taydan04

Yeah this has been my main conundrum. Although the 9700K offers more gaming performance today. Will the Ryzen see an uplift when games start to utilize more threads. Especially considering the new consoles are going to be essentially using a modified 3700x. With them confirmed to be 8 core 16 thread Zen2 chips. And i agree with your sentiment that I personally have no problems with either company. My first build was on AMD back in the Athlon64 x2 days. Then i5 750 followed by the i5 6600K. I do regret not going for the i7 for more threads at the time and don't want to make the same mistake again! haha. My only problem with the 9900K is the price. If Intel could just bring it down a little. Then they would be offering 16 threads while still offering the increased throughput per-thread in gaming. It would be a no brainer for me then. If rumors are true this could be what they decide to do with 10th gen and re-enable HT on the i7. But I can't see the single threaded performance increasing much if at all from the 9th gen so if AMD manage to push IPC or frequency much further for the 4000 series we could be seeing an outright win for them. But only time will tell. Definitely interesting times we are in for CPU's with more interesting options to come. I think I am leaning more toward either the 3600 or 3700x. Especially considering even the 3700x is cheaper than going for the 9700k including the motherboards. And the value of the 3600 is just bonkers. With the proposition of having an actual upgrade path on AM4 (even if it is only 1 more generation that is still 1 more than on Z390). I really appreciate your advice btw. You've been really helpful in allowing me to rationalize my thoughts and see if anyone feels the same in the whole Faster threads for the now or more threads for the future debate in my head.

Yeah the 3600 is really tempting to be fair! It is an incredible amount of performance for the price tag. For me going with the x570 board was purely down to looking at the AM4 itx boards available and preferring the the Strix x570i for it's feature set. Especially it's fantastic selection of rear IO (All the USB ports are 3.1 gen 1 or better). I know in my use case I'm not going to see any advantage of PCI-E 4 when it comes to internal IO. When it comes to swapping out my 2x Samsung 850 500GB SSD's I use in RAID 0 for a 2TB nvme drive (purely for capacity due to the insane size games seem to be getting to) I'll probably still go for a PCI-E 3 one anyway. As the real world performance gains of the PCI-E4 ones for me doesn't justify the cost. As far as RAM goes i do plan to upgrade down the line regardless of the platform I go for but it is good to know my current DIMMS should work okay. So would you not recommend the 9700K at all? Keeping in mind the CPU I choose will be what I intend to continue using through my impending GPU upgrade (I think ill be waiting to see what NVIDIA have coming out for that part).

I thought the same initially so tried a fresh windows install with only drivers, steam and Oculus home installed but got the same result. I have been looking this up online and have found allot of examples of people struggling to get a smooth experience on 4 thread CPU's in general. It seems the engine just wants more threads to run smoothly.

Yeah it's an approach I'm always kind of tempted by but I have found there is always something around the corner that you could justify waiting for. But at some point it's time to bite the bullet. I am planning to upgrade my GPU anyway, I am also saving in to a separate pot for this purpose. (Will be something from Nvidia as I have not long spent £500 on a Gsync panel.) The issue is I am currently already intermittently CPU bound. So a GPU upgrade will currently only make me even more CPU bound.

I game at 1440p on a Gsync 165hz panel. I am planning to also upgrade my GPU this year or next. I have a separate fund iv been saving in to for this upgrade. The 6600k isn't always what is holding me back but is starting to become the case more often. The CPU upgrade is partly in preparation for a new GPU as if I'm occasionally CPU bound now that will only become more-so the case once the GPU is upgraded. The upgrade is also to try to get a smoother HL: Alyx experience where I am seeing a constant 100% CPU usage with low GPU usage indicating I am heavily CPU bound in that case.

Hello all! I hope you are all coping well with your respective countries lock downs and staying safe! I want to avoid this becoming an Intel vs AMD thread as much as possible (although this is probably going to happen anyway) as when it comes down to comparisons of the companies themselves, I honestly couldn't care less! haha. I am only interested int he products on offer and what suits me (and my wallet) better. So on to topic... It was 2016 and competition in the high end of the CPU market didn't yet exist. A 4 year younger version of me was planning to build his first gaming PC in several years after I had seen the end of some long standing financial troubles. I had 2 options laid down in front of me: a 6600K or a 6700K. After reading many forum posts on here and elsewhere and watched a plethora of youtube tech channels I had found that the general consensus was that 4 cores with 4 threads was plenty for gaming and will be for the foreseeable future. I read time and time again, the extra money spent on a 6700K would result in little to know performance gains. And on that faithful day... I listened. Now, 4 years later, that aforementioned "foreseeable future" seems to have passed and my 4 thread 6600K is officially on the struggle bus in most AAA titles. A big one for me that has led to the decision to retire my 6600K was Half-Life: Alyx. While playing this game I found I was getting allot of stuttering intermittently throughout the game. I had assumed my GTX1070 had reached the limit of what it could do. But on further inspection, to my surprise, the 1070 was only being utilized 60-70% while my 6600K was sat at a fairly consistent 100%. I couldn't believe it. I was CPU bound! I had always assumed I would get through 2 GPU generations before my CPU would be holding me back but... Here we are. Herein lies the 2020 equivalent of that fateful 2016 decision. Except this time instead of the competition being between 2 of Intel's products we have an entry from both team red and blue to decide between! I have some money squirreled away to treat myself to an upgrade for my upcoming birthday in 2 weeks (Since I wont be going out to celebrate for obvious reasons!) this money will allow for going either: An Intel 9700k (8 Cores, 8 Threads at 5+ ghz) - £630 including motherboard. A Ryzen 3700x (8 Cores, 16 Threads at 4.4 ghz) - £580 including motherboard. And I have been endlessly bouncing between going for either of the 2. They are both fantastic chips that offer a substantial improvement over my 6600k. I would be planning to re-use my 16GB of Corsair LPX 3000Mhz memory on either option for now. I already have an H100i V2 AIO cooler that came with AM4 mounting hardware so would be re-used for either chip. The motherboards may sound a little expensive, this is due to me using an ITX form-factor build. I know the clock speeds above cannot be compared 1:1 but with AMD's IPC improvements for 3rd gen they're pretty close now. Both motherboards are the ROG STRIX -I equivalents from their respective chip-sets (X570 and Z390). I know there are other options for boards and X570 may not be necessary for a 3700x but these boards are the ones I prefer out of the options for both chips. The machine's purpose is 95+% gaming with some occasional light video editing. (And currently from-home office work). I game at 1440p on a 165hz Gsync panel. I play VR on an Oculus Rift S. I have plans to upgrade my GTX1070 this year or next and would also like to decrease my odds of a bottleneck as much as possible. The current points of contention that have me divided on which platform to move to are: Current releases seem to mostly favor the higher clock speed of the 9700k rather than the increased thread count of the 3700X. (But will this be the case in future releases? We have already seen 4 threads go from being enough to being a problem. I wonder if 8 threads will see the same fate any time soon or in the near future?) Specifically when it comes to Half-Life: Alyx and other VR titles part of the high CPU usage seems to be caused by having both Oculus Home and Steam VR running in the background taking up CPU time as well as the game itself. Would, in this case, having twice as many threads be of any benefit? X570 motherboards in general seem to have far more robust rear IO (Maybe thanks to the PCI-E 4.0 bus they are all connected to or the platform just being newer) The Z390 board is completely passively cooled whereas the X570 board has 2 small proprietary fans on it to cool the VRM and Chipset. (Do these fans tend to be loud from anyone's experience? Do they run all the time or only in cases of high system load?) My current memory (2 x 8GB Corsair LPX 3000Mhz) is definitely drop-in compatible with the 9700K whereas I cannot seem to confirm anywhere online as to whether the same can be said for the Ryzen. The 3700x uses considerably less power thanks to 7nm which could be quite handy in my cramped Ncase M1 with an intake-only fan configuration and passive top exhaust. The x570 motherboard should support Ryzen 4000 as a drop-in upgrade. Should this end up being a substantial or necessary upgrade in the future. I would really be hoping for either chip to be lasting me another 4ish years but it is still a pro. I could honestly go on endlessly with pro's and conns that come out 50% for both products. I'm lost and going endlessly in circles haha. Please somebody help me settle on a decision! Has any body out there had experience with specifically HL: Alyx on either of these chips? Even if not I'd still value your input. Otherwise I'm going to go crazy deciding.

I'm glad it doesn't just stump me haha. It confuses me because I would expect, if a hardware fault had caused it, then another PSU wouldn't be working fine right now surely?

This was the impression I initially got when I ordered the first one! I've never been able to cheap out on power delivery. Not after my very first build caught fire back int he day! haha.

The power here is very stable generally. Goes off maybe once a year at the most. Never had issues with dimming or fluctuating ceiling lights. The house was re-wired just before we started renting to bring it up to code. (The old electrics were run under the carpets! XD) I am honestly baffled and can only think to blame rotten stinking luck! haha.

In fairness the original and replacement PSU's were both Corsair SF600's (SFX form factor). The AX750 is being used externally at the moment due to its size but haven't had an AX fail.

I think i will order a replacement surge protector just to be on the safe side. From what I understand of how they work, if a surge was the reason the first PSU died, the strip may not be protected any more depending on the size of the surge I guess.

That may be my next step if the unit amazon is sending goes the same way. Do you think its possible I could have just had a bad unit? It just seems so unlikely to me to see 2 reputable PSU's die so quickly.

Ah yes, should have posted this. My Spec list. Intel i5 6600K @4.4Ghz 1.35v Asus Maximus VIII Impact MSI GTX 1070 Founders Edition (running stock) 16GB Corsair LPX DDR4 3000 2x Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SATA3 SSD's in RAID0

Hello all! Just looking for some advice or to see if anybody else has experience with a similar issue. It has me properly scratching my head! haha. So, last Wednesday, while my PC was running completely at idle, sat at the desktop, my Corsair SF600 power supply failed with a bang and a flash of light from the rear of the PSU itself. Tripping the circuit breaker for the sockets on that ring. This appeared to kill the unit all together. Wasn't able to get any power to any of the components until I connected up an older power supply, an AX750, externally (as it doesn't fit in my SFX case). I one-by-one reconnected each component and tried powering the device. To my surprise, everything was fine with all of the components hooked up. Ran a couple of hours of Prime95 and Unigine Valley simultaneously with no issues. So I shrugged and attributed this to the heatwave we are currently having in the UK that must have pushed a very heavily used 3 year old PSU over the edge. So I ordered a replacement. The next day I installed the replacement SF600 and i was off to the races. However today, 5 days after installing it, the replacement unit appears to have failed. The PC, this time while streaming a video from 4oD, powered down suddenly. Followed by a 'clunk' from the power supply. Sounded like a safety shut off to me. Testing would seem to agree as cycling the power switch on the PSU would allow me to switch the PC on for a split second. Then it would power back down immediately. Seems to be a protection cutoff. I have tried powering up the PC with this 2nd SF600 with just the 24 pin (ATX) and 8 pin (CPU) connected. Still exactly the same results. Only powers on for a fraction of a second. The PC is now running fine again using the AX750 as an external power supply sat next to the tower. No stability issues running stress tests or games. Could anyone here suggest a line of investigation? I'm confused as to how I have managed to kill 2 Corsair SF600's in the space of a week... Amazon are already sending a free replacement for SF600 number 2 and I'm concerned this will just pop as well after just as short a life span. Would you guys think the 2nd unit being faulty is more or less likely than one of my components being at fault? The PC is on a surge protector. Maybe this could do with replacing? Maybe I'm experiencing unclean power... So many avenues to go down. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for your replies all! I am struggling to find an adapter on Amazon at the moment that supports full 4K 60Hz. Does anyone know of any reputable brands I should be searching for?