Overdue Budget Upgrade

[Wishy]

I've just finished my Ivy Bridge to Skylake upgrade (The wife wanted a desktop, and was happy with a hand-me-down, hence the earlier than normally justifiable upgrade - even if the Ivy Bridge setup was over 3 years old).

Processor performance isn't radically different, maybe a 15-20% IPC increase, and a 20% clock speed improvement. Probably not worth the upgrade for that alone. The chipset upgrade, however, is a massive improvement. Those extra PCI-E lanes are very much overdue, and the Samsung SM951 moves like shit off a shovel (And that's speaking as someone who had a relatively decent Crucial M4 256gb SATA III SSD, which came close enough to saturating SATA3 for it to be more or less as good as it gets over that interface). Other noticable improvements is the ease with which you can stuff it with RAM, thanks to DDR4.

One thing I have very much noticed is how much the prices have gone up for Skylake. Processors are £200, where my previous i5 was closer to £150, motherboards was £125 vs £80/ I can't help but think Intel are milking their position, and that a bit of AMD competition would be nice!

[Merson]

One thing I have very much noticed is how much the prices have gone up for Skylake. Processors are £200, where my previous i5 was closer to £150, motherboards was £125 vs £80/ I can't help but think Intel are milking their position, and that a bit of AMD competition would be nice!

General inflation hasn't helped i feel. Also hasn't silicon gotten more expensive over the years?

[Wishy]

In fairness, the dollar is quite strong - but the dollar price has certainly gone up.

The raw materials are negligible. It's development and fabrication costs

[Freelance]

You're also buying it right as it comes out and supply is thinner on the ground.

[iMess]

Which mobo did you go for steve?

[Wishy]

MSI Z170A Gaming Pro. Mostly as it was the cheapest available board with MSATA, an Intel network card and DDR4. (Watch out for the cheap versions, they're DDR3. IMHO that has no place on a Z series chipset!)