Mulling an Upgrade

[SuperSpy]

I'm seeing all this hype over 3rd-gen Ryzen and starting to feel the upgrade itch, but I'm on the fence and looking for a little insight.  I haven't been paying very close attention to hardware in the last few years so I feel a bit out of the loop.

 

My current rig:

i7-4790k overclocked to 5 Ghz single core / 4.8 all core

ASUS Z97-A

32 GB DDR3

GTX 1060 6GB SC mildly overclocked (1040 core / 4100 VRAM)

Intel 660p 2TB M.2

3 x SATA HDD

EVGA CLC 280mm AIO cooler

Fractal Design Define R4

6 x 1080p displays

 

My primary itch is a CPU upgrade.  My Devil's Canyon i7 while still not what I'd call slow, I feel is showing it's age.  With it is an aging platform with limited PCIe bandwidth, which is getting more important to me with storage.  I'd like to upgrade as few as possible as most of the other components are still fairly new.

 

This machine is both my primary workstation (especially now with all the stay-at-home stuff) and my gaming machine.

 

For work I do IT support, so I'm generally multitasking very heavily as well as doing some light/moderate VM work.  This is the primary reason behind having so many displays.  Historically, I've always favored lots of RAM in my desktops as I'm constantly hopping between tasks while waiting for something like an installer to finish.  For example, it's currently a fairly lazy Saturday afternoon where I'm not actively doing work tasks, and my machine is still hovering around 15 GB used and bouncing between 15-20% CPU just from background tasks while the CPU wanders up and down it's turbo ranges.

 

Outside of work, I play all sorts of games from high FPS shooters to strategy to vintage/GOG and even MMORPGs, and some modern multi-core-optimized games are really starting to hurt my aging quad core, but also some of the games I play are poorly multi-core optimized so I'd also like to see if I can make some significant gains for single-core performance as well.  I recently upgraded my two primary displays to 144Hz, which has also really started to stress single-core performance.

 

That said, my initial upgrade thought is:

 

Ryzen 9 3900X

 

This is where I am really starting to feel the age of my system.  The 4790k is really starting to feel old with just 4 cores, and in this regard I'm on the fence between a 3800X and the 3900X.  I'm sure going from 4 to 8 cores will be a big boost, but at the same time I kind of want to go further, as I plan on stretching the platform out for a similarly-long time as my current setup.  I will probably lightly overclock the CPU right from the start to get as much single-core/turbo performance as I can to help the high-FPS gaming.

 

64GB DDR4 3200 in two 32-GB sticks

 

I've started to recently bump against the commit limit for my current 32GB setup, so I'd like to make an immediate upgrade here.  However, I want to leave myself a cheap upgrade path in the future, so I'd like to keep some free slots so I have an easy way to bump it up to 128 in a year or three.

 

ASUS TUF GAMING X570-Plus

 

Honestly, this is the item to which I have the least insight.  Obviously, as I'm switching platforms I need to change motherboards, and I'll be really happy to be able to move up to PCIe Gen 4.  My current setup only gives me PCIe 3 for the GPU slot, and 2 for the remaining slots and the M.2 slot, which is probably slightly bottle-necking my current SSD.  It's also going to give me some breathing room for future expansion into faster drives and networking.

 

My main questions are deciding between a 3800X and 3900X, and deciding a motherboard.

 

I'd like the extra cores and slightly higher boost clock of the 3900X, but I'm not sure if it's worth the nearly $200 price premium.  I'm leaning towards splurging on the 3900X as I want this platform to last as long as possible.

 

As far as the motherboard, I'm very open to suggestion.  I assume I need an X570 board for overclocking and PCIe Gen 4 support, and I like the dual M.2 layout of the X570-Plus, but they are quite pricey.  I'd prefer an ASUS board, as I've had good luck with them in the past, but I could be persuaded otherwise.

 

I plan on keeping the GPU as it's currently not a bottleneck for most titles I play (they seem to be more CPU-bound on my current setup), plus I can easily upgrade that in the future.

 

The big question and the reason this post has been a bit of a ramble is: Will it be worth the upgrade?  $1000 is a lot to spend on what's effectively just a CPU upgrade, and I want to make sure I'm going to get some clear performance gains out of that much cash.

[dizmo]

As I'm sure you know, worth is relative. So no one can really answer you if it's worth it or not, because that'd be decided on a person to person basis.

If it was me, I'd be waiting for 4th gen Ryzen, get the best you can with that, and ride it out as long as you can. 5th gen will likely be on a different socket, so you'd be at the end of your upgrade path with the board. You're also getting significantly faster RAM with DDR4.

[Fatih19]

6 minutes ago, dizmo said:

As I'm sure you know, worth is relative. So no one can really answer you if it's worth it or not, because that'd be decided on a person to person basis.

If it was me, I'd be waiting for 4th gen Ryzen, get the best you can with that, and ride it out as long as you can. 5th gen will likely be on a different socket, so you'd be at the end of your upgrade path with the board. You're also getting significantly faster RAM with DDR4.

I agree. Since you have a perfectly fine PC, I advise to wait maybe 6 months to upgrade for either price drops in Ryzen 3000 or (since you said you want this platform to last as long as possible) Ryzen 4000. It could also be a cost saving measure since Covid-19 has affected supply chains and inflate hardware prices in some cases.

[dizmo]

Just now, Fatih19 said:

I agree. Since you have a perfectly fine PC, I advise to wait maybe 6 months to upgrade for either price drops in Ryzen 3000 or (since you said you want this platform to last as long as possible) Ryzen 4000. It could also be a cost saving measure since Covid-19 has affected supply chains and inflate hardware prices in some cases.

COVID is here to stay for the foreseeable future, it'll be a year if not three or more before things return to normal.

[SuperSpy]

28 minutes ago, dizmo said:

If it was me, I'd be waiting for 4th gen Ryzen, get the best you can with that, and ride it out as long as you can. 5th gen will likely be on a different socket, so you'd be at the end of your upgrade path with the board. You're also getting significantly faster RAM with DDR4.

Oh wow I didn't realize AMD's schedule was so aggressive.  I would have expected them to try and ride out the current chips a bit longer.  This is exactly the kind of sanity check I was looking for with this post.

 

I spent a little time after posting looking up benchmark figures, and I was expecting a bigger single-threaded gain moving to Ryzen, but it looks like it's at best a 20% boost.  That's not nothing, but I was expecting a bit more considering Haswell's age.

 

Plus, depending on pricing, I might be able to move up a notch in the product line-up by waiting.

 

Thanks for the insight.

[dizmo]

47 minutes ago, SuperSpy said:

Oh wow I didn't realize AMD's schedule was so aggressive.  I would have expected them to try and ride out the current chips a bit longer.  This is exactly the kind of sanity check I was looking for with this post.

 

I spent a little time after posting looking up benchmark figures, and I was expecting a bigger single-threaded gain moving to Ryzen, but it looks like it's at best a 20% boost.  That's not nothing, but I was expecting a bit more considering Haswell's age.

 

Plus, depending on pricing, I might be able to move up a notch in the product line-up by waiting.

 

Thanks for the insight.

It's not too aggressive, it's on trend with what Intel does.

AMD was so far behind Intel, the fact that Ryzen was on par at all was quite a feat.

[trevb0t]

55 minutes ago, dizmo said:

It's not too aggressive, it's on trend with what Intel does.

AMD was so far behind Intel, the fact that Ryzen was on par at all was quite a feat.

I think a big part of it is also that they promised AM4 through 2020, so their last AM4 product release being in 2019 could feel kinda cheap to the customer base.

[dizmo]

1 minute ago, trevb0t said:

I think a big part of it is also that they promised AM4 through 2020, so their last AM4 product release being in 2019 would feel kinda cheap.

That statement makes no sense. It doesn't even relate to what you quoted.

[trevb0t]

1 minute ago, dizmo said:

That statement makes no sense. It doesn't even relate to what you quoted.

I was merely expanding on reasons why the forthcoming release might fell "aggressive" beyond your statement. So... I disagree.

[kyn1972]

5 hours ago, SuperSpy said:

I'm seeing all this hype over 3rd-gen Ryzen and starting to feel the upgrade itch, but I'm on the fence and looking for a little insight.  I haven't been paying very close attention to hardware in the last few years so I feel a bit out of the loop.

 

My current rig:

i7-4790k overclocked to 5 Ghz single core / 4.8 all core

ASUS Z97-A

32 GB DDR3

GTX 1060 6GB SC mildly overclocked (1040 core / 4100 VRAM)

Intel 660p 2TB M.2

3 x SATA HDD

EVGA CLC 280mm AIO cooler

Fractal Design Define R4

6 x 1080p displays

 

My primary itch is a CPU upgrade.  My Devil's Canyon i7 while still not what I'd call slow, I feel is showing it's age.  With it is an aging platform with limited PCIe bandwidth, which is getting more important to me with storage.  I'd like to upgrade as few as possible as most of the other components are still fairly new.

 

This machine is both my primary workstation (especially now with all the stay-at-home stuff) and my gaming machine.

 

For work I do IT support, so I'm generally multitasking very heavily as well as doing some light/moderate VM work.  This is the primary reason behind having so many displays.  Historically, I've always favored lots of RAM in my desktops as I'm constantly hopping between tasks while waiting for something like an installer to finish.  For example, it's currently a fairly lazy Saturday afternoon where I'm not actively doing work tasks, and my machine is still hovering around 15 GB used and bouncing between 15-20% CPU just from background tasks while the CPU wanders up and down it's turbo ranges.

 

Outside of work, I play all sorts of games from high FPS shooters to strategy to vintage/GOG and even MMORPGs, and some modern multi-core-optimized games are really starting to hurt my aging quad core, but also some of the games I play are poorly multi-core optimized so I'd also like to see if I can make some significant gains for single-core performance as well.  I recently upgraded my two primary displays to 144Hz, which has also really started to stress single-core performance.

 

That said, my initial upgrade thought is:

 

Ryzen 9 3900X

 

This is where I am really starting to feel the age of my system.  The 4790k is really starting to feel old with just 4 cores, and in this regard I'm on the fence between a 3800X and the 3900X.  I'm sure going from 4 to 8 cores will be a big boost, but at the same time I kind of want to go further, as I plan on stretching the platform out for a similarly-long time as my current setup.  I will probably lightly overclock the CPU right from the start to get as much single-core/turbo performance as I can to help the high-FPS gaming.

 

64GB DDR4 3200 in two 32-GB sticks

 

I've started to recently bump against the commit limit for my current 32GB setup, so I'd like to make an immediate upgrade here.  However, I want to leave myself a cheap upgrade path in the future, so I'd like to keep some free slots so I have an easy way to bump it up to 128 in a year or three.

 

ASUS TUF GAMING X570-Plus

 

Honestly, this is the item to which I have the least insight.  Obviously, as I'm switching platforms I need to change motherboards, and I'll be really happy to be able to move up to PCIe Gen 4.  My current setup only gives me PCIe 3 for the GPU slot, and 2 for the remaining slots and the M.2 slot, which is probably slightly bottle-necking my current SSD.  It's also going to give me some breathing room for future expansion into faster drives and networking.

 

My main questions are deciding between a 3800X and 3900X, and deciding a motherboard.

 

I'd like the extra cores and slightly higher boost clock of the 3900X, but I'm not sure if it's worth the nearly $200 price premium.  I'm leaning towards splurging on the 3900X as I want this platform to last as long as possible.

 

As far as the motherboard, I'm very open to suggestion.  I assume I need an X570 board for overclocking and PCIe Gen 4 support, and I like the dual M.2 layout of the X570-Plus, but they are quite pricey.  I'd prefer an ASUS board, as I've had good luck with them in the past, but I could be persuaded otherwise.

 

I plan on keeping the GPU as it's currently not a bottleneck for most titles I play (they seem to be more CPU-bound on my current setup), plus I can easily upgrade that in the future.

 

The big question and the reason this post has been a bit of a ramble is: Will it be worth the upgrade?  $1000 is a lot to spend on what's effectively just a CPU upgrade, and I want to make sure I'm going to get some clear performance gains out of that much cash.

I was in the same boat about 4 weeks ago with a 9 year old system and I decided to splurge on my next pc purchase about 2 years ago which is why I saved up the money and bought the 3900x as I do not plan on replacing this CPU for probably 7 to 8 years.

I guess it comes down to how soon do you plan your next cpu replacement? If its sooner than 4 years then get the 3800x but if you need it to last longer then you might want to consider the 3900x with its extra cores.

In the end though it will be up to you to decide but that is my 2 cents for what its worth.

[dizmo]

13 minutes ago, trevb0t said:

I was merely expanding on reasons why the forthcoming release might fell "aggressive" beyond your statement. So... I disagree.

He was commenting on their release schedule, which has nothing to do with how long they decided to stay on one socket. So. You're wrong.

[SuperSpy]

3 minutes ago, kyn1972 said:

I was in the same boat about 4 weeks ago with a 9 year old system and I decided to splurge on my next pc purchase about 2 years ago which is why I saved up the money and bought the 3900x as I do not plan on replacing this CPU for probably 7 to 8 years.

I guess it comes down to how soon do you plan your next cpu replacement? If its sooner than 4 years then get the 3800x but if you need it to last longer then you might want to consider the 3900x with its extra cores.

Yeah I would say I had a great run with my current PC, so if I can get another 5-6 years out of an upgrade I'd go for it.

 

Given the update cadence, I'm thinking the best route would be to wait until 4000 series desktop CPUs, which would also give me a little extra budget to maybe upgrade to a hypothetical 4950X or maybe even better some kind of chip in between the hypothetical 4900X and 4950X.  The other reason I'd shy away from the current 3950X apart from it's price premium is it's base clock speed is slower than the 3900X, which at that point would be worth more to me than the multi-threaded gains going from 12 to 16.

 

My dream part would be some kind of "Super" 4900X with the same core count and boosted clocks over the base chip.

[Fatih19]

7 minutes ago, SuperSpy said:

Yeah I would say I had a great run with my current PC, so if I can get another 5-6 years out of an upgrade I'd go for it.

 

Given the update cadence, I'm thinking the best route would be to wait until 4000 series desktop CPUs, which would also give me a little extra budget to maybe upgrade to a hypothetical 4950X or maybe even better some kind of chip in between the hypothetical 4900X and 4950X.  The other reason I'd shy away from the current 3950X apart from it's price premium is it's base clock speed is slower than the 3900X, which at that point would be worth more to me than the multi-threaded gains going from 12 to 16.

 

My dream part would be some kind of "Super" 4900X with the same core count and boosted clocks over the base chip.

Word on the street is that the Ryzen 4000 will have faster clock speed so I think it's even better for you to wait.

[SuperSpy]

3 minutes ago, Fatih19 said:

Word on the street is that the Ryzen 4000 will have faster clock speed so I think it's even better for you to wait.

Who knows, at that point they might throw in the extra 4 cores for 'free' too, and introduce like an 18/20 core part as the new halo product.

[trevb0t]

10 minutes ago, SuperSpy said:

My dream part would be some kind of "Super" 4900X with the same core count and boosted clocks over the base chip.

Really the point of Ryzen 9 isn't to be faster than Ryzen 3/5/7. It's to have more cores. (So better for workload, approximately equal for gaming.)

As it stands, a 3950X does game a touch better than the 3600, but the difference is mostly negligible since the cores clock very similarly, and 6c/12t is already whole heads above what games are really aiming for.

 

So if you're upgrading for gaming, go Ryzen 5/7 and a better GPU budget.

[SuperSpy]

2 minutes ago, trevb0t said:

Really the point of Ryzen 9 isn't to be faster than Ryzen 3/5/7. It's to have more cores. (So better for workload, approximately equal for gaming.)

As it stands, a 3950X does game a touch better than the 3600, but the difference is mostly negligible since the cores clock very similarly, and 6c/12t is already whole heads above what games are really aiming for.

 

So if you're upgrading for gaming, go Ryzen 5/7 and a better GPU budget.

For me, it's both.  My focus in these posts has been more clock speed/single threading because I've already limited my upgrade options to Ryzen 9, which has a good amount of cores across the range.  However, I still want to get a significant increase in cores as IMO that will be quite important for future-proofing the machine.

[kyn1972]

59 minutes ago, SuperSpy said:

For me, it's both.  My focus in these posts has been more clock speed/single threading because I've already limited my upgrade options to Ryzen 9, which has a good amount of cores across the range.  However, I still want to get a significant increase in cores as IMO that will be quite important for future-proofing the machine.

Which is exactly why I chose the 3900x as unlike some I do not have hundreds or thousands every year of extra money to spend on another upgrade so I have to do the best that I think I personally can do for me.

That does not mean its best for you or anyone else of course as everyone does different things with their gear so they need different things as there is not one size fits all upgrade.