What CPU would be best to pair with the 3090 for a 4k gaming setup?

[Duranson]

Just now, JakeSublime said:

Intel: i5-10500k
AMD: Ryzen 7 3700x

And I would also recommend the 3080 instead of the 3090. 3090 is a titan class card, NOT a 3080 Ti (as far as information shows us).

I mean ... yes and no. There's a lot of evidence (#1 being that NVIDIA letting their AIBs make and sell their own 3090s) that the 3090 kind of is the new 2080ti. Instead of there just being extra VRAM like there was with the titan last year, there are signs that it could actually have a major performance benefit over the 3080.

 

But, when benchmarks come out, if it does turn out that there's no major benefit of the 3090 over the 3080, then I will just go 3080. But we just have to wait and see, I guess.

[Duranson]

1 minute ago, badreg said:

I standby my original recommendations of a 3800X or a 10600/10700/10900K. It doesn't sound like video editing is going to be that important of a workload for you, and maximizing frames is going to be priority at least some of the time. Therefore, the highest speed Ryzen would be my choice for an AMD platform. 8 cores will also be more than sufficient for your use case. If I had to pick a single Intel chip for your use case, the 10700K would be the sweet spot.

Sweet, thank you. Do you think I should go with a R7 3800x or 3800XT?

[Duranson]

4 minutes ago, badreg said:

I standby my original recommendations of a 3800X or a 10600/10700/10900K. It doesn't sound like video editing is going to be that important of a workload for you, and maximizing frames is going to be priority at least some of the time. Therefore, the highest speed Ryzen would be my choice for an AMD platform. 8 cores will also be more than sufficient for your use case. If I had to pick a single Intel chip for your use case, the 10700K would be the sweet spot.

 

As an aside, according to Nvidia, a 3080 will be able to hit 4k 144 for many titles, and 4k 60 for more demanding titles. If you aren't looking for 4k 144 in all titles, a 3090 is not necessary.

Oh, and also, might be a super dumb question but - 16gb of RAM wouldn't bottleneck a 3090, right?

[badreg]

21 minutes ago, Duranson said:

Sweet, thank you. Do you think I should go with a R7 3800x or 3800XT?

Theoretically, the 3800XT should have a slight edge, but I don't think there is much of a difference in practice. You should watch some comparisons between the two and decide.

17 minutes ago, Duranson said:

Oh, and also, might be a super dumb question but - 16gb of RAM wouldn't bottleneck a 3090, right?

As long as you are not running out of system memory, it won't matter. Running of the system memory creates a bottleneck for your CPU. 

[xg32]

24 minutes ago, Duranson said:

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i think for a new build with a 3090, i'd recommend just waiting for zen 3, you have more info by then and don't have to deal with pcie3.0 or zen 2 single core.

[HM-2]

2 hours ago, JakeSublime said:

 If you want absolute top teir GPU performance (3090 MSRP rumored at $1500), then just get the absolute top teir CPU performance (3900XT or 10900k). 

I mean that's top-tier mainstream CPU performance. If budget and power consumption was no concern and the OP wanted to overclock I'd probably consider something like a 10980XE. But for gaming use right now a 10700K or 10900K is probably the "best" pairing (in terms of mainstream performance); if you do any non-gaming tasking such as rendering, multimedia etc then a 3900X/T or 3950X is probably a better bet.