Nathan, you’re right the LGA 1151 boards for Skylake particularly its latest iteration Z170 is a better choice. And it shows how long ago I seriously looked at the DDR4 RAM prices.
My research tells me that DDR4 doesn’t yet give much performance improvement (leave that aside), but it’s interesting that UniDIMM <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniDIMM> makes it possible to run either DDR3 or DDR4 in the newer boards (ie, Skylake), not both at once. There’s also an Asrock board that does both DDR3 and DDR4 (Asrock B150M Combo-G) which I wouldn’t buy – probably N/A here in Australia anyway. Ian Thomas Albert Park, Victoria 3206 Australia From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of Nathan Schultz Sent: Wednesday, 3 February 2016 2:29 PM To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Subject: Re: [OT] New PC - Intel LGA 2011-3 socket boards I've been looking at refreshing my system as well. I'm not sure why you'd consider a Haswell system over SkyLake? The price difference between something like an Intel i5-4590 (Haswell) and an Intel i5-6500 (Skylake) is ~$15. And the price difference between 8GB of DDR3 (1600Mhz) and 8GB of DDR4 (2133Mhz) is ~$20 (at least for Kingston). I don't know where you're shopping to see three-fold price differences. On 2 February 2016 at 19:51, Ian Thomas <il.tho...@outlook.com <mailto:il.tho...@outlook.com> > wrote: I’m a bit ignorant of this, being a “slow adopter” – so would appreciate some opinions. Apart from being ready for another self-build, a 15yo releative is keen to build himself a gaming PC that will last a few years [his choice of graphics card is based on the Nvidia GTX 970 4GB GDDR5 chipset, which is expensive: the Asus ASUS STRIX GeForce GTX 970, (Base: 1140MHz, Boost: 1279MHz), 4096MB (7010MHz) GDDR5, PCIE3.0, Dual DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort i over $500 at a couple of places I’ve checked]. Someone was telling me that the LGA 2011-3 supports both DDR3 and DDR4 RAM, and there are some motherboards about that have slots for both types of memory. Is that right? The socket is used for the Intel Haswell-E and Haswell-EP CPUs. It was released in 2014 so now there should be some manufacturers supporting motherboard builds for people like me who would stuff it with DDR3 until the cost of DDR4 comes down by a factor of 3 or so .. Ian Thomas Albert Park, Victoria 3206 Australia
