I'm currently running a AMD Phenom II 1100T Black Edition (clocked at 3.7ghz and due to my motherboard I can't OC it further) with 8GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 and I recently upgraded from a GTX570 to a GTX970.
I'm finding that the upgrade didn't net me a great increase in performance, which points to my CPU becoming a bit of a drag on the system. I love gaming and as such I do it a lot, but I am also a software developer so I need to spin up virtual machines and run Visual Studio et al on a regular basis.
It feels as though the obvious next step is to upgrade to a new architecture, which leads me to the following predicament:
Do I go the full hog and upgrade to Haswell-E (i7 5820K) or go with Haswell (i7 4790K)? I know that going Haswell-E is going to be more expensive, however if Haswell is reaching the end of the line, I will have a much better upgrade path with the former. I also know that the 4790K will outperform the 5820K for gaming, whereas it should be the opposite as a workstation with the 5820K winning out.
I am a student right now (with one more year until I get my CS degree) so budget is important, but I'm willing to splurge if it will save me in the long run.
"I love gaming and as such I do it a lot, but I am also a software developer so I need to spin up virtual machines and run Visual Studio et al on a regular basis."
I don't understand, if you already have a gaming pc, which I am assuming windows is running on, why do you need a VM to run visual studio?
Side note, I too am a coder and I run everything just fine on an overclocked 2500k. Over all a xeon that runs on socket 1150 would probably be the best price : performance cpu for you. I'm considering making the switch to ether that or a haswell E(I am also a hardware enthusiast and therefore love to derp around with high end hardware to see what I can do with it) next year.
That's true. I don't have any issues with development on this machine currently. It's mainly gaming that it struggles with.
It's also going to be less than half the price to upgrade to Haswell. Depending on how Skylake pans out, saving money now could slate me for another upgrade mid 2015.
Unless I've missed something the Xeon E5 1620v2 seems like the most comparable chip to what I was considering. Is that along the lines of what you were thinking? It's roughly the same price as a 4790K in Australia at the moment. If I go more cores I'm losing out on individual clock speeds which will tank gaming performance.
Also this might be impossible (I couldn't find anything on Google)... Would 2x G3258 work in a dual CPU MB? If games can't use both CPUs you still get 2 cores @ 4.7GHz. For workstation you have 4 cores at that speed. Has anyone tried this?
I'm guessing it's not possible for some blaringly obvious reason.
There are no consumer grade multi socket motherboards and cpu's. Multi socket motherboards and cpu's are meant for servers and workstations, and they are very expensive.
If you're not interested in overclocking, an E3 1230v3 Xeon or 1231v3 would be your best bet, as suggested above. They perform very well in gaming and productivity, while staying pretty cool with the stock heatsink.
Well you're forgetting that Haswell E overclocks quite well so you can get better performance than the 4790k hands down. Also they are better binned parts than the 4790k though it's not entirely guaranteed. I personally like the Xeon chips mainly because of the durability, xeon is guaranteed for 24/7 workloads, but as long as you keep your chip cool almost any can run 24/7. Xeon also has special strings for VM so i see you brought up VM usage.
In generally even your 1100t will do the job just fine.
What really matters is, are you going to:
game heavily
video production
game development
heavy loaded programming like designing game engines, large scale programs, etc.
If you're just doing basic programming then your 1100t will do the task just fine. In gaming for example, the 1100t won't really bottleneck the performance of the graphics card, so going 4790k you may gain 5fps most likely, The real reason you'll want to go to a new gen board from your AM2+ board is only for SATA III protocols like SSD Trim, S.M.A.R.T., etc.), M.2 capability, PCI-E Gen 3.0 (still hasn't been fully utilized so Gen 2 is still sufficient), USB 3.0, 4TB+ HDD capabilities. For most people, these features aren't that much of an upgrade as they sound.
Next gen video cards past the Nvidia GeForce 9xx and Radeon 3xx series may then require PCI-E Gen 3 mainly because of the load in VRAM now that we're seeing. 8gb of VRAM will be the next standard in the elite consumer grade cards most likely, also with HBM coming out finally we may really see a need for Gen 3. AMD Radeon Fiji is rummored to go HBM on their VRAM. So Gen 2 may finally go to the grave, but that's only for the enthusiasts.
I want to agree with you since what you say makes sense, but I just can't understand why I get average to low FPS in games with my current setup. At 1080p I average 25-40FPS with Mechwarrior Online and Rift gets down to 10FPS in heavy areas and fights on low settings.
With a GTX970 what else could the bottleneck be if not the CPU? If it was the PSU I assume I would be experiencing stability issues. I don't think overheating isn't an issue as the CPU is around 59 degrees C under load with a Noctua cooler.
No. The Xeon 1230V3 or 1231V3. It is a quad core 8 thread socket 1150 Xeon. Will work on any board with a 1150 Socket. They have very similar clock speeds to the 4770 and are about the price of an i5. I have a 1230 and it is great.
well, it might actually be the CPU losing its performance then, i was assuming that the CPU is in tip top shape. IF you've been running the CPU since launch for example, it's like a car with 100k miles, you'll lose horsepower compared to it being right out of the lot. I would do a benchmark if i were you on the CPU and compare it to a launch day benchmark to see if maybe the CPU is starting to lose its steam.
Another factor could be motherboard not being able to drive the performance, or the ram not performing. I would definitely test everything, run memtest on the ram, check to see if the motherboard is delivering the proper power and check to see if PCI-E 2.0 is running at x16. There can be a ton of factors that affect the performance, in most cases a motherboard can be the culprit over the likelihood of CPU degradation.
i voting for the 5820k, just for the simple reason, that 6 cores 12 threads will be a bennefit for virtualization over the 4790K, because you have 2 extra real core´s to add to your VM. also quadchannel ram in my opinnion would be very handy, because you have the abillity to add more memory.
5820k is also good overclockable 4.2GHz on stock voltage no problem. in gaming it perform arround the same as the 4790K. wenn you overclock the 5820k. in terms of gaming performs there is not much of a diffrence.
Also a better platform overall. From the sounds of it, he will be able to make use of the extra power. With x99, there are plenty of options for the future. I also bet that the ddr4 would help out with the VM a bit. If you can't afford x99 though, I would look at the 1150 xeons, honestly. It would be fine for gaming, and should be great for VM as well.
I would say in terms of time spent: gaming >= development > virtualization
Having to spend $1200 AUD for X99 is rough compared to $550 for Z97 (Xeon or Devil's Canyon) so it really comes down to whether or not I can afford it.
I'm afraid that if I go all out with E now that Skylake may blow everything out of the water mid 2015.