Haswell-e

It depends what you mean by convinced redders, the Kman is not convinced that AMD CPUs match or outperform Intel ones at the high end. They do offer the best bang for buck in my price range of below £200, or around £300 for Motherboard & CPU together. My current setup cost me £453 for the CPU, Motherboard & RAM (Brand new in February 2014) which is really good value in my eyes; Intel can't offer the same performance and features at a similar price, you'd have to lose multithreaded performance which I am betting will be more relevant in the future, that was why I got this setup to replace my i5 2500K which was annoying me.

There is also my intense dislike of Intel as a company and my voting with my wallet attitude. No better way to influence the world than to spend your money in a manner you think will be constructive.

I agree with you though, no need to upgrade as the need for CPU performance is not there yet. Tempting to get the latest and greatest but for us, not doing rendering tasks that require the most performance possible, it is far from a useful upgrade.

unfortunately anyone who is looking at an x99 is not considering bang per buck as a pre requisite. What annoys me more is people are throwing the term around when talking about the 5820k which I consider hilarious and ironic to the point that besides the cpu the motherboard and the ram will still be the same amount. So you are looking at a 700 quid hit so you can be part of the x99 epeen crew and still bark bang per buck on every forum you encounter.

700 pounds is not bang per buck in computing. Basically I think it is a way to look down on other setups yet not being able to afford to play with the big boys. While I am the first to admit I am a bit of a snob and elitist when it comes to pc hardware it like peasants trying to dress like lords of the manor.

Realistically this platform is of no use to gamers. Some might cry it would be for 4k setup gaming. But I think that is unrealistic. While the price of a 4k monitor is hardly what I call expensive or cheap it the supporting hardware you need to play not at the best possible framerate but only for an acceptable one.

Nobody minds dropping 2-3 k on a setup if you know if going to be the cats meow meow an d plays everything. But to drop 2-3k and only barely scratch the surface that is too much all but for the hardcore and early must have crew.

And another thing ther would be no way I would drop 2-3k on a setup and partner it with the ****ty 4k monitor makes like aoc and all that. I mean seriously iilyama 4k monitors? they havevn't been a major player in the monitor market for years. AOC who the **** are they?

And seriously just how many people can afford a full x99 setup? I'll bet you there is not that many. While I don't doubt the over all speed increase over something like my current setup it just doesn't seem a financial and worthwhile setup for the majority of people

It even makes the Mac Pro seem 'bang per buck' ( I hate this term with a passion)

I agree that it is mostly epeen waving but some people have a need for that speed with regards to the work they do. Hence it is a viable upgrade for a very few people that can increase their productivity thanks to the saving of minutes on each render task.

In terms of computer hardware enthusiasts, like us, there is no point. You may as well buy the server hardware which has been available for a while and get yourself something with 2 CPU sockets on one board and fiddle with that. That would be much better in terms of enjoying using the hardware and would give you some insane performance on multi-threaded tasks.

You can buy a E5-2630 for £442 and a Supermicro X9SRA Motherboard for £208 (both from Scan Computers) and then some DDR3 memory for a similar price to the X99 platform, and have been able to do that for a long time now. Those who are truly enthusiastic about computer hardware would take that option rather than wait until Intel release the same technology in the form of Enthusiast products, which are just epeen products to be honest.

I don't hate "bank for buck" comments, value is relative and subjective so unless you understand where the person is coming from they are useless terms. Enthusiast branded consumer products are not value oriented, as you mention; they are all about performance, nothing else, and at least offer better performance than the Xeons that have been on offer for longer.

The more interesting thought is: would someone currently using the X79 platform move to this? I don't see much point unless you need the extra 2 cores (4 threads), which no-one does and won't for a long time.

I don't think it really viable as it does not fit in. If you want raw computional power for rendering and what not like you said in your post just get a xeon workstation. if it for gaming what's wrong with the equivalent amd or 4790k setups?

It doesn't seem to really fulfil either niche. 4k gaming is a nono because the gfx card that are currently available are seriously expensive or they just don't have the grunt to drive a 4k display.

And what the point of buying it for rendering etc. Would it not be better to get a cooler running setup and one with even more cores? So the only reay niche it comes close to fulfilling is a person wanted a compromise between the two. And out of the people who would use the cpu computational power and play games enough to warrant this purchase the total amount of people who could afford/justify it is very very small.

I can't see why a person who had a reliable setup in a x79 would move to this platform unless they had money to burn, higher benchmarking scores etc.

Agreed redders, no-one should be upgrading to this from X79 despite having waited so long for this update. Perhaps there are enough people with money to spend on this who don't like the consumer platform, Intel don't offer the best of features on their consumer chipsets. They have only recently caught up to AMD with regards to SATA III and PCI-E lanes for dual GPU setups, that is comparing a 2013/2014 chipset from intel to a 2011 one from AMD ffs.

The more I look back the more I dislike Intel... damn annoying company.

PS: looks like the gorks have taken over