Evening gents,

Was wondering if anyone with a bit of knowledge about PC’s could provide me with a bit of aid buying a new CPU!

I am looking at updating my CPU along with my MOBO, RAM and GPU later on!

With Black Friday / Cyber Monday upon us, wanted a bit of advice before I spend!

Debating an i5 6600k for around £220 currently. For this price point, is it the best bang for buck? If not, what would you recommend?

For the record, would be using it for gaming and the odd bit of streaming!

Regards,

P

You will likely need a new MOBO and RAM as the socket will have changed and probably the RAM standard also.

I’d look for a CPU, RAM, MOBO combo deal. What graphics card do you have currently?

Currently a 960 2GB but looking at 1070 soon!

Assumed I would need a new mobo and ram, hopefully be on sale as well!

Any thoughts on the cpu?

I like the i5’s a lot. I’m still running the original Sandygate spec and it is still plenty powerful enough. Unless you’re a really hardcore gamer or running serious graphics/video editing software there realty isn’t any need to go to the i7.

I would though opt for 16gb of RAM these days…

What is your existing CPU?

AMD 6300 currently!

You’ll definitely need a MOBO/RAM upgrade at the same time and yes you’ll notice a significant difference!

Bought one a couple of months back & am happy it was a good compromise for the money, probably a lot more powerful than I need, but looking to reasonable future proofing. Happy to have an i5 as I don’t do anything that requires an i7 & don’t personally rate i3’s, even if ‘most’ games probably still wont max them out. Tbh for better bang for your buck the slightly lower spec i5’s (non-overclockable) are supposedly better deals, especially when buying component separately, though i3’s are supposedly the best value.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-cpus,3986.html

X58 4 lyfe 🙂

Yeh look out for a ‘bare bones’ bundle as in mobo, cpu, ram.
But also check if you can do better buying the parts individually, although with postage costs it makes sense to buy the bundle from the same supplier, generally speaking so don’t forget to consider postage if buying individual parts.

Also agree a good spec i5 is where the sensible money is at, i7 only comes into play for serious crunching power, 3d animation, Virtual machines etc.
Decent i5’s perform very well against i7 in game benchmarks.

If you’re running an AMD FX6300 then the Intel i5 CPU you’re looking at will not be compatible.

You’ll need to look at AMD processors that use the AMD3+ motherboard socket.

Or, if you’re absolutely set on the Intel, you’ll need a new motherboard.

Just to add, it sounds like your pc is pretty old, so you’ll want a new graphics card too..

FFS don’t pair a 1070 with anything less than a 4GHz quad core. 6600K with a mild OC should see you fine.

If you’re not in a great hurry, AMD Zen should launch in like, March or something.

I hear that for streaming YOUR games live, that a 4-thread chips isn’t really cutting it [unless you’re playing ye-olde games]. Most recent games will be expecting 4 threads for themselves, so streaming might introduce stuttering. Maybe a secondhand hyperthreaded chip would do fine, you should be spending most of your money on the GPU anyway.