Intel Core i7 4820K (quad core) vs 3930K (hex core) on ASUS X79 Deluxe

[BenNicholls]

At the moment I am using a ASUS X79 Deluxe with a i7 4820K (3.7GHz/3.9GHz Turbo), however I have not been particularly impressed with the CPUs overclocking ability. I only managed to achieve a maximum of [email protected] (24 hour Prime95 stable) with a Corsair H100i. I can go to [email protected], but despite temperatures being reasonable (well under 90 degrees) I get the odd crash after a few hours of Prime95 (although it could be considered 'practically' stable).

It may also be worth noting that I am using 4x 4GB 2133MHz Patriot DDR3 memory DIMMs.

Having done quite a bit of reading it appears that the Sandy Bridge-E has greater overclocking potential than Ivy Bridge-E (4xxx). As I cannot really afford to spend much more money on the system I was considering selling my 4820K and buying a 3930K (or possibly. 3930X) having read very impressive reports of its overclocking potential, some even nearing the 5GHz mark on water.

Would you guys advise this move? If so what, if any, features would I lose? I have considered adding another set of 4x matching Patriot 4GB DIMMs to get 32GB of RAM, but I read that Sandy Bridge-E only supports a maximum of 4 DIMMs (so I suppose I would need to sell my 4x 4GB kit and buy a 4x 8GB kit). Would 'downgrading' to Sandy Bridge-E make this the only way of upgrading memory (and thus, impose a 32GB limit, as I have not seen DDR3 sticks over 8GB yet). I also want to leave the possibility of SLi open, at present I have a single NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti, and am unsure if I should sell it and buy a NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti/NVIDIA GTX 1070 or buy another NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti and use them in SLi mode. I have a vague recollection of the motherboard having some sticker on it regarding a limitation of it's SLi capability with regards to Sandy Bridge-E or Ivy Bridge-E, but I may be mistaken.

In short, what features would I stand to lose or have affected by going with a Sandy Bridge-E chip (likely the 3930K or 3930X) over my existing Ivy Bridge-E setup... My concern is things like memory limits, SLi compatibility, native SATA 3.0, USB 3.0 etc).

The two most CPU intensive functions that the system is used for video encoding (via Multi-Threaded AVISynth to x264) and gaming. I am guessing that having six vs four cores would be a benefit for video encoding, however I am doubtful about what (if any) games would be able to take advantage of this.

Thanks in advance,

Ben

 

[DaveB]

You can certainly use 8 DIMMs with the 3930K.

The 3930K CPU has PCI-e 3.0 just like the 4820K.

SLi, USB 3.0 and SATA3 are not CPU functions and are provided for by motherboard components and the X79 chipset.

 

[deathman20]

For function yes 6 core will prove highly useful in Video Encoding. Gaming... eeh most likely it won't affect majority of games out right now. Though the ones that do have the use of the extra cores could potentially seen even a greater benefit. And yes as long as you can OC to or even potentially above that of your current CPU you probably won't see any degraded performance.

 

[DaveB]

I had no problem running my 3930K to 4.4 GHz a few years back. It would do 4.5 GHz but I really needed a better cooler than my Hyper 212 for that.