Upgrading the backup PC

If you look back to my posts in April and May 2021, deep in pandemic territory, you will see that I was keeping busy by building a spare PC in case my main threw a wobbler, I said at the time that it would be placed in a home under my bench and I would move on to occupying my time with something else.

So that was then, twenty months ago, and my main PC has been upgraded and logically, the technology "width" between the two machines has widened. That was fine, but as I am always lurking on Facebook marketplace, I came across a very local deal on a motherboard, cpu and cooler combo.

That is one boring photo, but the anti-static bag is hiding an ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming motherboard with an Intel i5-6600K processor. The online deal also came with an almost complete Cooler Master Hyper 212 heatsink and fan, and for the record, the motherboard, cpu and cooler, cost me $120 and it was a short drive from the house.

In terms of computer history, the i5-6600K is from the third quarter of 2015, and it is a sixth generation Intel CPU, and they code named that series, Skylake. The ASUS motherboard is based on the Intel Z170 chipset and for this build, I will need DDR4 RAM, I have some, but again, I will go searching for more in the wilds. In general terms, the previous project in the Rosewill case was an Intel i5-4570, 4th generation Haswell CPU on an Intel Z97 chipset motherboard, two generations behind.

As I have discussed, is newer better? - if we look at raw numbers, the Haswell scored an average CPU mark of 5218 with single thread 2036 and this "new" Skylake contender for the crown, scored 6349 with single thread 2341. This indicates that the new one is about 20% quicker, but that is just part of the story as improved generations of Intel processors include other benefits, same cores, same threads, but with increased bus speed, DDR4 memory support and higher bandwidth. 

The Haswell and the Skylake packages include integrated graphics, and that too has assumedly improved between generations, but here is where Intel get convoluted again, the older processor has "Intel HD Graphics 4600" and the new one has "Intel HD Graphics 530" which sounds worse, however, as usual, Intel change their naming rules and the smaller number, oddly, is a lot better. It matters not as with this build, like the previous, I will be using a dedicated GPU which will be betterer.

It was time to dust off that old assembly and update.