RezidentSeagull

Huh, you know weirdly enough, I think I have actually seen your EXACT craiglist ad, since I live in the Lower Mainland area...! I don't really need a 560TI, but if I do need one, I'll definitely send you a message!

Pretty much purely for aesthetics, honestly.

for $30, I could get not only getting a neat aesthetic piece but I ALSO get a cooking grill? #valuebuy

Haha, yeah, I read the reviews from the era and it was... yeah.

Is that USD? Because that would be an awesome price to find one. So far though, I've only been seeing listings as low as $59.99 (not including shipping from US to Canada, yikes), and in one insanely-hilarious case, $250 CAD.

Like the title says, what's an appropriate price for a GTX 480 Fermi graphics card these days? I kinda want to buy a reference one as a collection piece, partially because it has a unique cooler design and partially because it's infamous for its heat issues, and I'd like to know what seems reasonable to most people. I'm Canadian, so CAD pricing would be nice.

That's a valid argument. That said, saying the Zen architecture "isn't for gaming" is kinda silly. As for the issues with CCX latency... they don't really seem to be so significant as to make a game unplayable, especially with higher speed RAM being used for faster Infinity Fabric speeds. Regarding L3 cache... that is just kinda weird to say. For the Ryzen 3 chips, each CCX has 4MB of L3 cache, with two CCXs leading to a combined total of 8MB. Gaming performance on the Ryzen 3 1300x also is looking pretty good. Tomshardware, for example, has shown in its gaming tests that the 1300X, at stock but especially when overclocked, balances against the more expensive i3-7300 50% of the time and trounces it the other half. Anandtech also is showing similar numbers, even suggesting that the i5-7400 is given a serious challenge. (Of course, there's more data out there than just two review sites, so everything is, as always, with a grain of salt). Waiting for Coffee Lake, in the meanwhile, is an option, though frankly I'm not hugely interested in it for a variety of reasons. An i7-7700K right now at NCIX is about $445 CAD, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the rumored hex-core Coffee Lake replacement will not be any cheaper. For that money, I could literally buy a Ryzen 3 1200 ($144.99 CAD base price), overclock it until it bursts into flames, and then buy the hex-core Ryzen 5 1600 that I eventually wanted ($279.99 CAD on sale). Coincidentally, that is actually my current plan. I was going to get a Ryzen 3 today and overclock the heck out of it, move my FX-8320 system to a server-role, then evaluate my options when AMD eventually releases a "14nm+" refresh of Zen. Just like Intel, it seems very likely that a second batch of 14nm products will mean a matured production process and hopefully higher clock rates than the current 4.0GHz ceiling on Ryzen chips. No guarantee, but certainly likely.

The evidence looks pretty good so far for the 1200, so I'll keep an eye on overclocking results, but it looks like I'm leaning 1200 then...! As for the X370, I know it's not as good a value as B350, but I kinda wanted the extra PCIe lanes in case I go for getting a 10Gb NIC for my desktop and NAS... That said! I'm still working out exactly how many PCIe lanes I REALLY need, so if I find a nice B350 board I like, I'd probably be swayed towards it. Work in progress, that is.

The Short: What's a better value proposition, the 1300X, or the 1200? I'm definitely going to overclock whatever I get, so it really boils down to gambling on the overclockability of the Ryzen 1200. Do I play it safe with the Ryzen 3 1300X, knowing that the probably higher binning and stock speed of 3.5GHz will make it more certain that I can overclock to 3.9-4.0GHz? Or do I gamble on the Ryzen 3 1200, knowing that reviewers SEEM to be able to get it up to around 3.9-4.0GHz and saving about $30 CAD in the process, but having to deal with a possibly lower quality chip and having to overclock much more from a 3.1GHz base? The Looooong: I've been waffling on how to approach an upgrade to a Ryzen-based system for some time now. Originally I was going to buy a Ryzen 5 1600 because I wanted more than 4 cores while still getting as good a value as I can. It got hard to justify that though, since I'm mostly just gaming on my desktop, and not doing a huge amount of CPU-intensive stuff that really benefits from more cores. Plus, the price of ~$280-300 CAD is a lot of money for too-little need. So, once I started seeing the results of Ryzen 3 benchmarks, I shifted and instead am going to focus on a "Mostly-Gaming" build. The money I save going to a Ryzen 3 processor (~ $100 CAD) can be used to offset getting the X370 motherboard and high-speed RAM that I was angling to get, and it leaves me with more room for a meaningful processor upgrade in the future. I'd be upgrading from an overclocked FX-8320 system with a GTX 970, so even though I'd lose out (sort of) on multi-threaded performance, I'd be gaining a LOT in terms of single-threaded performance, which is still where it's at for gaming anyway.

Oh, I meant that the FX system in my sig would become my virtualization server. The Ryzen build would be almost entirely for fun and gaming (and Handbrake encoding every now and then)

Part of the problem for me is that my upgrade plans also include converting my current desktop into a home server for virtualization and file storage. So, I'm getting that addicting feel of wanting to upgrade so I can also get cracking with experimenting with server stuff... Still, you're probably right, it's not particularly critical for me to upgrade if the desktop is still managing well.

How dare you make me also read that now

I've been keeping a close eye on AMD's Ryzen platform for a while now, and I'm dead set on eventually upgrading to a Zen-based CPU. I'm also 90% sure I'm going to go for a 6-core cpu, likely the Ryzen 5 1600, because it strikes the best balance in terms of budget, productivity, and gaming for me personally. So the real dilemma I'm facing right now is do I upgrade this summer, knowing that the platform is getting really close to being stable and that the next set of mainstream-enthusiast products won't land for about a year or so (Zen 2, Coffeelake etc.), or do I wait it out until late this year, either for further refinement of existing products or checking out new products? I mean, my current desktop isn't reeeeaally dragging me down in ways that matter to me, but I'm really itchin' to upgrade while still trying to be sensible. Input from current Ryzen owners would be especially useful, since I want to get a picture of what it's like to use Ryzen, and what issues you have to put up with right now.

I think at a high-level that's it. I think it's intended more as a way to isolate applications, similar to a legit VM, without running all of the overhead of a hypervisor between the host and the container. Good point. It may be more noob-ish, but a container with a web-interface would take some of the trouble away from me actually getting an SMB share up and running

That's true. Nothing a bit of online research and man pages can't fix for me I meant a web interface for managing storage and file sharing. Sorry for the confusion