R5 3600 or R7 2700?

[Flying Sausages]

Hello. On Amazon US, R7 2700 is cheaper about $11 than R5 3600. Should I go with R7 2700 or R5 3600? R7 2700 is nice because 8/16, but R5 3600 is fast in 6/12. I want to do video editing like Shotcut, streaming sometimes, photoshopping, and gaming as well. I probably will upgrade to 1440P from 1080P. I am having a difficult time to pick either of these two. Please help.

[Princess Luna]

It depends,

 

Does your productivity outweights your gaming? then yes go R7 2700.

 

Will you game most and do just mainstream/average desktop'ing? then R5 3600 it is.

 

The 2700 has more multi-tasking potential and more multi-threaded capacity but will lag behind on single core performance which is key for mainstream applications and gaming.

[Mr.Humble]

I'd go with the faster 3600 - Photoshop and some video editing software prefer speed over number of threads, and gaming performance of the 3600 is not much behind the 3700X. It will do 1440p completely fine.

 

If you actually have a use case for more cores, the 2700X is a great option too.

[Sauron]

What graphics card and monitor would you be pairing this with? Because if you have less than a 2070 or a 60hz monitor you will see no difference in games and you might as well get a 2700.

-edit-

now that @Mr.Humble mentions it, some editing software does prefer a few faster cores over more, slower cores - if you predominantly use photoshop the 3600 is probably a better choice

[Flying Sausages]

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

What graphics card and monitor would you be pairing this with? Because if you have less than a 2070 or a 60hz monitor you will see no difference in games and you might as well get a 2700. 

I am planning to upgrade GTX 970 to RX 590 8GB, and monitor upgrade to 1440P either 60HZ or 120Hz in the future.

[GrockleTD]

5 minutes ago, Sauron said:

What graphics card and monitor would you be pairing this with? Because if you have less than a 2070 or a 60hz monitor you will see no difference in games and you might as well get a 2700.

-edit-

now that @Mr.Humble mentions it, some editing software does prefer a few faster cores over more, slower cores - if you predominantly use photoshop the 3600 is probably a better choice

From experience shortcut is able to use most of a 3700x (80-90–100) percent

[Sauron]

Just now, OlympicAssEater said:

I am planning to upgrade GTX 970 to RX 590 8GB, and monitor upgrade to 1440P either 60HZ or 120Hz in the future.

You can't really push 120fps at 1440p on most modern games with either of those cards so I'd go for 60hz. So as I said, for games which one you pick makes no difference - so you should get whatever performs best in the rest of the software you use. The 3600 is definitely faster in photoshop, I can't find any benchmark results for shotcut though. For streaming, assuming you use OBS the 2700 should be faster.

 

 

[G00fySmiley]

depends on what you use it for. I just did this debate myself and ended up with a Ryzen 7 2700. My reasoning is with the new generation of consoles around the corner with more cores (its still amd and supposedly both are getting 8 core/16 thread processors so I expect cut down Ryzen 7 modules with vega graphics onboard.) With that in mind  I chose a 2700x over a 3600x to make sure that build (my son's gaming pc) would be reliant for at least the next 5-7 years as engines are modified in newer titles to use the extra cores.  

[Flying Sausages]

2 minutes ago, Sauron said:

You can't really push 120fps at 1440p on most modern games with either of those cards so I'd go for 60hz. So as I said, for games which one you pick makes no difference - so you should get whatever performs best in the rest of the software you use. The 3600 is definitely faster in photoshop, I can't find any benchmark results for shotcut though. For streaming, assuming you use OBS the 2700 should be faster.

 

 

I did use OBS in the past so I am familiar with the software. What about  VirtualBox VM performance on R5 3600?

[Sauron]

1 minute ago, G00fySmiley said:

depends on what you use it for. I just did this debate myself and ended up with a Ryzen 7 2700. My reasoning is with the new generation of consoles around the corner with more cores (its still amd and supposedly both are getting 8 core/16 thread processors so I expect cut down Ryzen 7 modules with vega graphics onboard.) With that in mind  I chose a 2700x over a 3600x to make sure that build (my son's gaming pc) would be reliant for at least the next 5-7 years as engines are modified in newer titles to use the extra cores.  

Current consoles have 8 cores, in fact even the ps3 had 8 cores. This reasoning doesn't work, unfortunately. Trying to "future proof" anything is generally a bad idea. Especially since AM4 has a very good upgrade path for if and when it becomes necessary.

3 minutes ago, OlympicAssEater said:

I did use OBS in the past so I am familiar with the software. What about  VirtualBox VM performance on R5 3600?

Depends on what you need VirtualBox for, if it's just one or even two VMs doing non intensive tasks then it really doesn't make much of a difference which one you pick. If you consistently use multiple VMs for intensive tasks the 2700 will have the edge, but I wouldn't be using VirtualBox at that point.

[G00fySmiley]

28 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Current consoles have 8 cores, in fact even the ps3 had 8 cores. This reasoning doesn't work, unfortunately. Trying to "future proof" anything is generally a bad idea. Especially since AM4 has a very good upgrade path for if and when it becomes necessary.

Depends on what you need VirtualBox for, if it's just one or even two VMs doing non intensive tasks then it really doesn't make much of a difference which one you pick. If you consistently use multiple VMs for intensive tasks the 2700 will have the edge, but I wouldn't be using VirtualBox at that point.

The current consoles (PS4/XBOX1 have 8 amd cores but its shared scheduler and resources. PS5/ xbox scarlet s are (supposedly) 16 cores with shared resources again. 

 

the PS3 is really not in the same place as PCs as playstation did their own things there with a weird cell architecture (1 big 8 small SPEs). Of note there the 8th "core" was always disabled, and one of the "cores" was not available for gaming use it was fo rthe system. (really not wanting to use the term "core" for an SPE but for simplicity will) 

 

Also of note here over the life of the PS3 some games did get up to using the 6 threads available to it (though strong emphisis on single core performance with 5 smaller low useage threads), and over the course of the ps4/xbox1 they have commonly gone up to 8/10  

[Sauron]

31 minutes ago, G00fySmiley said:

The current consoles (PS4/XBOX1 have 8 amd cores but its shared scheduler and resources. PS5/ xbox scarlet s are (supposedly) 16 cores with shared resources again. 

 

the PS3 is really not in the same place as PCs as playstation did their own things there with a weird cell architecture (1 big 8 small SPEs). Of note there the 8th "core" was always disabled, and one of the "cores" was not available for gaming use it was fo rthe system. (really not wanting to use the term "core" for an SPE but for simplicity will) 

 

Also of note here over the life of the PS3 some games did get up to using the 6 threads available to it (though strong emphisis on single core performance with 5 smaller low useage threads), and over the course of the ps4/xbox1 they have commonly gone up to 8/10  

The point is that just looking at the core count of consoles doesn't give you any insight on what future performance will look like. The ps4 and xbone have FX-like chips, yet FX cpus were and remained mediocre in games throughout their market life. It's just pointless to look at what consoles have and try to deduce what will be good in a few years - it never worked and there's no reason to think it ever will.

 

When you're porting a game to pc from something like a ps4 you have to use radically different libraries and most optimizations you've made for the platform are likely to be lost in the process, so developers pretty much need to go through that all over again - often with different results as they try to target the average pc, which still doesn't have 8 cores and generally has an Intel CPU. It's not enough for the hardware to be similar for ports to be just a matter of dragging and dropping the code and expecting it to work. It helps a little, sure, but that's about it.

 

Besides, if developers (or rather, their publishers) want a game to run well on a given platform, it will run well on that platform regardless of how different the architecture is; just look at games like Doom 2016 being ported to the Switch, which has virtually nothing in common hardware wise with either the average PC or other mainstream consoles, and running ok for a game that looks that good on 5 years old tablet hardware. It has everything to do with developer/publisher commitment and almost nothing to do with hardware similarities.

[G00fySmiley]

2 hours ago, Sauron said:

The point is that just looking at the core count of consoles doesn't give you any insight on what future performance will look like. The ps4 and xbone have FX-like chips, yet FX cpus were and remained mediocre in games throughout their market life. It's just pointless to look at what consoles have and try to deduce what will be good in a few years - it never worked and there's no reason to think it ever will.

 

When you're porting a game to pc from something like a ps4 you have to use radically different libraries and most optimizations you've made for the platform are likely to be lost in the process, so developers pretty much need to go through that all over again - often with different results as they try to target the average pc, which still doesn't have 8 cores and generally has an Intel CPU. It's not enough for the hardware to be similar for ports to be just a matter of dragging and dropping the code and expecting it to work. It helps a little, sure, but that's about it.

 

Besides, if developers (or rather, their publishers) want a game to run well on a given platform, it will run well on that platform regardless of how different the architecture is; just look at games like Doom 2016 being ported to the Switch, which has virtually nothing in common hardware wise with either the average PC or other mainstream consoles, and running ok for a game that looks that good on 5 years old tablet hardware. It has everything to do with developer/publisher commitment and almost nothing to do with hardware similarities.

I more console comparison use  as my personal reasoning than a rule as a whole, but I tend to do pretty well building systems that last 5-7 years base done it /shrug.  It is very true that you cannot knwo 100% what is around the corner. for all we know AMD might pull a 16 core 32 thread out of thier back pocket with a gpu that puts the RTX titan to shame and manage to squeeze it into an APU and call it the PS5 pro in 2 years making everything now obsolete if developers reset that to the bar.

 

I 100% agree on optimization. the switch is impressive for what it is (basically a 2015 mid range tablet hardware wise with some joysticks and buttons) and some companies will make things tha tuse hevay pc hardware like battlefield 5, absolutely stunning eye candy. but most things I do feel like are lazy port of "it kind of works on pc so lets just do that" . as an example Fallout 4 and skyrim look not the best even at launch it was iffy. but the community that loves these games have patched and fixed things to the point where they look better than 90+% or new releases with the retexture and game patches. Hell you cna get ray tracing emulation in skyrim because fans took the time to build it where AAA devs stamp things "good enough" and release (or don't release on PC... looking at you red dead redemption 2) 

 

 

[Tom H]

4 hours ago, OlympicAssEater said:

Hello. On Amazon US, R7 2700 is cheaper about $11 than R5 3600. Should I go with R7 2700 or R5 3600? R7 2700 is nice because 8/16, but R5 3600 is fast in 6/12. I want to do video editing like Shotcut, streaming sometimes, photoshopping, and gaming as well. I probably will upgrade to 1440P from 1080P. I am having a difficult time to pick either of these two. Please help.

3600 all the way.  For gaming, there is no comparison, the 3600 is much better. If you are worried about photoshop, don't. Photoshop is actually faster on 3600 than on 2700x. The IPC improvements more than make up for the 2 additional cores