Time to upgrade from the 6700k?

Answering things as suggested in the pinned thread…

  • Budget.
    -There really isn’t one, however I see no need to spend $5,000 to do a guts upgrade.
  • Where do you live
    -USA
  • Is there a retailer you prefer?
    -For buying, I’m a huge Microcenter fan, but Fry’s, Newegg, and Amazon are also places I buy from frequently.
  • Do you need or already have peripherals?
    -Already got everything.
  • What will you be using your Glorious computer for?
    -Predominantly work. That said, I do have an HTC Vive and like to play games when I’m in the mood.
  • Do you overclock or want to get into overclocking?
    -I use to, but nowadays I prefer to leave things be for the sake of known stability.
  • Do you plan on going for custom water-cooling now, or in the future?
    -I use a closed loop solution right now and plan on keeping it that way.
  • Operating System. Do you need a new one?
    -Windows 10, I’m happy with it.

If you Game-

  • What kind of settings do you like or what FPS do you want to play at?
    -Maxed out everything.
  • What resolution will you be playing at? //or would like to play at.
    -4K
  • What kind of games do you like to play?
    -VR on the Vive, Total Annihilation, Borderlands, Mass Effect, Titanfall, Anything Star Wars, etc etc
  • What specific game will you be playing (if you really only play one)

If you Render or Edit things-

  • What application do you use to render? (very important)
    -Vectorworks 2019 (Spotlight with Renderworks and Braceworks), AutoCAD 2019 LT, Adobe Creative Suite (After Effects, Premiere, Photoshop), WYSIWYG
  • Do you render movies or just Photoshop pictures
    -Movies and pictures.

Here’s a link to my current build, mostly. I skipped my drives, (1x M.2, 4x SSD, 6x HDD) and case fans (3x 140mm, 2x 120mm I think…) https://pcpartpicker.com/list/psH4kd

Essentially this rig is my workstation. I use it primarily for AutoCAD and Vectorworks for concert design. I’m a rigger, so it’s uncommon for me to be doing lots of video rendering and that sort of thing, but it’s still a lot of 3D modeling going on. I also use WYSIWYG for automation pre-programming and that gets pretty busy in the 3D as well.

As you see, I’ve got a Gigabyte 1080 8GB and recently upgraded to 32GB of Corsair Vengeance 3000. One would think that should keep things moving along fairly well but as of late ACAD and VW hang up for 10-60 seconds when I rotate something in an isometric view or when I select a large amount of objects. (It’s not uncommon for me to be moving ~250,000 individual objects at once in ACAD.)

I know I’m not helping myself in that most all of the drawings are sitting on an HDD, however I’ve tried putting all necessary assets on the desktop (which puts them on that M.2 Sata drive on the mobo,) and while it’s a little better, I still get hang ups.

Is it time to get off the i7-6700K and go to latest gen? I took a cursory glance at the i9-9XXX series and good lord at those price tags. (Money isn’t necessarily an object here, but let’s be reasonable…) How much better are they than the 7XXX Extreme series? What about the i9-79XX-X series?

For the record, for a very long time I was an AMD guy. But as time went on, I noticed that my Intel laptops weren’t having near as many struggles with these softwares as my AMD desktop was. As such, I’ve gone to Intel/Nvidia. All these software devs still recommend the Intel/Nvidia combo foremost and I find that getting support on this platform choice is often much easier.

It’s been a while since I’ve built last, (obviously,) and I’m defintiely out of the loop on the latest gen stuff. Your patience and advice is most appreciated!

Out of curiosity, why Autocad in this day and age?

I’ve run multiple CAD/CAM packages on an AMD Ryzen 1700X and Vega 56 with no issues, but they don’t perform as well in benchmarks so this might matter with huge assemblies, I’m not sure TBH.

I’d at least wait until CES as Dr. Lisa Su is giving the keynote and there’s a lot of expectation and rumors around Zen 2/Ryzen 3000 on 7nm.

I’m a SolidWorks and Fusion 360 guy mostly, but have also run Inventor on that PC.

If you’re getting a skylake X CPU right now, the 7940x is best value for money.

Just some higher clocks out of the box and better TIM (solder vs paste).

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@Steinwerks “Why autocad in this day and age?”

Mostly because it’s what the engineering firms and manufacturers I work with use. With what I’m doing, something like Solidworks is MAJOR overkill.

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TBH its not going to net you much in the way of framerate bumps. At that resolution you become GPU bound and there isnt as much difference between any of the CPUs. There will be some benefit but you might be disappointed in the returns. A much better investment is a newer/faster GPU.


Because its still industry standard for architectural and mechanical/electrical engineers.

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@Adubs I answered the question about resolution for giggles mostly. The only real improvement there would definitely come from a new graphics card. That said, every time I look at a Titan V or an RTX 2080 Ti I wanna puke from the price tag. I miss the days of flagship cards being 499, lol.

Well there is the 2080. It’s about what a 1080ti is, or go look for a used 1080ti and call it a day.

I feel ya brother, I’m on a 7700k salivating at 4 more cores but it just doesn’t make sense. Im literally doing most of the same stuff with my machine as you just 7700k and 1070 but at 1440p 144hz.

If you wanted to test if it’s worth it for you, set your vcore to 1.35ish and 47 multiplier.

I would say in terms of cpu the i9-9900K 8C / 16T would allready,
be very sufficient for his typ of workloads.

Wenn it comes to gaming at 4K in particular,
the choice of cpu doesnt really matter all that much tbh.
I still think in the vast majority of the workloads stated in the op,
the clockspeeds and per core performance still make a difference.
So thats why i think that the 9900K might be the ideal cpu for the job.

Some people would argue that more cores is allways better wenn it comes to productivity workloads.
But that certainly isnt allways the case doe.
It just highlly depends on the said workloads and how well the used applications actually scale,
with multiple threads.
I believe that auto cad still relies allot on strong per core performance.
And that is what the 9900K is all about.

Unless you trully need more pci-e connectivity.
Then you should look into HEDT, either Skylake-X or Threadripper.

Architectural maybe. ME? No way. SolidWorks has that nailed down well these days, and we use that as well as NX far, far more. I can find out what we use for electrical for consumer products and I’d bet it’s not ACAD either.

I feel like many folks are stuck with it as a legacy product and not much more.

There are a group of users on this forum who will recommend AMD products for no other reason than ideology, but from a cursory google it seems that unless you are ready to buy the 9900k, which has much higher multi-thread support, I would second the recommendation to wait. The holidays are often awful times for availability, and I would at least see if AMD can be competitive [enough] for your chosen workload whenever their new chips release.

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Maybe I should qualify my statement more. For civil works it absolutely is the industry standard. That’s besides the point. The topic is not about being a cad snob so take it somewhere else if you want to discuss.

Roll the i9-9900K just saying… But in my humble opinion… can you not wait? 14 nm has had all it can handle… It would be the max end of the 14 nm node cycle that you would be buying into. I would say wait until 10 or 7 nm intel to be honest?

If you need MAX PCIE throughput and connectivity… you should probably consider threadripper but just like HEDT these are optimized for different workloads

is waiting not possible just curious?