General feedback and suggestions

Satelerevan · July 13, 2020

Budget (including currency): 1000 - 1500

Country: UK

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: World of Warships, Streamlabs, OBS, World of Tanks etc.

Other details

Hey there guys, a friend of mine from the UK has been talking with me and my friends about in regards to upgrading his gamerig however there were a few concerns about in relation to switching from Intel to AMD in terms of software re-installations and possible issues with being limited to the amount of CPU cores for it to operate efficiently. It has been awhile since he last upgraded his computer and has been thinking for awhile.

What he does is he does play some quality games but at the same time, he also streams on his old game rig and likes having a decent system with good FPS but I understand that it you're with Intel you would have some better framerates turnover (how? I dunno) but the concern is whenever he is playing games and streaming.

Basically he's looking at getting the Ryzen9 3900X and its a good system with all the 12 Cores and 24 Threads. He's upgrading from an Intel i5 4690K and I can tell the difference with the benchmark there https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-9-3900X-vs-Intel-Core-i5-4690K/4044vs2432

Basically the hardware of my friends old machine is looking like this https://www.userbenchmark.com/PCBuilder/Custom/S148810-M842647.141989.123.204853.998434vsS4682-M11612.141989.123.204853.100478?tab=MBD

I can see that maybe the video card and the RAM might need to change for example but he has been planning on upgrading the powersupply as well too so I'm a bit sceptical on where the performance issue can be and would he experience any bottleneck issues with GPU performances etc.

The other question is that does he need to reinstall Windows 10 because he is swapping hardware? and would he still be able to receive all the core performances?

He saw an article and it scared him a little https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/h81sl3/ryzen_3900x_not_performing_as_well_as_intel_i5/

Any advice or suggestions are welcome.

marmour · July 13, 2020

First up, Userbenchmark is a load of trash so I would ignore it for any performance comparisons.

As far as CPU and GPU, if its only gaming, a 3900X is vastly overkill. A 3600 will perform just as well for £200 less. This extra £200, when combined with the say £200 from selling a 1070, could get you a 5700XT nicely, or a 2070 super if you add a bit more budget.

Chris Pratt · July 13, 2020

Not sure what the issue was with that Reddit user, but you should see an improvement all around over the 4690K with a Ryzen 3900X, though perhaps not a dramatic one in games. Gaming is still primarily about single-core performance, and there it's basically just a straight clock to clock comparison. The 3900X has a higher base clock and a much higher boost clock, but that's over stock. If you OCed the 4690K to 4.5Ghz, then the difference is going to be much less.

Where Ryzen really shines is multi core, and with 12 cores and 24 threads, you're going to see dramatically better performance in any workload that actually fully uses those. The problem is that gaming just doesn't, which why the 4-core 3600 is the most recommend processor for gaming focused builds. You just don't get anything out of more.

July 14, 2020

24 minutes ago, Satelerevan said:

He saw an article and it scared him a little https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/h81sl3/ryzen_3900x_not_performing_as_well_as_intel_i5/

That reddit post is wrong, or their system is broken. The 3900X is faster in both single core and way faster in multicore tasks, https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_core_i5_4690k-412-vs-amd_ryzen_9_3900x-931

And for gaming a 3900X is overkill, get a 3600 or 3700X and take the extra money to get a RTX card. The RTX cards have a NVENC encoder which takes the stress of streaming off of the CPU and uses dedicated hardware on the GPU.