Trying to decide between Intel and AMD CPUs, and need motherboard suggestions to match.

[Waggles]

Budget (including currency): Up to 3k USD, not including GPU.

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: The heaviest loads I plan to throw at it are VR games and occasional new releases (Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield, Armored Core 6), plus browser-based VTTs. I'll be running most of my games either at 3440x1440p 144hz or 4k 60hz, or in VR (Valve Index).

Other details: 

I last updated my PC right around the start of Intel 8th gen (i7-8700k), and for a little over a year now I've definitely been feeling its age. Earlier this year, I swapped my 1080ti for a 3080ti and definitely felt an uplift, but the whole system otherwise is more-or-less feeling like it's ready to retire.

 

14th gen just launched, but most of the reviews I've been seeing just call it "13.5th gen", and while there are reviews comparing the 7800X3D to the 13900k, most of those reviews are pretty old and I'm not sure what the current mindset is. I've been using Intel for the past 10+ years since I built my first PC, but since I built this one, AMD has seemed like an attractive option, but I don't know how I feel about the switch.

 

I plan on going all-out with the motherboard, RAM, and storage, while reusing my 3080ti, and my main concern is building a system that'll still be rock-solid in 5+ years, only swapping the GPU down the road. I don't really care about platform lifespan because I probably won't be changing my motherboard, CPU, or RAM for another 5+ years.

 

If anyone has arguments for either CPU (the 14900K, or the 7800X3D) or another CPU, I'd appreciate some advice on which to go for and a motherboard to pair it with. While I have a listed budget, I'm not picky on price/performance and I'd rather spend more now if it will perform better down the road as games get more demanding. Also, I'd like to stick to air-cooling, if that makes a difference in your advice.

 

Thank you!

 

Edit to add: I plan on building in the Fractal Torrent case, if it matters at all for your recommendation.

[Tetras]

8 minutes ago, Waggles said:

If anyone has arguments for either CPU (the 14900K, or the 7800X3D) or another CPU, I'd appreciate some advice on which to go for and a motherboard to pair it with. While I have a listed budget, I'm not picky on price/performance and I'd rather spend more now if it will perform better down the road as games get more demanding. Also, I'd like to stick to air-cooling, if that makes a difference in your advice.

If you want to stick with air cooling, the 7800X3D is the easiest out of the box to air cool in terms of power consumption (a peerless assassin would do it and that's under $50), though if you only game then the power draw of the Intel CPUs isn't beyond a decent air cooler either.

 

If you do any productivity work, a 14700 or 14900 will be much faster than the 7800X3D.

 

The 14700/14900 are harder on the board than a 7800X3D, so you'll need to be sure the board has a fairly robust VRM, while you can use the 7800X3D with a $100 motherboard.

 

About the motherboard: what kind of features do you need? Spdif? USB Type-C? How many SATA/M.2 ports? Do you plan on using anything else that plugs into the board (like sound card, ethernet)?

[CyberneticTitan]

7800X3D offers >100% the gaming performance of the 14900K at ~66% of the price and 34% of the power, on average. So a gaming focused system definitely AMD, unless you have specific needs for multithreaded workloads and spend a lot of time playing games that don't benefit from the additional cache.

 

That being said at those resolutions it won't make too much of a difference and you could probably get by with a 7600/13600k and spending the money on a 4090/7900 XTX.

[4bettingrags]

I was in the EXACT same scenario as you and ultimately chose to go Intel over AMD because gaming was lower on my priority list. It's what I needed right now, dead socket or not. There's already a lot of good advice here, with one caveat: buy what you need for the present, not for the future.

 

CPUs like 2500k and 8700k's are outliers. Very doubtful we'll see this same longevity with processors staying relevant for so long.

[Waggles]

23 minutes ago, Tetras said:

About the motherboard: what kind of features do you need? Spdif? USB Type-C? How many SATA/M.2 ports? Do you plan on using anything else that plugs into the board (like sound card, ethernet)?

I was planning on getting two M.2 drives, one to run as a boot drive, and another to throw load-time-critical games at, with a third large SATA HDD to catch media files and lightweight games. Other than that, I network off Ethernet and I have probably-too-many USB devices, so extra headers would be nice.

 

To your other points, while I don't do any real "productivity" on my PC, I do a lot of multitasking and I'm a "leave a hundred browser tabs open" type of person. My gut feeling says that the kind of "productivity" work I do on my home PC isn't going to be affected by differences in high-end modern CPUs. I will say that my current build (8700k, 32 GB of 2133 MHz RAM) does chug a bit occasionally in Firefox, and I can't run a lot of web apps (roll20, namely) smoothly in FF, usually I'll switch to Edge for those where they run just fine.

[Waggles]

36 minutes ago, CyberneticTitan said:

7800X3D offers >100% the gaming performance of the 14900K at ~66% of the price and 34% of the power, on average. So a gaming focused system definitely AMD, unless you have specific needs for multithreaded workloads and spend a lot of time playing games that don't benefit from the additional cache.

That's what I've been seeing a lot in reviews comparing the 7800X3D to the 13900K, but cost efficiency is really low on my list, and I don't really have a lot of context for how much I should care about power efficiency outside of just understanding that the running costs while pushing my CPU will be higher.

 

One part that I worry about is switching to AMD. While I feel like I shouldn't really expect a difference on the Windows side of things, I've run Intel my whole life so I don't really know what to expect.

36 minutes ago, CyberneticTitan said:

That being said at those resolutions it won't make too much of a difference and you could probably get by with a 7600/13600k and spending the money on a 4090/7900 XTX.

I agree that upgrading my GPU is probably going to be the best bang-for-the-buck in terms of playing higher end games today, but I just got my 3080 and it's definitely a big cost to upgrade that again right away. I'd rather spend a bit more on the CPU/motherboard side now so that when the next series of cards drops from Nvidia/AMD, I'll have better parity.

[Waggles]

41 minutes ago, 4bettingrags said:

CPUs like 2500k and 8700k's are outliers. Very doubtful we'll see this same longevity with processors staying relevant for so long.

I had a 4700k before my 8700k, and I'm surprised myself at how long I've felt comfortable with this CPU before I started to feel a little "cramped" in how much it can handle with some modern games. Even bumping my GPU up to a 3080ti, Baldur's Gate struggled a lot in the higher density areas and I think that's around when I felt like my itch to upgrade turned into more of a plan.

[LAwLz]

For gaming, it doesn't matter. Between the i9-14900K and the 7800X3D my advice would be to go with the 7800X3D because it's a lot cheaper.

 

For really CPU-heavy tasks (media encoding using the CPU, various simulations, code compiling etc) the i9 will run circles around the 7800X3D, but it doesn't sound like those are things you will do so it would be a waste.

It doesn't really make sense to compare these two chips because they are in different price brackets. ~400 dollars vs ~570 dollars. Ryzen 7 is aimed at the i7 series, not the i9 series.

 

If you're just going to play games, it might be a better idea to spend a lot less money because the price to performance is way higher. That way you can put money aside either for more impactful components (like the GPU), or save money for an upgrade in the future.

You usually get a lot better results in the long run by spending let's say 500 dollars today and then 500 dollars 3 years from now, rather than trying to spend 1000 dollars today and using the same PC for 6 years.

The i5-14600K gets ~93% of the gaming performance the i9-14900K gets but at ~56% of the price. At 4K resolution, the difference between the i9 and i5 is less than 3%.

 

The i5-1400K also outperforms the 7800X3D at most CPU tasks.

 

 

This is not me saying you should buy the i5. This is me saying I think you should reconsider how much money you're going to spend on your PC and maybe go for something that brings you almost the same performance but at a much lower price. Even if you're allergic to money and just want to get rid of money (I can give you my paypal account if you want), you're probably better off spending some money today, and then spending the rest of your money on a new computer a few years down the line instead.

Diminishing returns hit pretty hard at the higher end. The amount of dollars you have to spend to get 1 more FPS goes up and up the more your PC costs. 

[Tetras]

1 hour ago, Waggles said:

I don't really have a lot of context for how much I should care about power efficiency outside of just understanding that the running costs while pushing my CPU will be higher

This page in TPU's article might give you some idea of the difference. The difference in running costs depends on how much you use your PC and the energy costs where you live, for Europe it can be well worth considering, but for the US it tends to be less so.

 

1 hour ago, Waggles said:

I was planning on getting two M.2 drives, one to run as a boot drive, and another to throw load-time-critical games at, with a third large SATA HDD to catch media files and lightweight games. Other than that, I network off Ethernet and I have probably-too-many USB devices, so extra headers would be nice.

Storage: 2x M.2 drives are available even on most (all?) of the lower-end B760 & Z790 motherboards, so are at least 4 SATA ports.

 

Ethernet: only the highest-end boards have 10 Gb LAN, most others have 2.5 Gb, except for one or two low-end boards that only have 1 Gb. You may want to avoid boards that have Intel i255-v.

 

USB: some of the low-end B760 boards are very bad, like only 2 or 3 USB 3.0 ports and as few as 5 or 6 overall on the rear I/O. Z790 is generally pretty good.

 

For AMD, it's pretty much the same, just substitute B760 and B650 and X670 for Z790.

[Waggles]

30 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

This is not me saying you should buy the i5. This is me saying I think you should reconsider how much money you're going to spend on your PC and maybe go for something that brings you almost the same performance but at a much lower price. Even if you're allergic to money and just want to get rid of money (I can give you my paypal account if you want), you're probably better off spending some money today, and then spending the rest of your money on a new computer a few years down the line instead.

Haha! I see what you mean though. I'd say less "allergic to money" and more "using money to try and solve a problem". On top of it just generally performing well enough for so long, what's kept me on my 8700k for so many years is that updating my build is something I'm not super keen on doing. Between spending some money to day and then some money in a couple years, or spending all the money now and not touching it for a longer amount of time, I'd prefer the latter, but it seems like that mindset isn't as easy to stick to nowadays. I was actually considering going with a system builder instead of doing it all myself, but I couldn't find any that would let you configure in a "bring your own GPU" setup. It makes sense, but I just wouldn't feel right swallowing the cost of the 4090 right now on top of everything else (plus, system builder cases generally aren't my style anyway).

 

I'll keep this in mind and maybe shop around and check out reviews for some of the non-overkill CPUs to see if it looks like there's something that'll let me put some money towards a 2025-26 build instead of blowing everything now and trying to keep something today running til 2028-29.

[Tetras]

14 hours ago, Waggles said:

Between spending some money to day and then some money in a couple years, or spending all the money now and not touching it for a longer amount of time, I'd prefer the latter, but it seems like that mindset isn't as easy to stick to nowadays.

I think there are a few reasons why there is a consensus it doesn't work anymore (to buy once and keep for a long time).

1. How much the 4090 moved performance forward, where CPUs that were previously very similar at higher resolutions started to show big gains.
2. The changes in monitor tech, with high refresh meaning that maintaining 60 fps isn't acceptable anymore.
3. Newer games like Starfield and newer games engines, like UE5 (whether that's also a lack of optimisation, or not).

My impression is that a high-end CPU like a 7800X3D or 14700K is still going to last awhile, probably the same time length as previous i7 CPUs (in terms of maintaining playability), but since our expectations have changed, it might not be acceptable for that long.

 

14 hours ago, Waggles said:

I was actually considering going with a system builder instead of doing it all myself, but I couldn't find any that would let you configure in a "bring your own GPU" setup. It makes sense, but I just wouldn't feel right swallowing the cost of the 4090 right now on top of everything else (plus, system builder cases generally aren't my style anyway).

Pretty much all CPUs except F have graphics now, so maybe they'd let you just drop it entirely? Though, often that would mean a bad case/PSU and lead to even more upgrade problems/headaches later.