Not too many games have issues.. but I see stuttering in crossfire mode in titles like Witcher 3 and GTA V. The FPS is usually stable at 60fps maxed out but the occasional stuttering can ruin the experience.
I'm not sure if this stuttering will be fixed with a CPU upgrade though. It might just be a crossfire issue.
I think i'll probably hang on till the DX12 titles come out - Fable, Hitman, Deus Ex. If the FX can keep up in those titles i'll wait for Zen to come out.
And about gaming monitors, my ideal monitor would be 1440p Curved Freesync Ultrawide IPS panel that supports refresh rates upto 144Hz. I don't think anything like that is available yet, and it would be really expensive anyway
Yeah I thought it might be the crossfire as well. The
Acer XR341CK comes pretty close. Its almost there.
Do you think the reduced top pixels from ultrawide monitors are a ploy for manufacturers to sell less display for more while keeping manufacturing costs even lower? I mean some of those curved ultrawides seem to cost close to full blown 4k displays, which you can always simulate that resolution on + have those extra pixels when you need them.
If wishes were horses, I'd get skylake-e when it launches with x99 refresh mobo and 64gigs of ram and a samsung 950 pro ssd.
Coming back to reality, my 2500k @4.5 is holding just fine. Planning to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB RAM to reduce large project(read UE4) compile times.
The 2500k is very respectable. Part of the reason I made this post was thinking about the diminishing returns of PC upgrades lately. Are you going to get rid of the 16 GB and buy faster RAM or just add more of the same to it? What are you working on? If that's okay to ask...
Nice and detailed post

1: I'm fine with 1080p as well. It annoys me that 4k resolution monitors don't actually hit 4000 or more pixels

. The amount of power it takes to drive them seems quite wasteful.
2: I'm currently without a GPU as well. I'm grateful that integrated graphics don't completely suck anymore. I think Nvidia will come out with both, HBM for the top parts. It would be hugely disappointing if they decide to wait this one out since AMD's already taken the plunge and given them time to do it better (cheaper?).
3: PCI-E drives are insanely fast but due to the inherent nature of PCI they have a far lower boot priority/initialization than SATA drives. I think a couple of manufacturers released firmware for people complaining about slow boot times when using it as an OS drive but I don't think that's going away completely. Still, boot time is just one factor... not sure its entirely relevant right now...
4: Same here. I always seem to have 2-3 GB in reserve, on 8 GB at present, 1600 Mhz @ 8-8-8-24. Still trying to work out what the sweet spot for DDR4 should be...
5: Preparing to be underwhelmed but fingers crossed at the same time!
6: Miss the golden days when everything wasn't locked down. There's little motivation to do it, just for namesake to justify the extra money spent on an unlocked part.

7: Damn, that sucks

. Not sure what to do here myself as most of the music I listen to is on a phone while travelling. Gaming is down to a minimum, I think I'd still stick to a standard stereo headset if I was still gaming as opposed to those new fangled multi-channel ones that seem to be popular now. I've used a Xonar DX before, on onboard for now, thinking of trying out the cheap and cheerful DGX.
8: Im thinking of a tenkeyless myself. Mechanical but preferably not too many bells and whistles otherwise. Suggestions appreciated. Those intelli mice were awesome. Microsoft sure knew how to make an input device. I feel you on the mice durability bit. At this point the only razer in my house is going to be the one in the bathroom.
They really don't build them like they used to.