I7 2700k. Where To go- and when!

True, I have just watched the video by Aus flight simmer, hopefully, this increase will be good enough to
keep everyone happy until DirectX 12

Iā€™ve currently got
i7-4790K / 16GB / MSI Gaming 5 / 2070 Super

Iā€™m looking at upgrading to

i7-11700K 3.6GHz ($349) / 64GB 3200 GSkill CL16 ($340) / 2X Sabrent Rocket NVMe4 1TB ($320 total) / MSI Z590 WIFI Pro ($180) / Noctua ND-D15S ($89)

I could get 3600 CL18 GSkill for the same price, but the 3200 has better latency, so I thought that would be better (16-18-18-38 vs 18-22-22-42)?

Iā€™ve already got a 750W PS, and, given the total lack of availability of RTX3XXX, Iā€™ll just stay with my 2070 Super for now.

Is it worth spending $1,300 on this rig? Iā€™m not strapped, but wondering how long Iā€™d have to wait, and what prices are going to look like, and what Iā€™d get for performance over this? Any thoughts on the cooler I chose?

I am happy enough for the moment with my current rig, but Iā€™m imagining Iā€™d get a bit of a boost with the new rig?

Iā€™ve been looking at upgrades myself from an i7-4790K. Check out Best CPUs of 2021 - Top Gaming CPUs for the Money | Tomā€™s Hardware (tomshardware.com). That link and some other related ones at Tomā€™s actually prefers the i5-11600K over the i7 series. Two less cores but MSFS doesnā€™t take advantage of additional cores anyway. Core speed is king. Might save you some money, too.

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Have been on the configurator tools at both Overclockers and CyberPC here in the UK. It does have me dribbling a bit, for sure. Hopefully, prices will drop a little later in the year and Iif they do, then it looks like a good idea might be to wait until Win 11 drops (and then tap foot for a month to let everyone else sort out any ensuing nightmares. I am not nice, am I?) and then press the trigger, unless there is exciting news on the horizon for the next gen stuff. I have used and trusted Overclockers for the last fifteen years, but CyberPC are new to me. Does anyone have any experience here? They do look a good outfit on paper or screen, anyway.

Final one for now. Does anyone have tips on how to run a totally over the top PC past their wife? I think I know most of them, but any gems, or failing that, humour or sympathy, would be appreciated.

you need to strike a deal, like i wanna get this pc, but we will do a weekend (or week)
somewhere nice.
you can offer also a kitchen/bathroom upgradeā€¦hehe
whatever.

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Already doing the first, though frankly, an asylum seems the best bet at the moment.

You might be able to save a bit of money, if your current case is ok.

Do the upgrade yourself, you could spread the cost a bit to get the spend approved.

At launch I had a 3570k and 8gb of ram exclusively running fsx, I upgrade the cpu added another 16gb ram, ssd and 1660ti. Before this I had never upgraded anything, pc had run the same for 8 years.

By Jan 21 Iā€™d got the vr bug and got a second hand 1080ti.

By Feb I was itching to upgrade the rest of my rig but couldnā€™t afford a full rebuild so with confidence gained upgrading bits and bobs the previous 6 months, bought the parts and did it myself, saved quite a bitā€¦just took my time and planned it out.

Even involved the wife! The aio water cooler front mounted was a bit trickyā€¦not if that helps with buy in !

Upgraded to 5800x, x570 strix e, 1tb pcie4 sad, 32gb Corsair ram and arctic freezer 240 for cĀ£1k.

If you buy bits from scan you can pay a bit extra then if damage anything installing hardware it covers you.

Alternatively you can buy a preassembled and tested mobo cpu water cooler etc and transplant into existing case.

It is a good idea and one that I have considered, but the old machine works well and will take up the slack when the new machine comes. Plus, an upgrade is good, but the components left over are approaching 10 years old now and life has taught me that all you end up doing is to push the weakest link elsewhere. There is a good PSU, 360mm All in One, SSDs etc. but I donā€™t want them to fail on a new machine at the drop of a hat. Daft as it sounds, when the PC gets put out to grass, I reckon it would take a 1K machine even to equal it, so current feelings lean towards an all new system, but thank you very much for the input. It is appreciated.

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Well, didnā€™t SU5 throw the Cat amongst the Pigeons? After a fairly torrid, three day update, today it worked.

That old i7 is throwing out 50FPS with some increased parameters and as long as it goes, it goes on. I had specced up a 5900/3080 combo for around Ā£3700 for the tower and I was lusting for it - until three hours agoā€¦ I am still scratching my head, but looking from the other end of the telescope, it seems that a computer of a lot less performance than even mine, will be able to run the sim passably well and for now at least, that new rig, sitting inside a Corsair 680X is going to have to wait for a while. It is quite amazing to take it all in right now.

And it goes onā€¦ and onā€¦ Next big question folks, is Alder Lake and a 12900k looks a likely candidate. Remember, that any new build, like the old i7 2700k is going to be in for the long haul. So. The next question, is this.

DDR4 or DDR5? Going for the former now, means a further rebuild in the future to get to DDR5 so is it even worth considering a DDR4 motherboard? Financially, it is going to hurt a lot, but if you were going to hit your thumb hard with a hammer, would it make that much difference if you hit it just that bit harder?

With Alder Lake, I may well go for a Corsair 5000X rather than the 680X, as there is much more room for a 360 rad and although no bottom fans, the overall effect of ten fans should help keep things cooler, even in summer. Probably have as much torque as a Mustang as well.

The other thoughts which are spinning through my head at the moment include these.

Would it be worth putting the OS on a single ultra fast 1 TB M.2 and the sim on a further ultra fast 2TB M.2?

Dependent on motherboard of course, it might be possible to utilise the onboard graphics in addition to a 3080 for the main screens. I had an idea of using the on board for the 15 inch touchscreen, so not much happening on that, whilst the main 1440p and 1080p supplementary screens can handle the more dynamic, sim centred stuff.

Of course, the old problem of what is around the corner is ever present and I am thinking of Zen 3 refresh here, ( and of course the 3080 refresh!) although this will be last time around for that platform as well.

Thank you all in advance and thanks for what you have already given me.

Best regards,

Magic

Finallyā€¦ A proposed spec for the follow on to the blessed 2700K. It still runs well, but is now struggling for room on the SSD. Time to bite the bullet in the next few weeks I think. Any thoughts on the proposed spec?

Corsair 5000X icue case

7 x Corsair LL120 RGB fans

Corsair 150 Elite LCD Capellix cooler

Corsair HX1000 PSU

12900K i9 CPU

MSI Z690 Carbon WiFi DDR5 motherboard Inc Bluetooth

32GB Corsair Dominator 5200 DDR5

MSI Suprim 3080 GPU

1TB Firecuda 530 primary, for OS

2TB Firecuda 530 secondary for sim and progs

Strimer plus RGB CPU/GPU cable.

This isnā€™t firm yet, but the new machine has to stand the test of time. I am looking for a balanced, but good machine to take me hopefully a good few years.

Thanks to all that have illuminated, educated and kept me on track. Hopefully, the best is yet to come. Just donā€™t ask me about the cost :slight_smile:

First off, congrats on the new build!
Your choices are great.

I offer the following suggestions:

CPU: do you really need 12900K?
It depends on your use cases, however unless you will be using your new rig for professional level video editing software, 3D rendering, etc, for MSFS you could save money and consider 12700K or even 12600k. Single threaded performance will not be identical but very very close. MSFS performance will be close especially after a little OC.

Nvme: Firecuda 530 is one of the best choices from a performance and pricing standpoint. However I canā€™t help saying: if you are looking for the best of the best in terms of longevity, random IO performance, reliability, long term investment to hold your data, IMHO nothing beats Intel Optane (905p or even better, workstation class P5800X) but they are very very expensiveā€¦
Maybe you could find a smaller size Intel Optane at a reasonable price for the OS, MSFS and critical data, and hold the bulk of the least access data on a slower and larger size, lower budget NVMe.

Fans: I would go Noctua. Nothing beats their silence. Expensive fans, very reliable. Next in line in terms of silence are Phanteks T30. Not as quiet as the Noctua fans, but reportedly close, and cheaper. Again I would consider Noctua, they are keepers, the slightly higher investment in quality is worth it.

MB: MSI Carbon is a great choice. In case you intend to overclock, please also consider an Asus high end board, simply because the overclocking community around Asus is more active, and their firmware is generally very solid with timely updates. Since your choice of CPU cooler is beefy you could easily follow the footsteps of other users to get the most performance out of your CPU. For example the following tutorial to reach 5.7Ghz on Alder Lake:

Again congrats on your new build, either way you will see tremendous performance uptake coming from your previous build :slight_smile:

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Thank you for your thoughts Kido! I will look and take in what you have written there. I do appreciate it. Thing is that I know enough to be dangerous, but not particularly effective, so what I have come up with here, is a one shot, pragmatic and hopefully, somewhat future proof platform to last me a long time. Bits for now, are over specced I know, but in a few short years this will be a mainstream machine and after that, we will see what funds are there for improvements. It isnt often that I get the chance to splash out on a PC, so I thought I would make it a good one.

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I had the i9 11900K($613 USD) for 2 weeks, Actual use and testing is about a week since I finished my PC buildā€¦ Asus Tuf 3090($1729 USD purchased back in December 2020), 32GB corsair 3600mhz ram, Asus Z590E MoBo. Thus far looks good, compared to my other PC that I still have with the i9 10900KF previous gen with Asus Tuf 3080($749 USD Purchased in October 2020), 32GB Gskills ripjaws 3600mhz ram and Z490E MoBo. I can state with confidence that as far as MSFS goes it performs better than the i9 10900KF. By that I mean noticeably less stutters and slightly higher FPS especially in London, NYC, Tokyo and any other densely populated areas. HP reverg G2 gogglesā€¦ No problem with the i9 11900K. I also want to add thatā€¦ yeah somehow the 3090 does help out a bit over the 3080 due to the Vram, Iā€™m sure of that according to task manager every time the 3080 hits the 9.6GB of Vram use the stutters and FPS dips show their ugly face. But with the 3090 Londonā€¦ No problem NYC, Tokyo,Frankfurtā€¦ Haha! says the 3090. So in conclusion, not a bad CPU and it certainly does the job as far as MSFS is concerned. UPDATE! I lucked out Nov 4th and managed to snag i9 12900K, Asus strix 690E mobo, new Ryujin 360 AIO and surprisingly enough a set of Corsair Dominators RGB 32GB DDR5. I was gonna hold off getting the ram thinking theyā€™ll be readily availableā€¦ yeah right! I paid $349 USD for 2 x 16GB dimms DDR5, theyā€™re now going for over $ 2000 USD on eBay. Anyways, Iā€™m still on the i9 11900K. The 12th gen build will be my Xmas gift.

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Pragmatic is good :slight_smile:
Keep in mind in Alder Lake there are 2 type of cores: Performance cores, and Eco-cores.

12700K and 12900K have the same number of Performance cores, at practically the same frequency out of the box. Only the number of Eco Cores is different, those are normally only used for background tasks and should not make a lot of difference in MSFS even at stock frequency. The following video offers a comparison:

If you pick a 12900K, the overclocking potential could be higher, but itā€™s not guaranteed. At stock frequency, 12700K has virtually the same performance esp with just a little OC :slight_smile:

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Thanks Kido, I have plenty of background tasks to run as well as MSFS which is where I think 12900K will be worth the difference, along with almost a fit and forget approach to the machine, but 2 mins ago, I picked up a 1TB Crucial nvme (admittedly gen 3) for Ā£61.97 from Amazon for a possible storage home for addons and maybe even the rolling cache too. Seems a cheap and useful tool to have.

https://wired2fire.co.uk/product/sim-x-2020-wasp/

5600 X is probably better for flight simulator 2020 and it is much cheaper! The first person to answer your question, I think was on the right track.

Charles

Thanks Charles, I think you would have been on the money with your suggestion when this thread began, back in 1925 or whatever it was. The 5600 was an early contender and is an excellent CPU. Even then, I wanted to future proof to some degree by looking closely at the 5800, then 5900 and eventually 5950 and I still wonder about the Z3 refresh with V Cache, but these will all be on the old socket and therefore are getting towards end of life products. The new LGA1700 should,last a generation or two longer at least and if something fundamental goes bang, or needs replacing, it will be an easier task with a current or at least, recently current motherboard. I love the idea of the new AMD socket but it is an unknown as yet and you have to bite the bullet at sometime. Even in the last week, whilst I wait for availability on one or two key components, prices have gone up further and it doesnā€™t look like getting better anytime soon, hence the decision to close my eyes, think of the Queen and pray for forgiveness, although my card will, eventually, forgive me. I hopeā€¦

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The good news is the next generation of Intel processors, Raptor Lake, will share the same chipset and socket as Alder Lake. It will mostly be a change in core count with some optimizations.

Meteor Lake, ie 14th gen, is expected to be a major change with the introduction of a new socket (LGA1800), ETA Q3 2023.