Productivity/Gaming Upgrades

[ChalkChalkson]

So my motherboard died today which is pretty annoying, but it means I can justify retiring my trusty (wow apparently 4 years old)  6700k. And what an exciting time to be in the market for a CPU with AMD finally having a competitive product! Sadly I was pretty busy the last year or so, not following PC hardware as closely as I would have wanted to, so I guess it's time for me to open up such a thread finally.

 

What's my budget: I am looking to spend somewhere between 400-750€ (ideally not too much over 500€) which in terms of PC hardware converts basically 1:1 to USD

 

What's my current setup: I am currently rocking a powermodded 1080FE and a full custom watercooling loop that is pretty overkill for even 120W TDP chips, though ~100W-120W is a sweet target since there it can run below the noise floor and sometimes fully passive. I sadly have 2 mismatching  2x8GB DDR4 sets of which the slower one is only rated for 2133 and the faster one being 2600 (I bought them pretty early in the DDR4 lifecycle and thought the faster one was complete overkill - god do they suck by today's standards...)

 

What's my usecase: I mainly do 3 things, scientific compute with mathematica and sometimes C++ or Phython were pure multicore performance is basically all that matters... like the PCs they give us at the uni when we work on those projects are Xeon Phis, clock speed and single thread super doesn't matter... I also do some occasional 3D CAD which are basically all single-threaded. In terms of games, I enjoy some KSP and Clausewitz based grand strategies (EU4, HOI4, Vic3...) for all of which the bottleneck is usually the single simulation thread, so again multicore doesn't really matter. 

Overall I would say the single-threaded stuff matters more to me, but I won't settle for less than 6 cores while 8 would be hugely appreciated.

 

After doing some preliminary checking something like a 3700X would be smack centre in my budget, however, judging from Steve's review it seems like a terrible fit, being hard to justify for the gaming and cad against a 9600K or 9700K and it being hard to justify not to upgrade to a 3900X for the compute stuff. 

 

What do you think, which CPUs should I consider? Any other features that are meaningful on team Red and Blue (super don't care about optane caching or pcie4)? Is there anything rumoured or announced I should be waiting for?

 

Thanks a ton for taking time for this!

[5x5]

From what I understand, Ryzen 3000 fits your needs perfectly. I'd say a 3700X is a great choice but if you can use the extra cores, the 3900X is superb.

 

Edit: the 9600K is dead at this point. The 3600(X) offers equivalent performance in games and vastly superior productivity performance. The 9700K Vs 3700X is a similar story, the 9700K barely wins in games and gets annihilated in almost everything else.

[ChalkChalkson]

Just now, 5x5 said:

From what I understand, Ryzen 3000 fits your needs perfectly. I'd say a 3700X is a great choice but if you can use the extra cores, the 3900X is superb.

Well the 3700 appears to be only a few %age points ahead of the 3600 (at least judging from the GN review) and single-threaded the 9700K seems to run circles around the 3700. That's why I am kinda hesitant to lock it in

[5x5]

Just now, ChalkChalkson said:

Well the 3700 appears to be only a few %age points ahead of the 3600 (at least judging from the GN review) and single-threaded the 9700K seems to run circles around the 3700. That's why I am kinda hesitant to lock it in

Consider that the 9700K needs better cooling since it runs hotter, uses more power and is about 30-40% slower in productivity whereas it's only about 4-5% faster for games. Not to mention Bios updates are still coming for Zen2 and Intel security patches are still coming, potentially hitting performance even more.

[ChalkChalkson]

3 minutes ago, 5x5 said:

Consider that the 9700K needs better cooling since it runs hotter, uses more power and is about 30-40% slower in productivity whereas it's only about 4-5% faster for games. Not to mention Bios updates are still coming for Zen2 and Intel security patches are still coming, potentially hitting performance even more. 

Where did you get these numbers? Also cooling really isn't an issue, I am kinda a nerd for PC cooling at my heart (after all it allows me to combine two of my big passions), so I went a little nuts with my cooling setup

GN seems to show something closer to the 9700k being ~10% ahead in single-threaded games with productivity being all over the map (which makes sense). But I would guess for my workload it might be at best 15% ahead,  probably less, since not all parts of the applications can be heavily parallelized.

[5x5]

3 minutes ago, ChalkChalkson said:

Where did you get these numbers? Also cooling really isn't an issue, I am kinda a nerd for PC cooling at my heart (after all it allows me to combine two of my big passions), so I went a little nuts with my cooling setup

All of the available reviews. You can see that multicore performance is just not even close, Ryzen CPUs are far far ahead.

 

 

Also, if you have anything slower tha a 2080 super or 2080 to running at 1080p, then the CPU won't matter for games. You'll be GPU limited hard.

 

As for the security issues, Google Intel security flaw. You'll see quite a few articles about security patches reducing performance. Same thing with Zen 2 Bioses. Constant updates are coming.

[ChalkChalkson]

11 minutes ago, 5x5 said:

All of the available reviews. You can see that multicore performance is just not even close, Ryzen CPUs are far far ahead.

 

 

Could you cite something specific? Like look at the GN review I linked, in most gaming tasks the intel chip is a solid 10% ahead

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Also, if you have anything slower tha a 2080 super or 2080 to running at 1080p, then the CPU won't matter for games. You'll be GPU limited hard. 

Super depends on games. The games I actually play are hard single thread CPU bound. In Paradox grand strategies it's the thread handling the monthly tick, especially towards the end of the campaign each tick can take several, to tens of seconds. In KSP the physics of each ship can only be calculated on one thread, so when I build one of my 2000 part overkill stations/interplanetary transfer craft the game slows down to ~2-4 FPS. In general, I agree and would give the same advice in a vacuum, but that's why I listed those games specifically

 

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As for the security issues, Google Intel security flaw. You'll see quite a few articles about security patches reducing performance. Same thing with Zen 2 Bioses. Constant updates are coming. 

I would be heavily surprised if those add up to enough that it flips the balance in one way or another. It surely is a consideration, but that can only really come in if the decision is really really close, since those software improvements/hits usually stay within a few % (except for crazy things like spectre) 

 

 

Don't get me wrong I would love to be back on team red, I still think fondly about my Phenom II x6 and generally prefer AMD over Intel all things being equal because of their better driver support on linux

[5x5]

Look at Hardware Unboxed, TechSpot, Anandtech, TechPowerUp and even Linus. In his review, CS:GO, a game tha runs only on 2 cores primarily, ran much better on the new Zen CPUs. In HUs video, you can see that certain games perform better on Ryzen. That's because Zen 2 actually has higher IPC than core I 9th gen. Intel compensates with high clockspeeds but that results in much higher power and thermal requirements. He'll, even Intel's leaked internal memo states that they're playing catch up till 2021 when 7nm is due. 

 

As for BIOS, firmware and microcode, that plays a huge difference. Along with windows scheduler, those updates lifted first gen Zen performance by about 10-20% depending on the task a few months after release. So be sure to look at the most recent results since each BIOS update ATM is massive.

[ChalkChalkson]

1 minute ago, 5x5 said:

Look at Hardware Unboxed, TechSpot, Anandtech, TechPowerUp and even Linus. In his review, CS:GO, a game tha runs only on 2 cores primarily, ran much better on the new Zen CPUs. In HUs video, you can see that certain games perform better on Ryzen. That's because Zen 2 actually has higher IPC than core I 9th gen. Intel compensates with high clockspeeds but that results in much higher power and thermal requirements. He'll, even Intel's leaked internal memo states that they're playing catch up till 2021 when 7nm is due.  

5

Anthony's review seemed to show that they trade blows based on individual titles which I guess is an argument for the 3700 since it's like 100 bucks cheaper. Though that doesn't really address the weird position of the 3700 inside AMD's stack with its performance often being closer to the 3600 than to the 3900 except in some specific workloads that like a balance of single and multi-thread.

1 minute ago, 5x5 said:

As for BIOS, firmware and microcode, that plays a huge difference. Along with windows scheduler, those updates lifted first gen Zen performance by about 10-20% depending on the task a few months after release. So be sure to look at the most recent results since each BIOS update ATM is massive.

Yeah but that was a completely new architecture with a completely new design premise. From what I have seen microcode updates historically have been much smaller increases

[5x5]

This is also a different architectures.. Zen 1 was CCXs and nothing more. Now you have CCXs, chiplets and a separate IO die on a different process. It's going to take some optimization.

 

 

That's normal for performance to be close, it's the same core, when you are us Ng 6 or less, the performance is identical. The 3700X shows its prowess when you use all 8 cores. If 6 are enough, get a 3600X.

[ChalkChalkson]

33 minutes ago, 5x5 said:

This is also a different architectures.. Zen 1 was CCXs and nothing more. Now you have CCXs, chiplets and a separate IO die on a different process. It's going to take some optimization. 

 

 

That's normal for performance to be close, it's the same core, when you are us Ng 6 or less, the performance is identical. The 3700X shows its prowess when you use all 8 cores. If 6 are enough, get a 3600X. 

Ended up deciding on a 3700, it fit my budget really well and if I am honest I enjoy hardware a bit too much to go for the 3600, will probably have way too much fun overclocking that thing

[Guest]

On 7/28/2019 at 6:26 PM, ChalkChalkson said:

Ended up deciding on a 3700, it fit my budget really well and if I am honest I enjoy hardware a bit too much to go for the 3600, will probably have way too much fun overclocking that thing

The 3700X is a good middle ground I'd say. If you wanted more gaming performance, the 3600 makes more sense since it performs about the same for a lower price, but the extra cores are useful for a number of reasons. Regarding overclocking, the 3800X would be better binned from what I understand (we don't have one yet), but so far we're basically getting similar OC results across the board, so it's really not worth worrying about. Despite having to do so much work all at once because of a... Let's call it slightly hurried launch, I had a lot of fun testing the new Ryzen chips, and I suspect you will, too. Pay particular attention to memory timings - We've got a video on Floatplane right now that should hit YouTube sometime in the next week detailing memory performance, and the end result is it's virtually all about timings and the Infinity Fabric clock's relation to the memory clock. Depending on the game, gaming performance can receive a pretty big uplift.

[ChalkChalkson]

On 7/30/2019 at 10:17 PM, GabenJr said:

The 3700X is a good middle ground I'd say.

 

Thanks! I feel a lot more confident in that conclusion hearing it from someone who spent so much time with these chips

On 7/30/2019 at 10:17 PM, GabenJr said:

Despite having to do so much work all at once because of a... Let's call it slightly hurried launch

Speaking of which, why are you helping randos on the forum with build choices, between super, ryzen 3, rx 5000 and LTX you surely have better things to do But seriously, I appreciate you taking time for this a lot

On 7/30/2019 at 10:17 PM, GabenJr said:

We've got a video on Floatplane right now detailing memory performance

Yeah I saw that one, awesome work btw! With the crazy amounts of testing you do LTT really rivals GN in some regards these days in terms of in-depth test results.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, ChalkChalkson said:

Speaking of which, why are you helping randos on the forum with build choices, between super, ryzen 3, rx 5000 and LTX you surely have better things to do But seriously, I appreciate you taking time for this a lot

Every now and again I like to run through the forums and see if I've had a mention that didn't include an @. Had a few occasions where people were looking for my opinion on something but didn't actually tag me, so it's kind of become a habit at this point.

 

4 hours ago, ChalkChalkson said:

Yeah I saw that one, awesome work btw! With the crazy amounts of testing you do LTT really rivals GN in some regards these days in terms of in-depth test results.

It's been something of a blitz, yeah. I don't really want LTT to be "another Gamers Nexus" since I think Steve does that better than we could and I think there's value to the oftentimes more surface-level reviews we do. However, I do want to round it out with more in-depth coverage where it makes sense - Though in the case of the memory video, of course it turns out that others like Buildzoid and even Tech Deals beat us to the YouTube punch. At least I feel we brought a little more to the table this time.

[trevb0t]

On 7/30/2019 at 2:17 PM, GabenJr said:

The 3700X is a good middle ground I'd say. If you wanted more gaming performance, the 3600 makes more sense since it performs about the same for a lower price, but the extra cores are useful for a number of reasons. Regarding overclocking, the 3800X would be better binned from what I understand (we don't have one yet), but so far we're basically getting similar OC results across the board, so it's really not worth worrying about. Despite having to do so much work all at once because of a... Let's call it slightly hurried launch, I had a lot of fun testing the new Ryzen chips, and I suspect you will, too. Pay particular attention to memory timings - We've got a video on Floatplane right now that should hit YouTube sometime in the next week detailing memory performance, and the end result is it's virtually all about timings and the Infinity Fabric clock's relation to the memory clock. Depending on the game, gaming performance can receive a pretty big uplift.

Anthony, have you guys played around with what the performance looks like with varying RAM speeds on Zen 2? 

Until prices drop on those high speed kits, there's no way those of us at ground level are jumping in to test them  

 

Edit: stupid question. Just saw the latest video and got my answer  Thanks, G. Skill!