Saturday, November 28, 2015

Redshift: Z97 or Z170?

Over the past few weeks I've been getting to the point where I can make some of the real purchases for my to-be gaming PC, Redshift. However, comparing Skylake vs Haswell/Devil's Canyon has really gotten me thinking about how much is Skylake actually worth it?

Here's the PCPartPicker links:

For those that aren't aware, Intel is going through some kind of supply issue at the moment. This is making the price of the Intel Skylake CPUs go up substantially. I mean, just look at the price of the 4790K vs the 6700K on Newegg US. It's silly. Do note, however, that I'm using archived pages to maintain the price information of these products, for the purpose of writing this post.

If you compare the 2 different part lists that I have, you can also see that the price of the comparable motherboards are also different. There's a decent gap in price between the 2, and it's just a generation apart. I don't think that the increased cost on this front makes Skylake any more worth it either.

RAM prices don't concern me too much. On the Z170 build I settle for some basic black-colored RAM at the compacity that I wanted, but on the Z97 build I was able to get a bit higher-tiered gaming RAM, and a little bit cheaper at that.

Anyways, my question to you folks is: What generation would you go for? Personally I am leaning towards just going with last gen at this point. This will probably be what I'll end up doing.