To Z390, or to X570?

[mao91]

Use scenario: audio production. Studio environment. Dual 1080p monitors + single 4k tv. 

X570 pros (3700x): Cheaper. Access to PCIe 4.0 motherboards (not much of a gamer but I am eyeballing the 3070 as a possibility for occasional gaming). Newer. More energy efficient. Lower TDP. More PCIe lanes (24 PCIe 4.0 or 48 PCIe 3.0). 7nm.

X570 cons: no motherboards with rear Thunderbolt 3, which my equipment does require. Only feasible mobo option would be Aorus X570 Pro + alpine ridge add-in card, more workaround. No integrated graphics so would need a discrete GPU. Slower than the 9900k.

Z390 pros (9900k): Access to motherboards with onboard rear Thunderbolt 3 without the need of an add-in card. Faster clocks, lower memory latency, generally more powerful CPU. Integrated graphics could handle my monitor setup for workstation type stuff, which is my primary usage. Faster than the 3700x. Higher userbenchmark workstation score.

Z390 cons: no access to PCIe 4.0 motherboards (eventual 3070 upgrade would face bandwidth bottleneck). 14nm. 

 

Anybody else want to chime in on this?

 

Also, if all you're going to say is "bruh z490," you can see yourself out of this thread. A 4-6% performance increase is not worth a $180 increase in CPU cost.

[Mateyyy]

5 minutes ago, B.Toast said:

Also, if all you're going to say is "bruh z490," you can see yourself out of this thread. A 4-6% performance increase is not worth a $180 increase in CPU cost.

Since when is the 10700K $180 more expensive than the 9900K?

[boggy77]

ASRock X570 PHANTOM GAMING-ITX/TB3

 

this mobo has tb3.

[Moonzy]

Pretty sure several x570 boards have tb3 on rear up, some with DP passthrough

 

Someone made a thread and complied all x570 board with tb3

 

Edit: this

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1233452-amd-motherboard-that-supports-thunderbolt/

[Chris Pratt]

FWIW, it's unlikely that the 30-series cards are going to need PCIe 4.0 for full performance, and even if they did, it would only be cards like the 3090. A 3070 isn't going to saturate PCIe 3.0.

[mao91]

8 hours ago, boggy77 said:

ASRock X570 PHANTOM GAMING-ITX/TB3

 

this mobo has tb3.

I should clarify I do want an ATX board. I typically use additional add-in cards for various needs.
 

8 hours ago, Moonzy said:

Pretty sure several x570 boards have tb3 on rear up, some with DP passthrough

 

Someone made a thread and complied all x570 board with tb3

 

Edit: this

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1233452-amd-motherboard-that-supports-thunderbolt/

Yeah. Unfortunately none of the ASRock X570 boards tickle my fancy for the price (limited onboard connectivity).

 

8 hours ago, Chris Pratt said:

FWIW, it's unlikely that the 30-series cards are going to need PCIe 4.0 for full performance, and even if they did, it would only be cards like the 3090. A 3070 isn't going to saturate PCIe 3.0.

This is very good to know. So in this case, Z390 wouldn't really be a bad thing. 

On paper, Z390 with a 9900k should perform better for workstation usage. But CPU UserBenchmark appears to give conflicting information; the 9900k is spec'd higher for clocks and offered a better score for workstation usage, but in the description at the bottom of the page it says heavy workstation users should consider the 3700X because it offers better 64-core computations.

The DAW I use in my work is Reaper, which doesn't natively require 64-core computations. Even heavier plugins don't really ask for such computations. So removing that 64-core caveat, I am thinking that the Z390/9900k route may be a better bet for me. For just a hair more cost over the X570/3700X route I can get better performance and not have to worry quite as much about trying to crank my RAM speeds to optimize CPU performance. 

My current 5820k (really, X99 was a godsend for so many people at the time) is the bottom of the X99 bucket and still offers 28 PCIe lanes. The 9900k only offers 24 lanes, so I might be a bit limited if I choose to use two NVMe M.2 SSDs and still try to run an extra USB add-in card and want to an a 3070 at 16x bandwidth. I'd be curious to hear what someone else's experience with such a situation of needing PCIe lanes might be.

[boggy77]

6 minutes ago, B.Toast said:

CPU UserBenchmark

firstly, don't trust userbenchmark.

 

secondly, don't buy into a discontinued platform.

 

if you want intel for TB3, go for z490 and a i7  or a i9 10th gen

[mao91]

2 minutes ago, boggy77 said:

firstly, don't trust userbenchmark.

 

secondly, don't buy into a discontinued platform.

 

if you want intel for TB3, go for z490 and a i7  or a i9 10th gen

Okay that's good to know. Now, further question:

I know Intel doesn't support PCIe 4.0 yet. How does this work for Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSDs? Will I face bandwidth bottlenecking for, say, a 970 Pro or Evo Plus? 

[boggy77]

1 minute ago, B.Toast said:

I know Intel doesn't support PCIe 4.0 yet. How does this work for Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSDs? Will I face bandwidth bottlenecking for, say, a 970 Pro or Evo Plus? 

yes. no point in getting a pcie4 ssd with intel for now

however, both 970 pro and evo plus are pcie 3, so no worries there

[mao91]

Good to know. Gen4 M.2 bandwidth would be nice for loading some of my heavier tools (Omnisphere and Analoglab are notoriously heavy, Kontakt can be heavy but even my X99 system handles it well over a SATA connection) but isn't really necessary as I'm handling them to a fairly satisfactory extent over a SATA SSD (860 EVO) so I know that even a Gen3 M.2 NVMe would already offer a significant performance increase.

 

I think what I'm mostly concerned about, in order, is:

1. Raw CPU horsepower. As software emulation of analog hardware gets better, it becomes significantly more demanding on CPU resources. I can peg my 5820k pretty easily playing back larger sessions with multiple instances of higher-end emulations, even at a 4.4GHz OC. This is my draw to the 9900K, because it offers the biggest performance increase over what I currently have, whereas the 3700X only offers a mild to moderate performance increase.

2. Thunderbolt 3. Whether native motherboard integration or add-in card, I absolutely require it. 

 

3. Memory optimization. I'm not exactly talking about trying to crank massive OC's on memory; I'm currently running 2400MHz DDR4 with no issues, and am upgrading to 3600MHz DDR4. This will already be a 50% speed increase. I just want stability and timing optimization, which has improved quite a bit already. I'm not concerned about achieving optimization on either platform, but it is important.

 

4. PCIe bandwidth & lanes. This is my draw to the 3700X. 24 PCIe Gen4 lanes is equivalent to 48 Gen3 lanes, which is literally double the PCIe bandwidth and would offer me access to Gen4 NVMe SSDs which would yield significantly faster loading times for heavier project assets. Right now trying to load a larger / heavier project can take several minutes (and may sometimes outright crash my system). Gen4 M.2 could significantly reduce that loading time.

I have considered the possibility of simply upgrading the RAM and SSD setup on my current system and waiting until Intel jumps on the PCIe 4.0 train so I don't have to choose between raw CPU horsepower upgrade or PCIe bandwidth upgrade.

[Mister Woof]

10 hours ago, Mateyyy said:

Since when is the 10700K $180 more expensive than the 9900K?

 

i9-9900k is $399.99

i7-10700k is $393.99

 

Motherboards are a wash for a good one

 

I'll take 10th gen's improved PCB/IHS thermal design over the 9th gen, thanks.

[RobFRaschke]

2 hours ago, Mister Woof said:

 

i9-9900k is $399.99

i7-10700k is $393.99

 

Motherboards are a wash for a good one

 

I'll take 10th gen's improved PCB/IHS thermal design over the 9th gen, thanks.

This, and frankly, at 3700X cost, I would ether drop down to a 3600 and put the money somehwere else in the system, or at least go 10600K on z490. Most programs will lean more heavily towards either raw speed, or towards more cores. If what you run needs cores, go x570. If 6 cores or 8 cores is more than enough and you use Adobe products or other programs that are better served by all the Ghz, go z490. That is the decision this generation.

 

All that said, we're about a month out from Zen3 announcement, so it would be silly(at best) to buy now when 4-6 weeks will give more information, and probably price adjustments, at least from AMD on the 3000 series.

[mao91]

39 minutes ago, RobFRaschke said:

This, and frankly, at 3700X cost, I would ether drop down to a 3600 and put the money somehwere else in the system, or at least go 10600K on z490. Most programs will lean more heavily towards either raw speed, or towards more cores. If what you run needs cores, go x570. If 6 cores or 8 cores is more than enough and you use Adobe products or other programs that are better served by all the Ghz, go z490. That is the decision this generation.

 

All that said, we're about a month out from Zen3 announcement, so it would be silly(at best) to buy now when 4-6 weeks will give more information, and probably price adjustments, at least from AMD on the 3000 series.

I am also waiting to see what Zen3 yields. If raw horsepower is competitive with Z490 or even Z390 at a competitive price point, I'll probably jump on it to get both the raw CPU power and the future-minded amount of PCIe bandwidth that I want.

[RobFRaschke]

28 minutes ago, B.Toast said:

I am also waiting to see what Zen3 yields. If raw horsepower is competitive with Z490 or even Z390 at a competitive price point, I'll probably jump on it to get both the raw CPU power and the future-minded amount of PCIe bandwidth that I want.

This is where you have to break things out into four distinct categories and look at them independantly, IMHO.

 

Category 1 is Corest per dollar, good for specifically thread heavy applications.

 

Category 2 is IPC, where the two are essentially(near enough as makes no difference) at parity right now, so it's a wash, but as 10th gen had an uptick, so will Zen 3, etc.

 

Category 3 is raw frequency, where AMD is legitimately at a 10-20% disadvantage, which is HUGE in specific tasks.

 

Category 4 is where everything is on it's head from just a year ago, with upgrade options. Zen3 is likely to be the last refresh on AM4, so it's a dead platform after Ryzen 4000 series. lga1200 from Intel is just in it's first generation, and by my best reconing, has sufficient pinout for at least PCIe gen 4 on a future chipset/cpu, if not DDR5 as well. However, the Intel 10th gen you buy today may or may not function on that future board, and those future features will almost certainly not function on Z490, so while the socket stays the same, interoperability is unlikely. Thus Ryzen 3000 series and Intel 10th gen are absolutely not going to get more than one refresh before you need at least a new CPU and Motherboard. So while it's a wash, it sucks out loud all the way around.

[mao91]

4 hours ago, RobFRaschke said:

This is where you have to break things out into four distinct categories and look at them independantly, IMHO.

 

Category 1 is Corest per dollar, good for specifically thread heavy applications.

 

Category 2 is IPC, where the two are essentially(near enough as makes no difference) at parity right now, so it's a wash, but as 10th gen had an uptick, so will Zen 3, etc.

 

Category 3 is raw frequency, where AMD is legitimately at a 10-20% disadvantage, which is HUGE in specific tasks.

 

Category 4 is where everything is on it's head from just a year ago, with upgrade options. Zen3 is likely to be the last refresh on AM4, so it's a dead platform after Ryzen 4000 series. lga1200 from Intel is just in it's first generation, and by my best reconing, has sufficient pinout for at least PCIe gen 4 on a future chipset/cpu, if not DDR5 as well. However, the Intel 10th gen you buy today may or may not function on that future board, and those future features will almost certainly not function on Z490, so while the socket stays the same, interoperability is unlikely. Thus Ryzen 3000 series and Intel 10th gen are absolutely not going to get more than one refresh before you need at least a new CPU and Motherboard. So while it's a wash, it sucks out loud all the way around.

I think both companies offer plenty of cores and threads. Compared to my current 6-core 12-thread, anything higher is an upgrade by at least 33%. 

 

IPCs are pretty solid. I am curious how Zen3 will pan out. There really are no performance reviews for my workload, so it's difficult to gauge. 

 

Frequency is certainly important. My 5820k is currently overclocked to 4.4GHz and has definitely shown me a real-world performance improvement over the stock 3.2GHz. (I attribute its longevity at this frequency to my NH-D15). If I'm remembering correctly, isn't 9th gen the first to regularly boost to 5.0Ghz since 4th gen? 

 

I'm not worried about upgrading my CPU in the same motherboard, as the incremental performance increase from one generation to the next is not enough for me to justify upgrading that quickly. I genuinely prefer to wait at least 5 years between upgrades. Features like PCIe lanes and bandwidth are pretty important to me, so if Zen3 can close the performance gap (or get close enough, say within 5%) of 10th gen, and the price is competitive, then that's most likely what I'll go with.