Originally Posted by
AOD_Tymplar
This IS a good article, and for about 95% of the PC population, it's a very valid point. Low, mid, and even some upper end builds would do just fine with an i5 level chip with more focus on the GPU and monitor as the primary means of contributing to the overall gaming experience.
It's a lot like the debate around the clock speeds of RAM as well. Most people aren't going to ever see the difference between DDR4-2133 and DDR4-3000.
For the longest time, I remember that when dual core chips came out, the only thing ever touted as being able to take advantage of more than a single core was a product like Adobe Photoshop (and some other products within the Creative Suite). I believe CAD applications were up there too, as well as other rendering / modeling type applications. Hell, if memory serves me correctly, if you had a Windows PC around the XP / 2000 days, applications would take advantage of the multi-CPU architecture and the OS wouldn't. Crazy (and yes, it's entirely possible) :)
This is where I typically land on the topic. My previous build was an i7-4770K. I could build a new rig around that and throw a Pascal-based card in there when they come out and it'll be up to snuff with a brand new Skylake build. But, if I had, say, an on-board m.2 type drive, it'd be horribly slow when compared to the Haswell-E / Broadwell-E and Skylake chipsets (X99 and Z710) because it wouldn't take advantage of the newer architecture (which, would be tied into the motherboard directly). m.2 SATA would still operate at the standard 6 Gbps throughput as the normal SSDs we use today, but the m.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 variant (made possible by the X99 and Z710 chipsets in conjunction with those CPUs and the additional PCI lane availability) operates at around 32 Gbps throughput (8 Gbps per PCI lane) because more lanes are made available to both the onboard chipset AND the use of things like GPUs and such (where they're typically limited since one takes precedence over the other).
Fun stuff...lmao :)
I'm hoping that when I do Phase II of my build, that the Broadwell-E i7-6950X (10 cores, 25 MB cache, 3.50 GHz) will get me through the next 5 years or so (or until Quantum computing is FINALLY a reality) :)