4th Gen Intel to 3rd Gen AMD?

[Guest]

I do see a lot of 'is the upgrade worth it' threads, so forgive me for yet another. I've been out of the CPU game ever since I bought my 4790k. So far my system actually runs pretty much everything I own on max settings just fine (specs in my signature). But a couple of my games are heavy on the CPU, specifically my Total War games and those do tend to lag when too much is on screen. A brief Youtube review search has told me that Intel is basically not worth it, dollar for dollar at least, so for the first time in my two decade career in computers I'm considering AMD. They seem to have become quite competitive.

 

Anyway, I was looking at their third generation Ryzen processors, mainly a Ryzen 5 3600. My ultimate question is, would I actually see any benefit from my current set up? Yes I know I'd have to get a new motherboard and RAM, but would a CPU upgrade be worth it for some of my CPU bound games? Thanks for any insight, as I am not familiar with AMD products at all.

 

Fun fact, I don't overclock anything in my system, so I don't care about that potential. 

[Mister Woof]

So we get you don't like to OC, but that's the biggest selling point if the 4790k.

 

If you did, you might find performance is acceptable and you won't need to upgrade.

 

Personally,of I had a 4790k with a decent OC, I would try to stretch it out on more generation.

[Jurrunio]

22 minutes ago, Stylized_Violence said:

Fun fact, I don't overclock anything in my system, so I don't care about that potential. 

of course you'll get performance benefits. Not only does the 3600 have more cores, but it does more work at the same frequency per core. Add to the fact that you completely wasted the expensive board and card just to run stock (like @Queen Chrysallis), you have frequency disadvantages on the 4790k as well.

 

Also the Ryzen 3rd gen CPUs are basically maxed out from the box with little overclocking headroom, so you dont lose anything by leaving it at stock settings. Just applying XMP profile on the memory and you're good to go.

[Guest]

14 hours ago, Plutosaurus said:

So we get you don't like to OC, but that's the biggest selling point if the 4790k.

 

If you did, you might find performance is acceptable and you won't need to upgrade.

 

Personally,of I had a 4790k with a decent OC, I would try to stretch it out on more generation.

I got the 4790k because it was the highest clocked processor at the time, and I did OC it when I first bought it and got my speeds to around 4.4GHz. I know it's nothing to write home about, but the tinkering with the voltages and the like for a few extra frames just didn't seem worth it to me. That's why I'm considering a more modern processor, perhaps it'll leverage more performance just by the fact of being a few years newer.

 

14 hours ago, Jurrunio said:

of course you'll get performance benefits. Not only does the 3600 have more cores, but it does more work at the same frequency per core. Add to the fact that you completely wasted the expensive board and card just to run stock (like @Queen Chrysallis), you have frequency disadvantages on the 4790k as well.

 

Also the Ryzen 3rd gen CPUs are basically maxed out from the box with little overclocking headroom, so you dont lose anything by leaving it at stock settings. Just applying XMP profile on the memory and you're good to go.

I admit I bought the board because I liked the way it looked and for it's I/O. No argument from me on that point. But the stock experience has been pretty good overall, I just never got much extra out of the OC I did put on my 4790k. Yes I got a few frames but it wasn't worth it to me in the end. To some it might be. Your last point is what I was mainly after, so I thank you for contributing to my question.

[Jurrunio]

1 minute ago, Stylized_Violence said:

I just never got much extra out of the OC I did put on my 4790k.

that's probably because of GPU bottleneck. It should occur in games that are not particularly CPU demanding, judging from my 2600k with 1070 experience.

[SkilledRebuilds]

13 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

that's probably because of GPU bottleneck. It should occur in games that are not particularly CPU demanding, judging from my 2600k with 1070 experience.

Also memory bandwidth is a factor maybe,.. I can do 4790K 4.9Ghz tops, 2400Mhz at 2600Mhz and there still feels like it should be doing more than it does...(GTX1070 using 900p low settings) but the pipeline feels like the results in some games are limited elsewhere..  but I'm also likely wrong in many ways without knowing for sure.

 

The 4790K when clocked up has the IPC around 2nd Gen without the latency penalty (which it has),..and 3rd Gen is better on IPC but has the memory latency penalty holding it back a tad too...

But if you chase more cores and games (some do) realize, then that would be my justification, if MY games were multicore enough to warrant it... (knowing future games though likely being 6-8thread-->12-16thread aware in the next 5 years.. Devs building new Engines with 8core support or higher.

FYI in case you didn't know..(AvgUsersImean) a GPU bound 80-90fps on a 2600K can still be 85-100FPS GPU bound on a 4790K (or whatever,..something better), depends on the game as always.. So people with 2600K's at whatever clocks saying they are GPU bound... still miss a sliver of performance, but its hardly worth talking about, but is worth mentioning once...

[Jurrunio]

26 minutes ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

The 4790K when clocked up has the IPC around 2nd Gen without the latency penalty (which it has)

Latency penalty? I doubt that. At 4.5GHz they seem to do about 900cb in R15, while my 2600k does 800cb.

 

28 minutes ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

(GTX1070 using 900p low settings)

no wonder, I use 1080p high or very high settings in all games, if not maxed out in older ones.

 

29 minutes ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

still miss a sliver of performance,

silver? slither?

[SkilledRebuilds]

28 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

Latency penalty? I doubt that. At 4.5GHz they seem to do about 900cb in R15, while my 2600k does 800cb.

 

no wonder, I use 1080p high or very high settings in all games, if not maxed out in older ones.

 

silver? slither?

I wasn't meaning 2nd Gen Intel, But 2nd Gen Ryzen IPC vs 4th Gen Intel, Ryzen has the IPC either on par or slightly better, but a latency Advantage on my 4790k but then i'm also Overclocked for more IPC, it's going to be quite close between them, I might have a MaxFPS advantage at best..

 

I used 900p to get extra frames delivered from the GPU so I could see CPU spec differences.

I don't actually play at 900p, testing purposes.

 

Sliver - a tiny portion .

[Jurrunio]

21 minutes ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

I wasn't meaning 2nd Gen Intel, But 2nd Gen Ryzen IPC vs 4th Gen Intel, Ryzen has the IPC either on par or slightly better, but a latency Advantage on my 4790k but then i'm also Overclocked for more IPC, it's going to be quite close between them, I might have a MaxFPS advantage at best..

 

If you're talking about Zen, then you have to mention memory frequency. 

[SkilledRebuilds]

7 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

If you're talking about Zen, then you have to mention memory frequency. 

Well kowledgable people already expect Ryzen at 3200-3600Mhz and cl14-cl16

 

CPU to Memory latency is where my advantage lies. 55.9ns for my 4790K, Ryzen with Fast Ram low latency is still higher than that.

 

I'm not knocking Ryzen down I'm any way by meaning intention... it's just benchmarks I can run and compare values.

[Jurrunio]

6 minutes ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

Well kowledgable people already expect Ryzen at 3200-3600Mhz and cl14-cl16

I still doubt Haswell has IPC similar to Zen+ at that high memory frequency.

 

6 minutes ago, SkilledRebuilds said:

CPU to Memory latency is where my advantage lies. 55.9ns for my 4790K, Ryzen with Fast Ram low latency is still higher than that.

laughs in 49ns

 

I'm limited in bandwidth tho since on Sandy Bridge, memory multiplier only goes up to 16x (2133MHz)

[Zando_]

3 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

I still doubt Haswell has IPC similar to Zen+ at that high memory frequency.

How does one test for latency? I'm running a 5820K (Haswell-E) and 3200Mhz CL16 RAM, would be interesting to see how it compares. 

[Jurrunio]

Just now, Zando Bob said:

How does one test for latency? I'm running a 5820K (Haswell-E) and 3200Mhz CL16 RAM, would be interesting to see how it compares. 

I use the one built into AIDA64. Not sure if you need to use paid version for it.

[Zando_]

4 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

I use the one built into AIDA64. Not sure if you need to use paid version for it.

Next time I have the main rig hooked up I should test then. Mebbe try tweaking the RAM at some point, but I'm iffy about OCing RAM on X99, I've heard a bunch of stories about the IMCs dying and bricking the CPU if pushed too hard (and 3200Mhz CL16 in quad channel is already some beefed bandwidth). 

[Jurrunio]

1 hour ago, Zando Bob said:

Next time I have the main rig hooked up I should test then. Mebbe try tweaking the RAM at some point, but I'm iffy about OCing RAM on X99, I've heard a bunch of stories about the IMCs dying and bricking the CPU if pushed too hard (and 3200Mhz CL16 in quad channel is already some beefed bandwidth). 

All I've heard is losing quad channel when pushing hard memory settings (so you'll get dual channel if not single instead). Comes back after multiple restarts though