Skylake Quad Core i5 or Haswell Quad Core i7

[JLTucker]

Looking to ditch my AMD setup and go with Intel. Reasons? Strongly prefer Intel over AMD and device emulation through Android Studio only works on Intel Processors. Sure, I can use Genymotion, but that's a pain in the ass. So... here are my choices for a processor: A quad core Haswell i7 clocked in at 4.0 GHz, or a quad core Skylake i5 clocked in at 3.5 GHz. Both CPUs are in my price range.

Uses: Coding, gaming, video and photo editing.

Which should I get?

[Mr Bean]

Skylake, Haswell is on the old socket of 1150 while Skylake is LGA 1151. Point is a year from now or two years from now you can drop 200$ and pick up a nice CPU to throw in there to upgrade, while the Haswell will be capped out and your next upgrade requires a new motherboard.

More to the point Skylake offers from nice performance for the money, I assume the 6600k? You'll enjoy it and it will already run close to 4ghz as it is, auto-overclocking has been built into Intel processors now both over and under clocking to save power/reduce temperature.

[DaveJB]

If it were just gaming and coding I'd recommend the i5 Skylake, but photo and video editing would really benefit from the Hyper-Threading on the i7 Haswell. I'd price them up, see what sort of configuration you can put together with each choice, as Skylake really needs DDR4 memory in order to stretch its legs, whereas Haswell uses DDR3, which might equalise the price difference (though admittedly, prices on the former have really dropped recently).

[JLTucker]

I already have 16gb of DDR3 ram, so if I go with the new socket I'd have to get new ram unless I buy a motherboard with support for DDR3. Not sure what to do.

[DaveJB]

Skylake's actually only compatible with low-voltage DDR3, so unless your RAM was made in the last year or so, trying to match it with a DDR3 Skylake motherboard is going to be iffy at best, even before you take into account the fact that it'd hobble the chip's performance. Haswell on the other hand would almost certainly be compatible with your existing memory.

[The Infidel]

I have a Haswell i7 4790K, and it is really nice, but Skylake is more future proof. I would go with that. Skylake also has a lot of new, nice things on their mobos, like a lot more PCI Express channels, so you can have an M.2.x4 nvme SSD with a ton of performance. On Haswell, I've only seen M.2.x2 with a limit of 10Gbs. M.2.x4 has 32Gbs. DDR4 is not that expensive anymore and will stay a few years, while DDR3 will be phased out.