Personal computing discussed
Moderator: JustAnEngineer
Chrispy_ wrote:Essentially, AMD CPUs are the best overall option right now for everything except twitch gaming, and there won't be any major changes there for a year or so. You get more cores and threads than Intel and at lower prices on an architecture that game developers are coding for first and foremost (consoles).
Chrispy_ wrote:Essentially, AMD CPUs are the best overall option right now for everything except twitch gaming, and there won't be any major changes there for a year or so. You get more cores and threads than Intel and at lower prices on an architecture that game developers are coding for first and foremost (consoles) Their IPC is 5-10 lower than the latest Intel stuff and their clockspeeds are another 10% or so lower when comparing equivalent models, but not only do they meet the bar for "enough CPU to shift the gaming performance bottleneck to the GPU instead", they are also blisteringly fast at everything non-gaming. That's what more cores does, in a lot of workloads. When you throw in the reduced exposure to Spectre and Meltdown variants that are sapping valuable IPC from Intel's finest and the AMD performance improves, relatively.
Pancake wrote:Chrispy_ wrote:Essentially, AMD CPUs are the best overall option right now for everything except twitch gaming, and there won't be any major changes there for a year or so. You get more cores and threads than Intel and at lower prices on an architecture that game developers are coding for first and foremost (consoles).
Consoles don't have Zen cores. They have Jaguar which is based on the happy crappy Bobcat architecture which is completely different. Game developers certainly aren't "coding for first and foremost" AMD in the PC space (which is the subject of discussion). Why do you think Intel CPUs perform so, so much better for gaming despite having fewer cores? Why do you think AMD demo their latest GPUs with Intel CPUs?
Why do you think Intel CPUs cost more? The truth hurts.
Pancake wrote:Why do you think Intel CPUs cost more? The truth hurts.
Chrispy_ wrote:Pancake wrote:
Because Newegg says so.Intel Z370 boards are an extra 30% more expensive than B360 boards, comparing like brand/model (eg Asus Prime)
- i7-8700K = $360, R7 2700X = $330
- i5-8600K = $260, R5 2600X = $260
Intel's stock coolers are utterly worthless, so you need to spent at least another $40-50 on a cooler, which just isn't the case for AMD's Wraiths.
just brew it! wrote:Edit: Moderately amused that Newegg still has the FX-8350 in stock, for $90. Who is still buying these things at retail?
Noinoi wrote:just brew it! wrote:Edit: Moderately amused that Newegg still has the FX-8350 in stock, for $90. Who is still buying these things at retail?
Probably people that were running an FX system with less than 8 cores. Or something.
I suspect $90 might be still be an upgrade considering that, but I'm not so clear on how it actually pans out these days. Most CPUs are probably fine in most office/Internet work/play, so I think it's probably something else that made having 8 cores "better".
Or maybe it's just that it has 8 cores compared to what they had.
EdwardJamesAlmost wrote:Hey all,
Even though my current Wolfdale E8400 is alive and well, it's getting long for the first world. In a world of "moar cores" and Twitch.tv tabs that run at 99% CPU usage, I think it's likely time for an upgrade. The question, however, is what that upgrade should it look like, and how long from now it should be done. I'm in the US. Nearest Microcenter is about an hour away.
The current build is an E8400 on a Gigabyte EP35C-DS3R motherboard. This PCI-Express 1.0-capable mobo currently houses a PCI-E 3.0 AMD HD7XXX graphics card, 8GB of DDR3 ram, with a Corsair MX500 power supply. A Corsair SSD plays a primary storage role. It's long since grown out of its multi-purpose rationale (some DVD-encoding here, some media editing there, some RTS and Deus Ex gaming), so a new day is dawning.
With that in mind, I've come up with three options. Feel free to chime in on any one, or modify with your reasoning. Thanks in advance!
1) Replace existing motherboard, CPU, and RAM in existing system. - An H370 motherboard (w/Type-C Gen2 for the phone) would house a Pentium Gold CPU (G5400) and 8GB of DDR4 ram. This would alleviate the PCI-E bottleneck, and I'd be able to enjoy improved IPC performance on a chip that isn't too radical of a departure from the E8400. This option would bide enough time for a newer generation of AMD video cards (Navi?) to hit the market, and allow me to enjoy some recent games at 1080p in the meantime in an older case. I've priced this one out around $240 USD. One piece of outstanding skepticism is whether I'm actually missing anything from not going o a Core iX.
2) Replace the pieces above with Ryzen 2700X, a B450 board (again, Type-C Gen2 for the phone) and 16GB ram, and replace other parts (case, power supply) as needed. - This build would allow me to immediately enjoy some of AMD's best current gen stuff, though I'd still have some vestigial hardware (especially this space-consuming case) in place. This would also allow me the PCI-E bandwidth to take advantage of an RX580 and Freesync. This one isn't priced too pretty, at around $600, thanks to current RAM prices. Add the RX580 and that jumps even higher.
3) Wait until Navi drops, then build an entirely new machine around that. - This way, I'd be stuck with my working Wolfdale build until Su only knows, but I'd have the benefit of having a greater selection of better hardware, and the possibility that prices drop on other components. This option will likely be higher priced than $600, but I'd be OK with that, because I'd be building another computer to last as long as the E8400 builds.
Now for me to take a breath. My thanks in advance!
just brew it! wrote:Edit: Moderately amused that Newegg still has the FX-8350 in stock, for $90. Who is still buying these things at retail?
just brew it! wrote:It could also be that the high price of RAM has kept some people on DDR3 platforms long past their "best by" date. That's certainly been a factor in why I haven't put together a Ryzen box, and continue to use the FX-8350.
Chrispy_ wrote:just brew it! wrote:Edit: Moderately amused that Newegg still has the FX-8350 in stock, for $90. Who is still buying these things at retail?
Clearly nobody at all, otherwise they'd have gone out of stock
madtronik wrote:From a fellow guy that was stuck with that dilemma some time ago (also had an E8400), I will give you a fourth option you weren't expecting.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/LGA775- ... 14744.html
Replace your processor with this and you are golden until Ryzen 3000 arrives with 7nm goodness. That's exactly what I did. Also OC'ed the chip a bit upping the FSB to 400mhz (I have 800Mhz DDR2). Working perfectly in Gigabyte EP45-DS3.
If you have any question about how to do that, just ask although google can answer all you need to know about this.
EdwardJamesAlmost wrote:The current build is an E8400 on a Gigabyte EP35C-DS3R motherboard.
Chrispy_ wrote:The Intel fanboys are desperately clinging to the IPC thing and if you use the traditional average framerate measurement method on some low-threaded FPS games and cherry-pick your graphics settings to specifically exaggerate the difference between AMD and Intel, Intel will have a commanding lead.
Chrispy_ wrote:The bonkers part about people who get upset when you dare speak out against Intel is how they're clinging to the past. low core counts are in the past, even smartphones have more cores than most Intel desktop PCs these days. Whether you accept it or not, software is becoming more and more multi-threaded by the day and Consoles (and by extension, the latest game engines) are also moving in that direction.
JustAnEngineer wrote:Ryzen 5 2600X + B450 Aorus M + 16 GiB DDR4 = $425 +tax
With Precision Boost 2, AMD's second-generation Ryzen CPUs offer even better performance for multiple threads than first-generation Ryzen.
https://techreport.com/review/33531/amd ... s-reviewed
https://techreport.com/review/33568/gam ... ryzen-cpus
https://techreport.com/review/33719/amd ... u-reviewed
Micro Center's in-store CPU deals are attractive.
$270 AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with Wraith Prism cooler ($330 at Newegg)
or $190 AMD Ryzen 5 2600X with Wraith Spire cooler ($230 at Newegg)
The Ryzen 5 has only 6 cores /12 threads, but it offers almost the same per-thread performance for $80 or $100 less than the 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7. If you keep this system for as long as you have kept the Wolfdale going, that difference is less than 70¢ a month.![]()
Micro Center will sweeten the deal by offering an additional $30 discount if you bundle your new CPU with specific motherboards, but there are no micro-ATX or mini-ITX bundle deals for the 2700X or 2600X. Of the first wave of micro-ATX motherboards with the B450 chipset, the $85 (or $87) Gigabyte B450 Aorus M has the best arrangement of PCIe slots. If you need to install more than two double-width PCIe X16 cards plus a PCIe x1 card that would fit into that micro-ATX motherboard, then the Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 5 WiFi is just $140 -20MIR in a bundle (vs. $184 at Newegg) but that's quite a bit more expensive than a B450 option outside of the bundle.
I do not believe that you should spend money on a wimpy Pentium Gold build. Your Intel options should be the 6-core/12-thread Core i7-8700K or a future 8-core/8-thread Core i7-9700K.
DDR4 prices have been dropping very slowly since the crypto-currency bubble has finally begun to collapse. Memory prices are still elevated significantly from where they were a couple of years ago. 16 GiB of memory will set you back $170 at Micro Center (or $150 at Newegg) as 2x8 GiB of PC4-25600 G.Skill F4-3200C16D-16GV (DDR4-3200, 16-18-18-38, 1.35 V).
Take a look at SeaSonic's Focus Plus line of power supplies.
$115 -25MIR SeaSonic Focus Plus Platinum SSR-650PX
or $80 -15MIR SeaSonic Focus Plus Gold SSR-550FX