i5 2500k to Skylake worth it?

What's up all?

So, I've been reading up on all the "rumored" specs regarding Skylake, and I was wondering what everyone's opinions are regarding if it'd be a worth while upgrade. I've been running my trusty Sandy Bridge at 4.5 GHz for awhile now, but I've been thinking about finally putting her out to pasture. While I know the difference between DDR 3 and 4 isn't all that much of a benefit now, it could be later. And, the extra access to more and faster PCI-E lanes sounds like a plus in my book. I recently purchased an MSI GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6G card (coming from crossfire 7950's), and was thinking about adding a second one to SLI sometime before the holidays as I've got a 21:9 3440x1440 ultrawide monitor. And, I know I'm going to be one of those "foolish" early adopters for a VR headset. What can I say...it's a sickness. I love tech.

Do you guys imagine that my 2500k would bottleneck SLI Ti's much (if at all)? Or do you think it'll do until maybe Skylake-E (2017?) comes out? Maybe hold out until Cannonlake? I know that DirectX 12 is coming out in a few short days, and that it's going to take awhile for developers to really take advantage of it, but will it extend the life of my Sandy Bridge enough to warrant holding off on a cpu/mobo upgrade?

As always, I appreciate your thoughts and opinions.

I wouldn't replace the 2500K yet, it still one of the best CPUs that came, I wouldn't replace it yet unless you start to see major bottleneck with your 980Ti, when I talk about bottleneck I refer to running some games on 30fps instead of 60 which probably won't happen because of the CPU, I wouldn't rush to throw money yet because the technology always changes and becomes better.

Wait for benchmarks, why would you want to beta test it?

2500k is a bottleneck for a 144fps+ gaming. It will be even more noticeable if you are going for 144+fps and are in sli/crossfire.

If you are aiming for just 60-100, it's fine.

I'd upgrade to skylake, but from the benchmarks so far skylake doesn't see to be any faster than haswell by any meaningful amount. So if you get a good deal on a haswell cpu, that may be an option as well.

Not at 4.5 ghz

@04dcarraher: Yes at 4.5 ghz.

A 5.0 ghz 2600k is about equivalent to a 4.4ghz 4790k.

Skylake will be around 5%-10% faster than Haswell.

Keep your CPU... :P

Your 2500K still rocks... Especially when o/ced...

lol misread the SLI of 980ti's part... though he was talking about only one 980ti. But with DX12 around the corner that i5 4500k will perform much better then in DX11.

.. Yeah not buying it.. The 2500k when overclocked to 4.5ghz outperforms the haswell i5 4690k.. Even when the Haswell is overclocked the boost is marginal over the overclocked 2500k..

It's not marginal for high fps gaming. Clock per clock haswell is around 10-15% faster than a sandy bridge cpu. 15%, at 100+fps is a large amount. With SLI it's even heavier on the cpu, and the HT threads will most likely help.

I wouldn't stick with a 2500k with a 980ti sli setup.

Wait for benchmarks... And see how high OC you need to match/and pass your current 2500K.

Thanks all. I appreciate it. Yeah, like I said, I really like this processor and I keep just wanting to jump the gun...but I suppose I'll just wait awhile and see how it goes. I'll wait and see just how much DX12 helps to extend it's performance.

@Coseniath said:

Skylake will be around 5%-10% faster than Haswell.

Keep your CPU... :P

Your 2500K still rocks... Especially when o/ced...

That last picture is openGL, that's the igpu's performance improvement. Not single core.

The firestrike test also includes an igpu test, hence the increased score.

You can see the single core performance and it's actually slower in that picture.

The last picture is Maxon's Cinebench R15. Every single hardware site uses it to show a CPU's single and multicore performance.

Don't look at the OpenGL, look beneath it where it shows the results of a rendering test that is using CPU only and it can be done both in single and in multi-thread.

If you haven't ever used Cinebench and you love benching, I suggest you to try it. :)

Firestrike test, again, is not a single test, but it's a total of 4 seperate tests. 1st and 2nd tests the GPU, the 3rd tests the CPU and the 4th is a combined test.

Thats why apart from the Firstrike score you get a lot of other scores.

The 1st and the 2nd (GPU tests) is the 1st score, the 3rd (CPU test) is the 2nd score and the 4th (combined test) is the 3rd score.

I am surprised that there is a PC gamer today that cannot recognise Firestrike scores...

And lastly. I would love to see an iGPU that has 11K+ in Firestrike GPU tests (that is stock clock GTX970 levels...). LOL...

edit: ps: Very good point talking about single core performance. Just 1 point is within the margin of error so lets say its equal.

Haswell i7 4790K has 4GHz with 4 cores that goes to 4,4GHz single core boost.

Skylake i7 6700K has 4GHz with 4 cores but in sigle core the boost goes only to 4,2GHz.

That means single core Skylake = Haswell + 200MHz. This is around 5% performance increase.

i have an i7 4700k and i'm likely going to get a 6700k skylake. If i were you i'd get one if you can spare the money, no point not maxing out your nice graphics cards.

But before really anything you have to wait for some real gaming benchmarks on the skylake cpus and see for yourself. By the looks of it, they will be really great overclockers... it may have the amazing overclockingness of the second gen intel cpus all over again, im pretty excited.

I've only been able to get my 4700k to 4.4ghz at a safe temp, while on my older 2600k i could hit 4.8ghz stable with similar temps on a much weaker water cooler which shows how great the second generation cpus were.

2500K through 4690K isn't worth upgrading. ^^^ He's gonna replace his 4770K with a Skylake and it'll be pointless since he'll only gain 10% yet lose on money.

Keep it for now and see what comes out in the future that you can actually gain performance from.

@joseph_mach: Depends on what your needs are. If it is just for more performance in gaming then no it's not worth upgrading. If you need better performance for, say, video editing or general, every day computing then I would say definitely! Go for it!