Which of these two PC builds would offer better performance?

Question

Asus X99-A with USB3.1 Motherboard And Intel Core i7 5820K CPU Or

Asus Z170-A Motherboard And Intel Core i7 6700K CPU

The rest of the build (the same for both):

Cooler: Noctua NH-U14S.

RAM: 32GB (2x16GB) Corsair DDR4 Vengeance LPX Black, 2666MHz, CAS 16-18-18-35, 1.2V.

Storage: 250GB Samsung 850 EVO.

PSU: 650W Corsair RMx, Modular, Silent, 80PLUS Gold - Any Single Graphics Card

GPU: 4GB MSI GTX 960 GAMING 4G.

I will be using the build for mainly programming. Most important programs I will use:

Android Studio.

IDE such as Eclipse.

Which combination of motherboard + CPU will give me better performance. Will the programs I mentioned benefit significantly from the 5820K's extra cores and threads?

Answer 1

Looking over the specs of the 5820K versus the 6700K, notable differences are:

• Larger cache (15MB vs 8MB)

• More cores and threads

• Higher memory bandwidth

All of these would probably be of benefit when working, however it has a lower clock speed. That might be the dealbreaker here, as while having lots of threads is great for multitasking (and possibly compiling, not sure if that applies to JDK? Some compilers are still single-threaded) clock speed is also important.

If you intend to overclock the 5820K (quick google search reveals people have got it over 4.0GHz and stable, but runs pretty hot) then I'd say it's safe to go for the 5820K. But if you don't want to do that, the 6700K might be a better choice given that it is already faster, can be overclocked higher, runs cooler while drawing less power.

So, if you'll benefit more from multithreading take the 5820K

Or, if you need the raw single-core speed take the 6700K

A good comparison of the two from LinusTechTips

Answer 2

The i7 5820K would be much faster than the i7 6700K. None of the programs you will use will benefit from an i7 5820K or even an i7 6700K for that matter. An i5 6600K will be enough for what you are doing. The 5820K will only benefit from much larger multithreaded workloads (such as virtualization or video rendering) and where more PCIe lanes are needed (allows up to 24 PCIe lanes). Your GPU will also bottleneck your system if you perform any slightly GPU-intensive tasks (such as gaming or video editing).