$600 budget, bare-bones build, FX or X99? (See post for plenty of details)

TEMPLATE QUESTIONS:

Budget $600 firm.
I live in the US, so USD.
Prefer Newegg.

WHAT I NEED:
Motherboard, CPU, cooler (also thermal compound recommendations), RAM, possibly a new GPU. I don't need any peripherals. I can donate my current rig's ATX case, HDD, SSD, GPU (GTX 750ti), and PSU (Thermaltake 600w).

This is my living room PC, so it does a few things all day and often simultaneously (BTW I keep the A/C blasting and don't give a damn about power use):
- Play YouTube at 1080/60fps across HDMI or DisplayPort, while playing+streaming extremely heavily modded Minecraft and also managing a Facebook page in Chrome with many extra extensions and scrubbing through hundreds of local and browser images.
- Max res 1080p, no 4k and no 120hz until those kind of awesome things become cheap :/

Other stuff I do:
- Play From The Depths, which is an extremely CPU heavy voxel based RTS. It's like Minecraft but with vehicles and missiles.
- Occasionally I log into Battlefield, and I'd also like to try DayZ and Overwatch.
- Doing CompSci homework (more Chrome windows, Putty, Visual Studio Community with Jetbrains IDE)

I wouldn't mind overclocking, if I can do it with automagic. I wouldn't want to base my $$/performance on overclocking though. I won't be making the investment to custom watercooling anytime soon. After the initial build, I would prefer upgrading my peripherals, GPU, monitors, RAM, then storage, in that order.

I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1 (no longer have the keys or disks) and would like to move it over from the current rig. Not sure how easy that is.

OTHER NOTES:

I've been digging around in PCPartPicker and CPUBenchmark.net. Some of the CPUs I've been looking at include the FX-9590, i5-6600, and E5-1620 v3.

I've already looked into X99 and Z170 and decided between those two I'd probably prefer X99 for it's RAM capacity I could max out later. Minecraft and Chrome eat a lot of RAM and I think I'd like to start with 32GB with this build.

I also thought the 9590 would be fun if it could handle the multitasking load, but I know the 990 chipset is dated as fuck and doesn't offer much RAM or M.2 support.

As I noted, I very rarely play FPS so my GPU is mostly just there to run extra screens. I wouldn't mind picking up an RX-480 if I needed a new GPU.

Of course, these are just my preliminary thoughts. I'm here for advice, so I'm open to anything!

Off the bat I'd say X99 - if for no other reason than FX (being AM3+) is a dead socket.

Going to need a bigger budget if you want to go X99

4 Likes

Missing a hyper 212, and taxes and shipping probably pushes it even further over $600

Really though he probably doesn't even need much more than an i5 6500 unless that game can use 8 threads

Recommended specs is only an i5, so probably only uses 4 threads

						Recommended:

Processor: Intel Quad Core i5 @ 2.5 GHz (or AMD equivalent)

Memory: 4 GB RAM

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 / AMD Radeon HD 7800 series

Storage: 1 GB available space

I think you should waight 3 or 4 months an till Zen and the new intell socket come out, it sounds like 6 cores would be a sweet spot for you and I think that youll fell like you mised a good optunity whin the new stuff comes out.

If I just update my motherboard I can get 32 or 64GB or RAM, and that might tide me over until Zen.

FX is very outdated, I was afraid of getting an FX CPU for this reason, but an i7 5820K (cheapest X99 CPU now) and a X99 Mobo will put you easily above $600, I spent $600 on the CPU ($320) and Motherboard ($275) alone, that alone set me at $595.

The 1620 v3 has 40 lanes of PCIe and hyperthreading but only four cores and a boost clock 3.6... a skylake 6700 boosts up to 4GHz, has more IPC also has four cores and hyperthreading. Only down side: just 16 PCIe lanes.

And they are the same price.

Both sockets are dead sockets...
The budget of $600 will get you nowhere, unless you sell your old PC and add the cash or reuse half of it - HDD, SSD, PSU, GPU etc...

X5670 or 2 can be had for dirt cheap
I still love mine
6cores 12 threads 3.3ghz boost could be worse and if you get an old x58 board itll overclock past 4ghz

xeon 2690 v3 12 core 24 thread cpu

+
http://pcpartpicker.com/list/Dz8YHN

you have a socket 2011-3 motherboard + a cheap cpu that will do all your tasks pretty well + 16 g of ram with option to upgrade further later on and a relatively quite cheap cpu cooler.

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How is X99 dead? It still seems to be live and kicking with Broadwell-E and Haswell-E

Show me one platform from Intel, that had more than 2 generations of CPUs...
Next generation Intel CPUs will be on different socket.
X99 is current platform, but just like AM3+ it will have no future updates.
I could be wrong, i don't follow Intel CPUs, i just pay attention to the history...

Point is, X99 won't be dead until Skylake-X comes out, it's pretty alive and kicking, and given you can still get an i7 5820K reasonably cheap, it's probably the most alive extreme edition platform I have seen thus far.

exactly my point. It is current, but the next generation will not be on it... Just like AM3+... It is current, but the next generation will not be on it.

I will be reusing everything you mentioned, as I went overboard on my PSU in the first place and also don't need a beastly GPU.

Not sure if this will help or not

If you live near any Microcenters their cpu + motherboard combo can save you $30.
I found my Motherboard open box for $159

Xeon e5-2670 might be a reasonable substitute for the amd if you need the extra cores.

Although do be sure to research if the programs you use will take advantage of the 16 cores

Otherwise ask @noenken for his opinion on the Xeon e5-2670 as I can recall he did a dual Xeon build and seems very knowledgeable about a dual Xeon builds.

Well then, get 5820K and you are set for quite a while. Intel is not known for huge IPC gains, so in the next couple of years 5820K will be just fine. Zen is not expected to be much more powerful either.
Now the question is, are you willing to hold on for Zen and see how the market will change, or you don't want to wait and you get 5820K and be happy with it... Either way...

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