
Hell even on those they often hardly use the power which they have.
4K looks fun but is for me too expenssive and not really adding much difference especially since there are no games who would look better than they do now on 1440p.
I also have not seen any games released since begin 2014 which supports 4K or even gives me the itch to buy any game at all. So i am stuck with the games i own and i bet those will never get an graphical overhaul. Hell crysis 2 is still a graphical masterpiece till today.
So my answer is NON of the above.

X99, no brainer, twice the PCIe lanes and twice the cores? Easy win.

today, i'd probably go for Z170.

late last year, with the choice of Z97 or X99 i went for the latter.

Z97 was a woefully inadequate platform for a high-end ATX gaming rig.

Z170 is an enormous improvement, regardless of the small improvement from haswell-refresh to skylake.

Granular, is that the word of the day? I seem to be seeing that everywhere lately.

The former, brought to market just this week alongside sixth-generation 'Skylake' CPUs, mixes the best of Intel's quad-core processor technology with DDR4 memory, more granular overclocking options and a new-and-improved arrangement of 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes, giving the chipset ample headroom for current and future storage solutions.

Determination for me would be price and that i would prefer ITX form factor which currently leaves little in terms of choice between Z170 or X99.

Personally I was going to go for X99 but i don't think i'd use all the extra features so I'm building a skylake PC in October ready for Fallout and Starwars (it might come down to which ever is cheapest with usb 3.1/c ports / built in wifi - i honestly really like the look and functions of the ASUS Z170-Deluxe

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Originally Posted by EvZ_2

Personally I was going to go for X99 but i don't think i'd use all the extra features so I'm building a skylake PC in October ready for Fallout and Starwars (it might come down to which ever is cheapest with usb 3.1/c ports / built in wifi - i honestly really like the look and functions of the ASUS Z170-Deluxe

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If you intend not to upgrade for three to four years,I would go X99. By then there should be plenty of DX12 and Vulkan games I suspect,and the extra cores of the Core i7 5820K will be more useful IMHO.

If not get a Coe i5 6600K and spend the money saved on your graphics card or a larger SSD.

X99 cuz' its more future proof min. 6-cores but i will pick 8/16 ;-)

X99 is a waste for gaming and Skylake is too expensive as price/performance
Hopefully the refresh (next year?) Will improve things and make Skylake worth moving to.
If I used the pc for work though it would be an X99 though like most I have a laptop provided by work rather than self funded

I have just upgraded to X99, took this route for the PCIe lanes. Have 2 980 ti's being surved with 16 lanes each... yummy

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

If you intend not to upgrade for three to four years,I would go X99. By then there should be plenty of DX12 and Vulkan games I suspect,and the extra cores of the Core i7 5820K will be more useful IMHO.

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I'm thinking along similar lines, just wondering if the additional peripheral updates of the Z170 might be of more use in the long term for me. Maybe I'll see if we get any X99 boards with the USB 3.1 ASMedia chip (maybe there are already, not checked).

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Originally Posted by kalniel

Maybe I'll see if we get any X99 boards with the USB 3.1 ASMedia chip (maybe there are already, not checked).

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Asus has refreshed a lot of their X99 boards with USB3.1.

x99 as I do some video editing/photoshopping as well as gaming - all those PCIe lanes are nice. If I only gamed, then Skylake. Obviously if your budget is more limited then there's not much point upgrading depending on where you're coming from. But I'm assuming 'high-end rig' means bigger budget. But if you're the type to upgrade your PC often then you'd go for at least one of these since the sockets before and DDR3 RAM are dead.

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Originally Posted by aidanjt

Asus has refreshed a lot of their X99 boards with USB3.1.

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Nice, are any of them type-C?

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Originally Posted by SciFi

I have just upgraded to X99, took this route for the PCIe lanes. Have 2 980 ti's being surved with 16 lanes each... yummy

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Which makes no difference at all over running them at 8x PCI-E 3.0 or 16x PCI-E 2.0

In other words you have spent an extra 200-300ukp for less than 1 FPS increase.

Not exciting enough to make it worth while.

Neither: I'm frankly waiting for an add-on NVMe RAID controller, with the same wiring topology as the Highpoint RocketRAID 2720SGL (2 x SFF-8087 ports fanning to 8 data cables). With an x16 edge connector at PCIe 3.0 bandwidth, the raw upstream bandwidth should be 16GB/s, increasing to 32GB/s when PCIe 4.0's clock rate increases from 8GHz to 16GHz. Then, if Intel's original intent for PCI-Express is to be maintained, such a controller should be plug-compatible with existing PCIe 3.0 chipsets. If the industry can deliver superior upstream bandwidth for multiple video cards, at a minimum they should be doing the same for users who have a real need for unusually high storage speeds. One problem with current 2.5" NVMe SSDs is that each requires x4 PCIe lanes: at that rate, 8 U.2 cables will consume 32 PCIe lanes. So hardware designers should be considering solutions like bridge chips e.g. PLX. The goal of this analysis is to design, build and "future-proof" a system which supports, at a minimum, all current levels of RAID arrays e.g. RAID-5 and RAID-6, using 4 to 8 x 2.5" NVMe SSDs -- to realize the proven stability and reliability of these higher RAID levels -- all of which are bootable. The OS definitely needs hosting on all such RAID levels. Ultimately, I foresee motherboards with "native" support for some mix of SATA (or SAS) -and- U.2 ports, without needing to purchase any add-on cards. (Forgive me for rambling, but the above is what I'm waiting for.)

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Originally Posted by kalniel

Nice, are any of them type-C?

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Sadly not. The refreshes hit the shelves way back in February before type-C materialised.

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Originally Posted by aidanjt

Sadly not. The refreshes hit the shelves way back in February before type-C materialised.

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Thanks. I looked into it some more - while Asus put the controller onboard, ASRock are providing an add in card, one variant of which has both type-A and type-C so I might look for that (or just buy an add in card separately I guess). Oh so tempting to get an X99 now...

X99, I could use some more cores.

I've been thinking about this question for a while now, and after looking at the results I was quite pleasantly surprised by what I had found.

Firstly Z170 has some great new features that I would surely like to have but they come at a price, to use the platform to its full potential I would need to get some DDR4 RAM, an m.6 SSD drive would be awesome too, then of course with the cost of the mobo and CPU I would be looking at around £600 plus. In terms of performance gains that I would get from the £600 investment, I don't think it's as big as the performance gains I would get from swapping out my 780 Ti for an EVGA GTX 980 Ti Classified edition card which would work out about the same in terms of costs.

As a person whos gameing PC still works after ages playing modern games, i have to say the intel 775 socket with a dual core and asus motherboard that never gives up kicks ass <3 will probably go for the Z170 if my baby ever gives up on me tho.

i hope to start a x99 build

Just about to put together a Z170 build with a 6700K. X99 was just the wrong side of affordable so with finding a couple of cracking deals went with Z170/6700K/GTX970 and the money saved went into a bigger/faster SSD and more memory.

As I'm going from a E6550/P45/GTX480 with 4Gb ram I suspect I'm in for a nice speed bump ;)

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Originally Posted by kellyharding

Just about to put together a Z170 build with a 6700K. X99 was just the wrong side of affordable so with finding a couple of cracking deals went with Z170/6700K/GTX970 and the money saved went into a bigger/faster SSD and more memory.

As I'm going from a E6550/P45/GTX480 with 4Gb ram I suspect I'm in for a nice speed bump ;)

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That's a solid system. You're going to be really happy with that build. I would have gone for a 390/390x as opposed to the 970 if i was building a new Win10/DX12 system now but still, a very noticable step up from your previous system. Enjoy the upgrade