Official PC Thread

[Yoshi]

Yeah, that's realistically when I may pull the trigger too, simply because I want real input from the Vive's requirements before I do something short-sighted.

[Frogacuda]

Yeah VR is such an unkown factor. I'd think USB3.1 wouldn't be that important even 5 years from now, but when you think about VR headsets and the sensors that track them, who knows. It's a technology that could very well see incredibly fast development as interest droves people to new technology, or it could be slower while they focus on breaking through to the mainstream and making the technology more affordable and accessible.

[gamevet]

How's your USB 3.1 and PCIe 3.0 support? Your focus is too narrow here for what I care about. If I do a full rebuild, which is really what I need at this point, I'd be an idiot to buy anything down-level. I tend to only upgrade GPUs in-between four or five-year rebuilds. I'm not using old everything until 2020.

I'm not saying that someone should pick a Z97 build today, if they had a really old PC build. I'm saying that if you have an Ivy Bridge, Haswell or Broadwell CPU, there's very little reason to upgrade to Skylake. Skylake is not the tock, that Intel was claiming it to be.

My PCIe 3.0 support is outstanding. My board can run 4 cards in PCIe3.0x8, or 2 cards in PCIe3.0x16. I saved a lot of money (only paid $109) by waiting until the Z97 boards came out. The price of the Z97 boards are going to drop as well, since the new Skylake boards are going to be the next big thing. Sometimes you're better off not buying the latest and greatest, especially if the performance difference is negligible. I actually have a spare Z97 board that I was using while I had my motherboard and CPU sent back to the manufacturer; I may use it for a Broadwell CPU in the future, should I choose to replace my 2500k build.

[James]

My current plan- wait to hear what Yoshi gets, read this thread as people nitpick the build, and research from there while most likely ending up copying as close as my budget allows to what Yoshi decided on.

[Shin Johnpv]

Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition

It's time to upgrade.

*edit* If I was upgrading now from where you are Yoshi I'd go Skylake.

[gamevet]

Here's a nice comparison video of the 6700k, 4790k and 5930k with benchmarks.....for anyone that is interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOh19-No2Nw

[Yoshi]

I remain very cautious, but my optimism with regard to MSFT's current regime is slowly increasing when I read things like this:

We are not intending to compete with Steam. If anything, we want Steam to be even more successful – they’ve done great things for PC gamers in terms of having a single store.

Over time do we want more developers to come over to our store and offer it in addition to Steam? Absolutely. Is competition good for people? Absolutely. But our goal right now isn’t to do anything else other than support Steam and help it run great on Windows 10.

Now if Gears doesn't show up on Steam, that's complete bullshit, so we'll know soon enough.

[Frogacuda]

Win 10 Store really feels more like an app market, which usually means a user base conditioned to free and low cost apps. And it might end up being good for that. I don't really see it cracking the AAA games market and it's probably wise that MS not focus on that right now.

[Yoshi]

I keep forgetting that there is no OSX/iOS split for Windows anymore.

[Frogacuda]

Yeah. It's actually kind of neat playing some mobile apps on high performance PC with a controller. I was wondering if the version of GTA San Andreas (based on the spruced up mobile version) is better than the one on Steam.