Gaming and streaming refresh

[porina]

Budget (including currency): no hard limit but want to keep low as practical for the objective - mainly need help deciding CPU + mobo

Country: UK

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: 

PC gaming. 1440p with 4070. Recent main PC gaming time sinks are:

Genshin Impact

Honkai Star Rail

Cities Skylines (modded, and sequel when it releases later this year)

Final Fantasy XIV

More in general: turn based JRPGs, management, simulation, 4X. I don't do insane fps shooters ever. I rarely look at new so called AAA releases which to me are more eye candy animations than a game, so better on youtube.

 

Streaming: OBS, live2d model via either prprlive or vtubestudio, may be adding more locally processed effects over time

Creative/productivity: mainly video editing (Vegas), photo editing (Photoshop), occasionally dabbling with gamedev (godot, looking at unreal), digital art, music

 

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

 

My current system is in sig below, but the CPU I feel is showing its age with my 7920X being released nearly 6 years ago. In particular I suspect that my single thread and low thread performance is lagging far behind modern systems by many tens of %, even if multi-thread is still hanging on. Other benefits of upgrade would be getting access to faster PCIe speeds.

 

I think I can recycle most parts, the only new parts being needed are CPU, mobo, DDR5 ram. I think I can get a mount converter for my NH-D15 for 1700 or AM5, or I might try another AIO. Ram would probably be 2x32GB at 6000+ depending on price and availability at the time, maybe I'd even go up to 2x48GB. DDR4 is not an option.

 

My goal is for a more responsive system in general. This doesn't mean higher average fps in games, but I do care about lows and load times in gaming - especially when other stuff is running at the same time.

 

My random thinking on candidate CPUs:

13700(k) - blend of core count (8P+8E), clocks and price make this a good generalist GPU on paper. I don't think the step to 13900 series is worth the extra cost.

7800X3D - it may be great at pure gaming most of the time, but I feel 8 cores will be limiting when I do more than gaming

7900X3D/7950X3D - may overcome shortcomings of 7800X3D but much higher cost

Zen 4 non-3D parts - might not cost as much but it then also doesn't have the wider gaming advantage

 

Minor advantage for Zen 4 is it supports AVX-512 where Intel currently don't. 

 

No point looking at mobo until CPU is decided, unless its cost factors significantly. I wont be doing extreme OC so mid range board is fine. Built in 2.5GBE and wifi are a strong plus.

 

Edit: if I get any of the CPUs mentioned I'll be pairing it with 2x32GB 6400 or similar, as that is the balance of capacity and speed at reasonable pricing. No overclocking beyond XMP/EXPO.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

4 minutes ago, porina said:

DDR4 is not an option.

In that case intel can be thrown straight out the window, btw futureproofing will only work if you are willing to overclock your rams in the future so theres no point buying ddr5 for futureproofing if you arent willing to do that, afaik hynix a die has replaced m die so anything 6000+ regardless of cl and assuming not a special bin/model will be hynix a dies

 

X3d chips can be overclocked but you need an async eclk board and cheapest ones are around 350$ like the b650e aorus master/taichi or in the 400$ range like the x670e-a/f, even then youll still be heavily limited by thermals due to the insulating 3d cache and god awful ihs ontop, nice to have the option though and i consider this mandatory for any >300$ board, youd only be able to fully leverage x3d oc when you build a cooler capable of reaching some pretty chilly subzero temps (constant sub -30c) so that kinda sucks for everyone but the oc nuts that are insane enough to daily a phase change cooler

 

For non x3d just buy a cheap ~200$ board like the b650 pg lightning/aorus elite or b650e/x670e steel legend/pro rs if pcie 5.0 might be utilized by future gpus (gen5 storage is useless for most ppl same as gen4 except more expensive and needs active cooling)

 

7950x3d is pretty compelling but id just go for a 7950x and tune it abit since its stock settings are god awful, can problably hit 5.4-5.5 allcore around 1.3v, not like itll be bottlenecking your gpu anyways, and for any productivity workloads that dont leverage the extra cache itll perform abit better with the higher clocks

[porina]

2 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

In that case intel can be thrown straight out the window

Why? DDR4 would be a downgrade from my current system. Only DDR5 at 6000+ breaks even. I'd rather have much faster, but I'm not willing to pay for it or manually overclock. Ideally I'd go HEDT but that doesn't exist now. I just want something that I can plug it, turn on XMP, and it works. I don't care if you tune something to an inch of its life it might perform better.

 

2 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

X3d chips can be overclocked

I forgot to say, I wont be manually overclocking at all for normal use, so the rest is irrelevant. Stability is far more important than a few % performance. Just upgrading CPU might give me 50% more single thread (maybe 20% clocks, 30% IPC). I don't have any interest in wasting time manually tuning beyond that.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

1 minute ago, porina said:

Why? DDR4 would be a downgrade from my current system. Only DDR5 at 6000+ breaks even. I'd rather have much faster, but I'm not willing to pay for it or manually overclock. Ideally I'd go HEDT but that doesn't exist now. I just want something that I can plug it, turn on XMP, and it works. I don't care if you tune something to an inch of its life it might perform better.

 

I forgot to say, I wont be manually overclocking at all for normal use, so the rest is irrelevant. Stability is far more important than a few % performance. Just upgrading CPU might give me 50% more single thread (maybe 20% clocks, 30% IPC). I don't have any interest in wasting time manually tuning beyond that.

If your workloads benifit from ram speed then makes sense to go ddr5, otherwise its kinda irrelevant

 

as for hedt theres sapphire rapids, zen4 threadripper will problably quite awhile later, sappire rapids is ludicrously expensive with that special ddr5 not to mention boards and cpus themselves, unsure about zen4 tr but ofc cpus + boards gonna be expensive

 

if hedt is what you want you may wanna consider waiting for zen4 tr or jumping on sapphire rapids

[porina]

12 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

If your workloads benifit from ram speed then makes sense to go ddr5, otherwise its kinda irrelevant

Mid to high end CPUs for the last 10+ years have all been data choked. It's a no brainer to get as reasonably best performing ram as I can. Note that doesn't just mean running speed, for example 2R often can out-perform higher speed 1R in real world tasks, even if higher speed 1R might show better raw bandwidth. The only reason X3D exists is because those cores are so starved of data.

 

12 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

as for hedt theres sapphire rapids

It is perfect, apart from the price. I didn't mention it for that reason. A mobo alone could cost more than one of the CPUs I mentioned + mobo. It isn't really like old HEDT either since it is full featured and you're paying for it whether you want it or not. Old HEDT was more cut down to help enable lower costs.

 

12 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

zen4 threadripper will problably quite awhile later

I don't expect that to exist. Threadripper is dead even if AMD never said it out loud. There may be a Treadripper Pro to go against Intel workstation parts, but that'll be insanely priced too. Even when they did offer Threadripper, they were never as cheap as Intel HEDT anyway.

 

 

Anyway, this is a distraction. Of the CPUs I mentioned previously, I'm still debating which may offer the best balance of response and performance.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

50 minutes ago, porina said:

Mid to high end CPUs for the last 10+ years have all been data choked. It's a no brainer to get as reasonably best performing ram as I can. Note that doesn't just mean running speed, for example 2R often can out-perform higher speed 1R in real world tasks, even if higher speed 1R might show better raw bandwidth. The only reason X3D exists is because those cores are so starved of data.

In that case just go and buy a 128/192gb quad rank kit, new agesa seems to help with ram speed compatibility cause recently there was a post highlighting 6000 ddr5 on a 128gb config iirc

 

also a 7950x3d cause it seems like your workloads may benifit from the extra cache

 

i prefer dual or quad rank whenever possible cause yes those are indeed superior to single rank, means that instead of say 5000 single rank micron rev b ddr4 i can instead go for a dual rank 4000 hynix djr config and still get good performance while not having to deal with the volatility of stupid high speeds, i mean i exclusively buy bare pcbs so i can just hand pick dual sided sticks and their ics simply using a model number

 

But im curious as to quad rank performance benifits cause ive heard that its mostly related to copy speed or something like that, kinda regret this dual rank 6x4 d9qbj when i could have gotten 6x4 quad rank samsung d die with not complete shit trfc

[porina]

3 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

In that case just go and buy a 128/192gb quad rank kit, new agesa seems to help with ram speed compatibility cause recently there was a post highlighting 6000 ddr5 on a 128gb config iirc

I know you're trying to help, but ram isn't the question I asked! It's the CPU choice. I don't need or want to pay for 128GB+. I'm thinking 2x32GB is fine as is matches my current capacity. Having gone back for a look, do 48GB module offerings exist yet? I might have been getting confused with 2x24GB kits, which I'm not interested in as I do use more than 48GB, and I'm not going 4 module.

 

When you say quad rank kit, presumably you mean it comes with 4x 2R modules. At same settings, this configuration seemed to perform worse than two rank (either 2x 2R or 4x 1R) when I tried it on DDR4: 

 

Personally I've given up on aida64 measurements since I've never seen them correlate to anything real world, although if I had to pick one copy might be closet to anything else.

 

3 minutes ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

also a 7950x3d cause it seems like your workloads may benifit from the extra cache

It could, but would it do it much better than 13700k for the price difference? This is kinda the input I was looking for. What is the impact to fps lows and load times, as that is more interesting to me than average fps or Cinebench. Or does anyone do game performance testing while streaming at the same time? Things like that.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

13 minutes ago, porina said:

Having gone back for a look, do 48GB module offerings exist yet? I might have been getting confused with 2x24GB kits, which I'm not interested in as I do use more than 48GB, and I'm not going 4 module.

48gb modules exist duh

If 24gb sr modules exist then 48gb dr and maybe some goofy ecc 96gb 192gb etc sticks also exist

 

ive heard that 24gbit ics run alot hotter but apparently doesnt matter, i prefer <40c due to oc shenanigans but as long as theyre stable i dont see any issue with 100c dimms

 

if you dont need the extra capacity then a dr 64gb kit will do, otherwise look at 96gb kits

 

Apparently intel imcs are also kinda annoying af to stabilize atleast looking at buildzoid vids, looks like its stable but then throws an error after like 8 hours or something, whereas amd will just crash or something and not do this goofy looks like its stable fury inducing shenanigans (i mean dont wanna wait that long to stability test again do you?)

 

not well versed in ddr5 and only seen some glances of ddr5, ill start showing proper interest when bare pcbs become dirt cheap like on ddr4 where i can buy 8gb sticks for 12$ and 16gb sticks for 23$ so uhh might wanna ask @RONOTHAN## for more details

 

19 minutes ago, porina said:

It could, but would it do it much better than 13700k for the price difference? This is kinda the input I was looking for. What is the impact to fps lows and load times, as that is more interesting to me than average fps or Cinebench. Or does anyone do game performance testing while streaming at the same time? Things like that.

As for cpu choice id go x3d for gaming if those lows really matter, ive seen some reports of ram oc helping with .1% and 1% lows so x3d should be the way to go then since it essentially substitutes fast rams with massive cache

 

Sold the card in my x58 rig so cant do any real testing, and the d9qbjs i have are complete dogshit not to mention a runt p6x58de having issues with qpi link speed capabilities, im considering reselling it and swapping out for a 2500k + p67/z68 alongside not garbage rams that cant tighten trfc nor clock high (theyre so bad the 2v+ scaling doesnt matter) so might be able to give some results comparing detuned garbage and tuned rams, maybe look around on the internet for ram oc benifits reported by others (atleast the ones that arent retarded and only tightened the useless primaries where theres like no performance to be gained instead of trfc trrd all the damn subtimings)

[porina]

1 hour ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

48gb modules exist duh

I didn't ask if the modules exist at all, I asked if offerings exist. I checked two big online stores in the UK before I wrote that. I did not see enthusiast system 48GB modules offered from either.

 

1 hour ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

ive heard that 24gbit ics run alot hotter but apparently doesnt matter, i prefer <40c due to oc shenanigans but as long as theyre stable i dont see any issue with 100c dimms

I heard they run "better" whatever that means, because in part they're newer than many of the 32/64GB modules already out there. My DDR4 is currently 40-45C mostly idle. I'm writing this reply and watching a vid on my 2nd display. I don't care too much about ram temps unless they get high enough to cause problems.

 

1 hour ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Apparently intel imcs are also kinda annoying af to stabilize atleast looking at buildzoid vids, looks like its stable but then throws an error after like 8 hours or something, whereas amd will just crash or something and not do this goofy looks like its stable fury inducing shenanigans (i mean dont wanna wait that long to stability test again do you?)

I said earlier I have no interest in manual overclocking, so any problems with them when doing extreme overclocking are irrelevant. Manual memory overclocking is a fast track to data corruption. XMP/EXPO or whatever I can just turn on, do an overnight run of memtest or similar and have fair confidence it is stable. For pure benchmarking systems I don't mind unstable ram if it gets the results, and I put it back to safe settings after. Leave the risk to the bench systems. I still have others around for that reason, not that I've done much recently.

 

1 hour ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

not well versed in ddr5 and only seen some glances of ddr5

I don't care what's the top OC IC or whatever. I see 2x32GB 6400 is cheap enough. Don't really save getting slower. I'm not paying much more for faster. Ram is done. There is no need to talk about ram choice on this thread.

 

1 hour ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

As for cpu choice id go x3d for gaming if those lows really matter, ive seen some reports of ram oc helping with .1% and 1% lows so x3d should be the way to go then since it essentially substitutes fast rams with massive cache

I'm struggling to find a good mix of tests. In general, lows seem to generally track average, so a good average tends to be a good low, but I don't have high confidence in that without finding more examples. Part of the problem is game reviewers are leaning towards newer titles, which may support multi-threading better than in the past. I'm also wanting to see how slightly older games behave, say those from 2 to 5 years ago.

 

And game load times vs CPU don't seem a frequently covered area. Do people not care? Right now I have games sat on Optane as the nearest performance to a ramdisk, and they're just sitting around while the CPU chugs along on a few threads.

 

It may well be the sort of test I'm looking for doesn't exist. That's fine. 

[Somerandomtechyboi]

8 hours ago, porina said:

I didn't ask if the modules exist at all, I asked if offerings exist. I checked two big online stores in the UK before I wrote that. I did not see enthusiast system 48GB modules offered from either.

Really?

192gb support does seem to exist in some newer bioses, maybe the uk doesnt have any 48gb sticks for whatever reason

 

8 hours ago, porina said:

I heard they run "better" whatever that means, because in part they're newer than many of the 32/64GB modules already out there. My DDR4 is currently 40-45C mostly idle. I'm writing this reply and watching a vid on my 2nd display. I don't care too much about ram temps unless they get high enough to cause problems.

Have no idea what that means either, cant tell if thats just a retard that has no idea about rams or maybe its some other variable that isnt tighter subtimings cause ive heard that 4gbit ics like m die dont tighten up as much as 16gbit a die but again thats just from what i can remember cause im too lazy to actually look it up again and im generally quite disinterested in ddr5 till dirt cheap bare pcbs exist

 

8 hours ago, porina said:

I'm struggling to find a good mix of tests. In general, lows seem to generally track average, so a good average tends to be a good low, but I don't have high confidence in that without finding more examples. Part of the problem is game reviewers are leaning towards newer titles, which may support multi-threading better than in the past. I'm also wanting to see how slightly older games behave, say those from 2 to 5 years ago.

 

And game load times vs CPU don't seem a frequently covered area. Do people not care? Right now I have games sat on Optane as the nearest performance to a ramdisk, and they're just sitting around while the CPU chugs along on a few threads.

 

It may well be the sort of test I'm looking for doesn't exist. That's fine. 

Ngl didnt know cpus played a part in loading times

 

might be both ppl not caring that much and ppl having no idea that cpus play a part in game loading times

 

If gaming performance is this much of a concern why not just split into 2 systems where you can have an oced gaming machine and a rock stable workstation? if one goes down you can use the other as a backup

[Why_Me]

This gives you the option of streaming with either Nvidia NVENC or Intel integrated graphics.

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: *Intel Core i7-13700 2.1 GHz 16-Core Processor  (£379.99 @ AWD-IT) 
CPU Cooler: *Deepcool AK620 68.99 CFM CPU Cooler  (£53.99 @ Scan.co.uk) 
Motherboard: *MSI B760 GAMING PLUS WIFI ATX LGA1700 Motherboard  (£151.40 @ Box Limited) 
Memory: *G.Skill Ripjaws S5 48 GB (2 x 24 GB) DDR5-6400 CL36 Memory  (£157.30 @ Newegg UK) 
Total: £742.68
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
*Lowest price parts chosen from parametric criteria
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-07-31 01:07 BST+0100

 

A better look at that board, cpu and cooler.

 

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/B760-GAMING-PLUS-WIFI  

 

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/230490/intel-core-i713700-processor-30m-cache-up-to-5-20-ghz/specifications.html  

 

https://www.deepcool.com/products/Cooling/cpuaircoolers/AK620-High-Performance-CPU-Cooler-1700-AM5/2021/13067.shtml