Gaming and buying the most appropriate CPU(3600 vs 3700)

[SecondGuessing]

Hello!

 

I notice a lot of these threads probably come up here or on reddit, and the majority of the time people say get the 3600 if its just for gaming(the 3600x is not worth it apparently) since it yields good results and the 3700 only gives like 2% more fps for like 110 dollars. The 3700 only increases core count, it doesn't increase clock speed (i am correct I believe?)

 

I'm currently in the boat where I have to choose between the two, and lots of people say the 3700 is future proof, and is a whole two more cores for 100 dollars but my question is wouldn't it make sense to just get the 3600 atm and then if it no longer performs sell it and upgrade to the 4600 or the 4700 when series 4xxx comes out? I mean I am gaming, I don't think I have any need where I will be required to utilize more cores.

 

The second question I want to ask is when ppl say 6c12t is enough theyre referring to the game but doesn't that response just assume the system in question is only running the game with nothing else? I mean, isn't there also bloatware or other APPS in the background utilizing resources? Wouldnt it also be wise to take these into consideration? Cause I mean in real life, youre gonna have various background apps? So would that change the argument to get a 3700, or the 3600 still reigns the best price/performance ratio king?

 

Thank you for reading and your help.

[Entropy.]

8 minutes ago, SecondGuessing said:

Hello!

 

I notice a lot of these threads probably come up here or on reddit, and the majority of the time people say get the 3600 if its just for gaming(the 3600x is not worth it apparently) since it yields good results and the 3700 only gives like 2% more fps for like 110 dollars. The 3700 only increases core count, it doesn't increase clock speed (i am correct I believe?)

 

I'm currently in the boat where I have to choose between the two, and lots of people say the 3700 is future proof, and is a whole two more cores for 100 dollars but my question is wouldn't it make sense to just get the 3600 atm and then if it no longer performs sell it and upgrade to the 4600 or the 4700 when series 4xxx comes out? I mean I am gaming, I don't think I have any need where I will be required to utilize more cores.

 

The second question I want to ask is when ppl say 6c12t is enough theyre referring to the game but doesn't that response just assume the system in question is only running the game with nothing else? I mean, isn't there also bloatware or other APPS in the background utilizing resources? Wouldnt it also be wise to take these into consideration? Cause I mean in real life, youre gonna have various background apps? So would that change the argument to get a 3700, or the 3600 still reigns the best price/performance ratio king?

 

Thank you for reading and your help.

It increases the clock speed, but only by a bit. Nothing major. GPU matter much more than CPU in gaming, so I'd stick with a 3600 and get a better gpu

[RadiatingLight]

for now, games don't really use more than 6 cores (and some don't even use 6, many are stuck at 4c/8t max), so getting more threads doesn't improve FPS by nearly anything today. It's impossible to know how games will scale in the future, but eventually they will use more cores.

3600 is a good CPU for now, and it will likely be cheaper to buy the 3600 now and then upgrade to a 4700X a few years down the line when those extra cores are needed.

with 6 cores, you should be fine running apps in the background. Even though a game might use 6c/12t, it uses core 0 the most, and the other cores might be sitting as 20% usage, so there's plenty of headroom for background stuff.

[Mister Woof]

its up to you. 

 

the 3600 is enough, the 3700 might be more "future proof" for $100 more.

 

but i wouldn't upgrade within a few generations anyway, so the upgrade path to me seems kind of moot.

 

Get the 3600 or the 3700 now, don't worry about upgrading either until 4 or more years go buy and then upgrade to something new, not something old.

[AndreiArgeanu]

8 minutes ago, SecondGuessing said:

The 3700 only increases core count, it doesn't increase clock speed (i am correct I believe?)

the 3700 also has a boost 200mhz higher than the 3600.

9 minutes ago, SecondGuessing said:

sell it and upgrade to the 4600 or the 4700 when series 4xxx comes out?

I doubt AMD is going to release the next generation of CPU's on the same socket so don't bet on being able to install the next generation AMD on your motherboard.

 

2 minutes ago, Brok3n But who cares? said:

I mean, isn't there also bloatware or other APPS in the background utilizing resources?

There is, but most often they don't hog that many resources that it actually makes a difference. Considering that a 3600 can be paired with up to a 2080 or 2080ti and not hold back the GPU in a lot of tittles I don't believe that a couple of apps running on the background will really make the difference.

 

The ryzen 3700x will be very useful use cases other than gaming, like streaming, editing, or heavy multitasking, but also kind of future proof. I'd recommend shelling out the extra 100$ on a better GPU if what you do mainly is game on the machine. If you stream, edit or are a really heavy multi tasker the 3700x may be the better choice for you as in those usecases the extra cores can be used to offload the load on to other cores for streaming or reduce render time during video/photo editing.

[SecondGuessing]

6 minutes ago, Mister Woof said:

its up to you. 

 

the 3600 is enough, the 3700 might be more "future proof" for $100 more.

 

but i wouldn't upgrade within a few generations anyway, so the upgrade path to me seems kind of moot.

 

Get the 3600 or the 3700 now, don't worry about upgrading either until 4 or more years go buy and then upgrade to something new, not something old.

I know many ppl include the new gen consoles coming out in their arguments, as they will employ 8c16t but I'm not entirely sure if thats definitive enough to indicate if games may be employing that architecture in the near future.

 

Future proofing is a "hard" concept, because isn't it also entirely that yes games will use 8c16t BUT...by the time they do, wont the 3700 be outdated? I just dont wanna "choke" early, and early being 2-3yrs, 4 max. I think I might just upgrade more often and sell my stuff, perhaps buying used stuff in the future too. Either way, tech depreciates pretty fast so *shrug*

[SecondGuessing]

5 minutes ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

the 3700 also has a boost 200mhz higher than the 3600.

I doubt AMD is going to release the next generation of CPU's on the same socket so don't bet on being able to install the next generation AMD on your motherboard.

 

I thought 4xxx was gonna be the last am4? Additionally, hasn't there been a bunch of buzz lately that the x570 and b450 boards will support the next release? Tho tbh, I think it would be strange if AMD didnt make 4xxx not a part of AM4 considering ddr5 is coming out soon(unless 4xxx will support ddr5 and not ddr4?)

 

Lots of ppl say OCing the 3600 isn't worth it, but you point out the 3700 is 200mhz. If I can ask directly, does that even matter then - that 200mhz boost? Cause couldn't I also achieve that on my own by OCING with a proper mobo and cooler? Maybe even push it a little higher if safe/possible?

 

 

I actually have a 1080, which I'm fine with atm(Nvidia's/AMD next release may change my mind). I think the 3600 should suffice, tho mentally its kinda hard to accept cause of the huge meta of "get the 3700!! its only 100 more" -___-.

[Boomwebsearch]

@SecondGuessing; Welcome to the LinusTechTips Community Forums!

 

7 minutes ago, SecondGuessing said:

I notice a lot of these threads probably come up here or on reddit, and the majority of the time people say get the 3600 if its just for gaming(the 3600x is not worth it apparently) since it yields good results and the 3700 only gives like 2% more fps for like 110 dollars. The 3700 only increases core count, it doesn't increase clock speed (i am correct I believe?)

What games specifically are you planning to run and with what frame rate, have you decided on what any of the other components of your system are going to be?

 

As of current pricing on Amazon the Ryzen 5 3600x costs $199.99 from the usual $249.00 and the Ryzen 5 3600 costs $173.85. The difference is around $25 due to the sales currently, so at the moment I would go for the Ryzen 5 3600x.

 

21 minutes ago, SecondGuessing said:

The second question I want to ask is when ppl say 6c12t is enough theyre referring to the game but doesn't that response just assume the system in question is only running the game with nothing else? I mean, isn't there also bloatware or other APPS in the background utilizing resources? Wouldnt it also be wise to take these into consideration? Cause I mean in real life, youre gonna have various background apps? So would that change the argument to get a 3700, or the 3600 still reigns the best price/performance ratio king?

If you are building the system yourself, it shouldn't have any bloatware, and modern processors are able to manage the other background tasks that take usually take up very little resources from the CPU. There is software which will stop unneeded apps/programs from running in the background while gaming, although for most users it shouldn't be needed.

 

5 minutes ago, SecondGuessing said:

Future proofing is a "hard" concept, because isn't it also entirely that yes games will use 8c16t BUT...by the time they do, wont the 3700 be outdated? I just dont wanna "choke" early, and early being 2-3yrs, 4 max. I think I might just upgrade more often and sell my stuff, perhaps buying used stuff in the future too. Either way, tech depreciates pretty fast so *shrug*

It is all relative to current mainstream hardware available, the older previous hardware will usually quickly depreciate since consumers want the current gen equipment. Although, you can buy top of the line used hardware from a few generations ago (given that they price fairly) and still enjoy a good computing experience without worrying about the depreciation since it will be much less than if you buy the new current gen hardware.

[Mister Woof]

12 minutes ago, SecondGuessing said:

I know many ppl include the new gen consoles coming out in their arguments, as they will employ 8c16t but I'm not entirely sure if thats definitive enough to indicate if games may be employing that architecture in the near future.

 

Future proofing is a "hard" concept, because isn't it also entirely that yes games will use 8c16t BUT...by the time they do, wont the 3700 be outdated? I just dont wanna "choke" early, and early being 2-3yrs, 4 max. I think I might just upgrade more often and sell my stuff, perhaps buying used stuff in the future too. Either way, tech depreciates pretty fast so *shrug*

The way i see it, "future proofing" to me isn't about gaming. it's about proofing your future in case you decide to broaden your use case. 

 

Obviously there's some exceptions, though. For example, 4/4 was long held as the standard for gaming. It was like that for a decade. Then, on the cusp and flood of new standards, 6/12 suddenly became the standard mid-range. At that point, I would have said, "yes, skip the 4/4 and go for the 6/12" because it was on the very end of a decade of the quad core. So some amount of intuition and critical analysis can help you make decisions. 6/12 chips being the standard has only been a few years. It will take a LONG time for this to become insufficient. 

 

It's been almost 3 years, and so far there hasn't been any meaningful difference between a potent 6/12 and an equally potent 8/16. For example, if you were considering a Ryzen 5 1600 in 2017, and thought, "hey, i want to future proof my CPU in case games need it...maybe I should get a Ryzen 7 1800x?" well...it's been 3 years and there's no appreciable gaming difference between equally clocked 1600 and 1800x's. And so far, 6/12 still isn't a limiting factor for gaming. In the case of first generation Ryzen, it's IPC.

 

So for gaming thus far, 3 years later, no future proofing happened. However, the 1800x is a lot better at doing other things. Say you decided to pick up streaming, or video editing, or whatever, that can use the extra cores. Then, it was a worthy purchase.

Let's say it's 2023, and you got the 3700x instead of the 3600. Games still don't utilize that many more threads than they used to, so gaming performance is equal. But, they need more IPC, and both of these chips provide almost identical IPC. So, you gained nothing, and either way you need to upgrade anyway, and "upgrading" from a 3600 to an "old" 3900x" still won't get you gains in 2023 games.

 

Basically, I'm saying look at the 1600 vs 1800x and see how if you bought the 1800x, you got no future proofing for strictly gaming in 3 years. Those who bought 1500x's, even they are still able to play games competently. 

 

 

 

 

[SecondGuessing]

3 minutes ago, Boomwebsearch said:

@SecondGuessing; Welcome to the LinusTechTips Community Forums!

 

What games specifically are you planning to run and with what frame rate, have you decided on what any of the other components of your system are going to be?

 

As of current pricing on Amazon the Ryzen 5 3600x costs $199.99 from the usual $249.00 and the Ryzen 5 3600 costs $173.85. The difference is around $25 due to the sales currently, so at the moment I would go for the Ryzen 5 3600x.

 

If you are building the system yourself, it shouldn't have any bloatware, and modern processors are able to manage the other background tasks that take usually take up very little resources from the CPU. There is software which will stop unneeded apps/programs from running in the background while gaming, although for most users it shouldn't be needed.

 

It is all relative to current mainstream hardware available, the older previous hardware will usually quickly depreciate since consumers want the current gen equipment. Although, you can buy top of the line used hardware from a few generations ago (given that they price fairly) and still enjoy a good computing experience without worrying about the depreciation since it will be much less than if you buy the new current gen hardware.

Ah sorry, I have a microcenter near me which I should have specified. The 3600 is 159, the 3600x is 179 and the 3700 is 269.99.

 

I'm upgrading. I have a 7700k that i'm gonna give to my younger brother along with its respective motherboard and the 2400mhzddr4 it has. So whatever will replace that will already have a 1080, 650w PSU and a Phanteks Entho pro m. I game at 1440p 144hz and I currently play pubg, insurgency sandstorm, AC Odyssey(struggles to get decent FPS...but I don't think there's a CPu that exists that could give this game what it wants...), and of course intend to play cyberpunk when it comes out. 

[Mister Woof]

7 minutes ago, SecondGuessing said:

Ah sorry, I have a microcenter near me which I should have specified. The 3600 is 159, the 3600x is 179 and the 3700 is 269.99.

 

I'm upgrading. I have a 7700k that i'm gonna give to my younger brother along with its respective motherboard and the 2400mhzddr4 it has. So whatever will replace that will already have a 1080, 650w PSU and a Phanteks Entho pro m. I game at 1440p 144hz and I currently play pubg, insurgency sandstorm, AC Odyssey(struggles to get decent FPS...but I don't think there's a CPu that exists that could give this game what it wants...), and of course intend to play cyberpunk when it comes out. 

AC is a trash game (from an optimization perspective) so I wouldn't judge any of your performance metrics on that one.

 

Personally, unless you want to give your brother the computer primarily as the reason for upgrading, then I would wait. The 7700k with an overclock is still quite potent and will perform in many games as fast or faster than a 3600. Especially games that aren't able to leverage wider resources.

 

You may find yourself actually losing performance here, in some scenarios. As an 8700k user, (basically your same chip + 2 more HT cores) i wouldn't even consider upgrading to anything right now. Even if the 4th generation is up to 15%-20 faster, I still wouldn't. I'd only consider it if I needed wider resources for a new task that I didn't previously do. Just not enough of a perceptible upgrade to be worthwhile.

[Boomwebsearch]

13 hours ago, SecondGuessing said:

Ah sorry, I have a microcenter near me which I should have specified. The 3600 is 159, the 3600x is 179 and the 3700 is 269.99.

 

I'm upgrading. I have a 7700k that i'm gonna give to my younger brother along with its respective motherboard and the 2400mhzddr4 it has. So whatever will replace that will already have a 1080, 650w PSU and a Phanteks Entho pro m. I game at 1440p 144hz and I currently play pubg, insurgency sandstorm, AC Odyssey(struggles to get decent FPS...but I don't think there's a CPu that exists that could give this game what it wants...), and of course intend to play cyberpunk when it comes out. 

13 hours ago, Mister Woof said:

Personally, unless you want to give your brother the computer primarily as the reason for upgrading, then I would wait.

 

An Intel Core i7-7700K is a great processor, shouldn't have issues with playing modern games, in fact, going with a 3rd gen Ryzen over your current processor could lower your performance in some cases since Ryzen has worse single-threaded performance which is usually leveraged more in games than multi-threaded performance which Ryzen excels at. I would wait for Intel 10th gen desktop processors or Ryzen 4th gen processors before making the upgrade (Ryzen 4th gen should have significantly better single-threaded performance).

[Mister Woof]

1 minute ago, Boomwebsearch said:

 

An Intel Core i7-7700K is a great processor, shouldn't have issues with playing modern games, in fact, going with a 3rd gen Ryzen over your current processor could lower your performance in some cases since Ryzen has worse single-threaded performance which is usually leveraged more in games than multi-threaded performance which Ryzen excels at. I would wait for Intel 10th gen desktop processors or Ryzen 4th gen processors before making the upgrade (Ryzen 4th gen should have significantly better single-threaded performance).

His brother would probably really enjoy it though. Haha

[Fatih19]

14 hours ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

the 3700 also has a boost 200mhz higher than the 3600.

I doubt AMD is going to release the next generation of CPU's on the same socket so don't bet on being able to install the next generation AMD on your motherboard.

 

There is, but most often they don't hog that many resources that it actually makes a difference. Considering that a 3600 can be paired with up to a 2080 or 2080ti and not hold back the GPU in a lot of tittles I don't believe that a couple of apps running on the background will really make the difference.

 

The ryzen 3700x will be very useful use cases other than gaming, like streaming, editing, or heavy multitasking, but also kind of future proof. I'd recommend shelling out the extra 100$ on a better GPU if what you do mainly is game on the machine. If you stream, edit or are a really heavy multi tasker the 3700x may be the better choice for you as in those usecases the extra cores can be used to offload the load on to other cores for streaming or reduce render time during video/photo editing.

Alternatively, if you wanted to do the other use cases but don't want to shell out the 100$, you could buy a 2700 for around the same price of a 3600. This of course, would reduce your framerate but it's up to you, really.

[Mister Woof]

Unrelated, but when I was a kid, my best friend was a rich kid, and I remember whispering devilishly into his ear to upgrade stuff (often needlessly) because he always let me have his hand-me-downs.

 

I was such a shitty teenager

[SecondGuessing]

I went with the 3600. My lows are a lot higher than the 7700k. Pretty happy with it!