Zen2. Is Intel now the gamers choice & price/perf king? (devils advocate).

[IDKFA]

So hear me out. This might sound mad what with all the latest buzz and excitement around the Zen2 launch. But doing some fag packet maths.... Intel might actually be the go to system for gamers. 

Lets break it down. 

by AMD's own slides we saw parity with Intel in gaming. I think we can all agree on that. It's roughly the same. (And thats by AMD's own slides, showing best case for AMD). 
so it is favourable to AMD to say that they perform the same in gaming. 

Anyway. Lets focus on price then. 

9900k can be had for $450.
3800X will likely be $400. 

So at this point AMD wins to the tune of $50. 

Alas....

AMD requires "premium" memory to hit its best performance (and likely what was shown by AMD in the keynotes, they aren't going to show gaming benchmarks vs 9900k on junk RAM now are they. 

So add is decent RAM for Zen 2 for say $150. 
Intel will get the same performance with half decent 3000Mhz RAM at $75. 

So now we have AMD loosing to Intel to the tune of £25. 

But it gets worse. Motherboards. 

As we are seeing. X570 boards are going to be expensive. Lets look at a typical gaming mobo choice for many. the ASUS ROG STRIX F Gaming. 

On Z390 its around $190
On X570 its going to be £299!! a $109 premium. 

So that takes our grand total to $134 MORE for the X570-3800x system than the Z390-9900k system. 
Thats with performance (by AMDs own metrics) pretty much identical. 

So in all seriousness. Once the hype dust from Zen2 settles. 
Is Intel now the best choice for gamers?

[Stormseeker9]

Seem to also forget core count... cause you know, CoReS !?!?!

[dgsddfgdfhgs]

 

2 minutes ago, IDKFA said:

So add is decent RAM for Zen 2 for say $150. 
Intel will get the same performance with half decent 3000Mhz RAM at $75. 

So now we have AMD loosing to Intel to the tune of £25. 

3000mhz not decent? what are you thing about?

Dont conclude anything before the launch, zen2 may or may not need good memory

 

 

[GoldenLag]

2 minutes ago, IDKFA said:

AMD requires "premium" memory to hit its best performance (and likely what was shown by AMD in the keynotes, they aren't going to show gaming benchmarks vs 9900k on junk RAM now are they. 

3000mhz memmory costs the same as slower memmory, so idk why you would pay for worse than 3000mhz memmory when in certain games it can be detrimental performance regardless of plattform. 

 

3 minutes ago, IDKFA said:

So add is decent RAM for Zen 2 for say $150. 
Intel will get the same performance with half decent 3000Mhz RAM at $75. 

AMD has allready shown the sweetspot is 3000/3200mhz memmory. why would you pay more?

4 minutes ago, IDKFA said:

On Z390 its around $190
On X570 its going to be £299!! a $109 premium. 

depends wildly on the board, not to mention you can use 300 and 400 series boards if you want to day 1. 

5 minutes ago, IDKFA said:

Is Intel now the best choice for gamers?

time will tell. benchmarks will tell who is top dog. 

6 minutes ago, IDKFA said:

3800X will likely be $400. 

or you can get the 3700x to save a bit extra. 

[Jurrunio]

1 minute ago, GoldenLag said:

why would you pay more?

I thought they showed 3600 CL16? No way would I recommend those of course

 

8 minutes ago, IDKFA said:

9900k can be had for $450.

PCPP shows $485

 

9 minutes ago, IDKFA said:

AMD requires "premium" memory to hit its best performance (and likely what was shown by AMD in the keynotes, they aren't going to show gaming benchmarks vs 9900k on junk RAM now are they. 

The benchmarks are run with the same memory on both platforms as far as I know

 

10 minutes ago, IDKFA said:

But it gets worse. Motherboards. 

As we are seeing. X570 boards are going to be expensive. Lets look at a typical gaming mobo choice for many. the ASUS ROG STRIX F Gaming. 

They dont stop you from using X470 and older boards

 

10 minutes ago, IDKFA said:

Is Intel now the best choice for gamers?

Now, yes because you can't buy Zen 2 Ryzen with money yet.

[GoldenLag]

Just now, Jurrunio said:

I thought they showed 3600 CL16? No way would I recommend those of course

not to mentioned they showed a tiny gain over 3200mhz. and 3000mhz isnt much worse than that. like with every platfform right now. getting faster than 3666 mhz is silly. 3000mhz is the sweetspot on every plattform. 

 

2 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

They dont stop you from using X470 and older boards

still think its awsome that AMD will ship you a bootkit at the cost of shipping. offcourse you need to return it, but its a neat service outside of asking a shop

[GoldenLag]

3 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

The benchmarks are run with the same memory on both platforms as far as I know

i think one of them had AMD using 3200mhz and Intel 2666mhz. the highest speed validated for both plattforms. 

 

though i am a bit unsure about that one. 

[IDKFA]

Just now, GoldenLag said:

not to mentioned they showed a tiny gain over 3200mhz. and 3000mhz isnt much worse than that. like with every platfform right now. getting faster than 3666 mhz is silly. 3000mhz is the sweetspot on every plattform. 

Thats just not true at all. 

[dgsddfgdfhgs]

also intel guarantees there will NO new chips supports on z390. its a dead socket from the start. ryzen is much more flexible

[GoldenLag]

5 minutes ago, IDKFA said:

Thats just not true at all. 

 

for now, slides say otherwise. why would i get better than 3000mhz when its so similar to 3200mhz. yes its not exactly the same and performance has yet to be determined, but its not like the 9900k is unfazed with slower memmory. 

 

and Hardware unboxed have explored memmory speeds concluding that 3666mhz and above is very much useless unless you have a very specific workload. 

[GoldenLag]

7 minutes ago, dgsddfgdfhgs said:

also intel guarantees there will NO new chips supports on z390. its a dead socket from the start. ryzen is much more flexible

well not very flexible, considering we have now almost run out of chips to put on the plattform. we have 4th gen next year before 5th gen with AM5, DDR5 and maybe PCIe 5.0 if that ever comes along as fast as people think it is

[porina]

20 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

AMD has allready shown the sweetspot is 3000/3200mhz memmory.

Have they? For Zen, Zen+ maybe, but it looks like 3600 is going to be the performance sweet spot for Zen 2.

4 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

and Hardware unboxed have explored memmory speeds concluding that 3666mhz and above is very much useless unless you have a very specific workload. 

Have they tested Zen 2? I stopped following them a while ago.

 

The big L3 cache should help mitigate some ram related impact on Zen 2. I'm really looking forward to seeing bandwidth measurements as latency by itself doesn't tell the whole story.

[GoldenLag]

1 minute ago, porina said:

Have they? For Zen, Zen+ maybe, but it looks like 3600 is going to be the performance sweet spot for Zen 2.

well they showed 3200mhz. and beyond 3000mhz the price increase starts to be too much. so based on what we know, 3000/3200mhz is still the sweetspot. 

 

3666mhz is probably going to be "best" in terms of performance, but those kits usually come at a small premium. yet to see actual benchmarks to confirm. 

3 minutes ago, porina said:

Have they tested Zen 2? I stopped following them a while ago.

well, no. Zen 2 isnt on the market yet. they tested 9k series intel and 2k series AMD i believe. 

3 minutes ago, porina said:

The big L3 cache should help mitigate some ram related impact on Zen 2. I'm really looking forward to seeing bandwidth measurements as latency by itself doesn't tell the whole story.

Win 10 just got an update to be CCX aware in its sqedualler. so that will be interesting, but im not expecting latency to be all that great. then again that just shows how fast Ringbus is, even with its scaling limits

[xg32]

pretty sure the 8core for 330usd is gonna be the price/performance king for gamers, and the 16 core is just a blessing for budget workstations, but for gaming, there's no reason to upgrade from a 9700k/9900k to a zen 2, still need to see 3800x vs 9900k max oc benchmarks, i'm also intrigued to see whether ddr4000 b-die on zen 2 will push the 3800x over the 9900k as the single thread king, no pricing issues, no 2-chiplets, just raw single core performance with an 8 core cpu to determine the gaming king.

[porina]

35 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

well they showed 3200mhz. and beyond 3000mhz the price increase starts to be too much. so based on what we know, 3000/3200mhz is still the sweetspot. 

Agree that up to around 3000 is relatively cheap, and probably good enough for most. But AMD's own slide states the price/perf point is at 3600. Given the premium for 3600 speed ram, is that suggestive of a good perf boost justifying it? One of my long term concerns about core wars on consumer platform is the core growth is much faster than the ram. Especially on the higher core count models, that extra bandwidth may be justified where it may not be on lower core counts. Big L3 helps, but only so far.

 

35 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

well, no. Zen 2 isnt on the market yet. they tested 9k series intel and 2k series AMD i believe. 

That was the point. We don't know how exactly ram will scale on zen 2, so neither we nor Hardware Unboxed can really say with any certainty. I certainly would not write off faster ram at this point.

 

35 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

Win 10 just got an update to be CCX aware in its sqedualler. so that will be interesting, but im not expecting latency to be all that great. then again that just shows how fast Ringbus is, even with its scaling limits

On another overclocking site I just took part in an "OC" challenge that doesn't actually involve overclocking exactly. The idea was for everyone to limit to 4 cores at 4 GHz, running 4 tasks (3DM11 physics, CB15, CB20, GB4). I decided to try my 7800X on it, as others had already submitted runs with 7700k and 2600X. I haven't dug into the details yet, but I was about 10% behind the 7700k, and only slightly ahead of the 2600X. Ring bus strikes again? Will dust off my 6700k later and see if I can catch up to the 7700k. The challenge intentionally runs to after Zen 2's availability, so we will also then see how that compares in this constrained case.

 

There's often talk about how many cores ring bus is effective to. Looking to past Xeons I think it could go up to 10 or 12 cores before multiple groups of rings were required. I think Intel can afford to continue using this for consumer until such time they decide to match AMD core counts.

[GoldenLag]

Just now, porina said:

Agree that up to around 3000 is relatively cheap, and probably good enough for most. But AMD's own slide states the price/perf point is at 3600. Given the premium for 3600 speed ram, is that suggestive of a good perf boost justifying it? One of my long term concerns about core wars on consumer platform is the core growth is much faster than the ram. Especially on the higher core count models, that extra bandwidth may be justified where it may not be on lower core counts. Big L3 helps, but only so far.

DDR4 bandwidth isnt an issue as seen by the 2990wx. Perhaps with the exception of certain workloads.

 

Benchmarks will show how much of an improvement it actually makes. 

 

2 minutes ago, porina said:

think Intel can afford to continue using this for consumer until such time they decide to match AMD core counts

Intel can very much continue with ringsbus. But its a matter of yield, power and cost. I believe ringbus starts to struggle at 12 cores. Or at least that is believed to be the effective limit before mesh makes more sense. 

[porina]

1 hour ago, GoldenLag said:

DDR4 bandwidth isnt an issue as seen by the 2990wx. Perhaps with the exception of certain workloads.

Now that AMD decided to finally catch up to Intel in the FPU department it will matter more. We will have the fastest AMD CPUs ever, and very likely the fastest consumer CPUs overall. It may still be a case of IF speeds too.

 

1 hour ago, GoldenLag said:

Intel can very much continue with ringsbus. But its a matter of yield, power and cost. I believe ringbus starts to struggle at 12 cores. Or at least that is believed to be the effective limit before mesh makes more sense. 

Probably going a bit OT now but I wonder if they'd dare consider multiple-rings on future consumer like the Xeons of old...

[GoldenLag]

1 minute ago, porina said:

Now that AMD decided to finally catch up to Intel in the FPU department it will matter more.

in AVX workloads yes. though not much more. its not like any CPUs can handle a lot of AVX units these days. 

2 minutes ago, porina said:

Probably going a bit OT now but I wonder if they'd dare consider multiple-rings on future consumer like the Xeons of old...

they might, its not like their current design is sustainable. and they are going to continue to use 14nm on large chips simply because they cant get 10nm to yield enough. 

 

doublering might be a good short term solution for a 12 core part that would be needed to keep any interest over AMD

[porina]

Just now, GoldenLag said:

in AVX workloads yes. though not much more. its not like any CPUs can handle a lot of AVX units these days. 

AMD's claim was that with 7nm process, they don't need to drop the AVX clock like Intel does. These should offer great performance. I'm really looking forward to this.

 

Just now, GoldenLag said:

doublering might be a good short term solution for a 12 core part that would be needed to keep any interest over AMD

12 could possibly get away with single ring, but if they want to play at 16 that's double for sure. We'll have a while to wait and see. 

[GoldenLag]

7 minutes ago, porina said:

AMD's claim was that with 7nm process, they don't need to drop the AVX clock like Intel does. These should offer great performance. I'm really looking forward to this.

that will be very nice, but i suspect very high overclocks will benefit from an AVX offset. 

7 minutes ago, porina said:

12 could possibly get away with single ring, but if they want to play at 16 that's double for sure. We'll have a while to wait and see. 

10 cores is comming. Intel might decide not to compete at all. just live on brand reqognition and just refresh untill they have a product ready. 

[porina]

25 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

that will be very nice, but i suspect very high overclocks will benefit from an AVX offset. 

They don't currently offer an option for that at all do they? Don't think it was ever fast enough on Zen(+) to be a problem. We don't know if they will offer this facility in Zen 2...

 

25 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

10 cores is comming. Intel might decide not to compete at all. just live on brand reqognition and just refresh untill they have a product ready. 

They could have got away with 10 cores if it was only going up against 12, but with 16 confirmed it will be interesting to see what they do next. Best I can see is if they do something with their next HEDT line. Skylake-X is done, so we're due a new platform and CPU. Some variant of Cascade Lake is top suspect. If they could do 16 core HEDT at $1000 for the CPU, that could probably be enough to fill that niche. This can also scale upwards better to go against next gen threadripper whenever that happens.

[GoldenLag]

6 minutes ago, porina said:

They don't currently offer an option for that at all do they? Don't think it was ever fast enough on Zen(+) to be a problem. We don't know if they will offer this facility in Zen 2...

 

not that im aware of. could be thath they claim its not an issue that way they dont need to fix a BIOS for it. 

 

7 minutes ago, porina said:

Skylake-X is done, so we're due a new platform and CPU. Some variant of Cascade Lake is top suspect. If they could do 16 core HEDT at $1000 for the CPU, that could probably be enough to fill that niche. This can also scale upwards better to go against next gen threadripper whenever that happens.

now that AVX is covered by AMD aswell as clockspeed. any high end plattform is more or less dead. 

[porina]

28 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

now that AVX is covered by AMD aswell as clockspeed. any high end plattform is more or less dead. 

Intel HEDT already offers AVX-512. I'm most interested in the subset of instructions which double the FPU performance again over existing Intel consumer CPUs, but there's all sorts of other new bits in there for other use cases. These are going into future Intel consumer CPUs. Ram bandwidth is still a major bottleneck. Consumer workloads may not care, but the more cores there are, the more this matters. I'm hoping but not expecting Intel could go 6 channel in next HEDT platform, but they might continue to nerf it to only 4 to prevent it impacting their Xeons.

 

Even Threadripper can use a refresh to get that upgraded AVX performance, more cores, more ram channels, more PCIe lanes...

 

Neither will be for the masses.

[ThePD]

5 hours ago, IDKFA said:

Anyway. Lets focus on price then. 

9900k can be had for $450.
3800X will likely be $400. 

So at this point AMD wins to the tune of $50. 

Amazon has 9900k for 489

Newegg has 9900k for 494

Where are you finding a 9900k for 450?

If I am not mistaken, the 9900K does not come with any heatsink.
AMD processors come with very capable heatsinks.
You made no notice of this in the forum post above.

[Ebony Falcon]

4 hours ago, IDKFA said:

So hear me out. This might sound mad what with all the latest buzz and excitement around the Zen2 launch. But doing some fag packet maths.... Intel might actually be the go to system for gamers. 

Lets break it down. 

by AMD's own slides we saw parity with Intel in gaming. I think we can all agree on that. It's roughly the same. (And thats by AMD's own slides, showing best case for AMD). 
so it is favourable to AMD to say that they perform the same in gaming. 

Anyway. Lets focus on price then. 

9900k can be had for $450.
3800X will likely be $400. 

So at this point AMD wins to the tune of $50. 

Alas....

AMD requires "premium" memory to hit its best performance (and likely what was shown by AMD in the keynotes, they aren't going to show gaming benchmarks vs 9900k on junk RAM now are they. 

So add is decent RAM for Zen 2 for say $150. 
Intel will get the same performance with half decent 3000Mhz RAM at $75. 

So now we have AMD loosing to Intel to the tune of £25. 

But it gets worse. Motherboards. 

As we are seeing. X570 boards are going to be expensive. Lets look at a typical gaming mobo choice for many. the ASUS ROG STRIX F Gaming. 

On Z390 its around $190
On X570 its going to be £299!! a $109 premium. 

So that takes our grand total to $134 MORE for the X570-3800x system than the Z390-9900k system. 
Thats with performance (by AMDs own metrics) pretty much identical. 

So in all seriousness. Once the hype dust from Zen2 settles. 
Is Intel now the best choice for gamers?

Amd doesn’t need fast ram this gem as fclk is decoupled entirely with own gate 

 

amd wont have tested the 9900k on 2133mhz ram and 3900x on 4,500mhz ram