Hypothetical Gaming/Game Design Build: i7-8700K vs. AMD Threadripper 1950X

[Ash19256]

Here's the links for the two builds being proposed.

 

The AMD Threadripper 1950X build: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/zgk7tJ

 

The i7-8700K build: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/zzCvBP

 

What I want to know is if either of these builds will bottleneck on the GPU or CPU, and which is the best for the intended use, which is going for high speed game development, as well as testing and gaming. This is a purely hypothetical build scenario, proposed mostly out of curiosity. Additionally, the initial price tag is no more than $6000 USD, and I do kind of want to preserve the RGB as if I were to spend this much money on a PC, it might as well look cool. And it can be used to monitor system temperature and fan speeds. In theory.

 

EDIT: I should also point out that I would at least make an attempt at overclocking both processors, so it's a matter of which can achieve the least bottle-necking and the best game design productivity and gaming performance when testing high fidelity games (or playing other games for inspiration).

[RadiatingLight]

Threadripper isn't any better for gaming than Ryzen.

if your game development scales across 16 cores, go for it. if not, get the 8700K

[ARikozuM]

Please don't post hypothetical builds on the forum as it's against Community Standards.

[ARikozuM]

That said, I would lean more towards the Threadripper if you're intending to test on the same system due to the core count, but either would be fine.

 

Edit: The 1080 Ti will be bottlenecked by the Threadripper chip.

[RadiatingLight]

4 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Edit: The 1080 Ti will be bottlenecked by the Threadripper chip.

only at 1080p AFAIK

[ARikozuM]

Just now, RadiatingLight said:

only at 1080p AFAIK

Can be seen in 1440 as well to a lesser degree. 

[BloodyWaters]

15 minutes ago, ARikozuM said:

Please don't post hypothetical builds on the forum as it's against Community Standards.

Where in the Community Standards does it mention that? I don’t remember reading it. 

[Guest]

If your workloads consists of utilizing lots of cores, then threadripper is something to consider. Compared to ryzen, threadripper wont do well when it comes to gaming performance because it has more cores running at slow frequencies. Although, the 8700k does do better in singlethreaded performance which will benefit in games.

[Ash19256]

11 minutes ago, TheBeastPC said:

If your workloads consists of utilizing lots of cores, then threadripper is something to consider. Compared to ryzen, threadripper wont do well when it comes to gaming performance because it has more cores running at slow frequencies. Although, the 8700k does do better in singlethreaded performance which will benefit in games.

I was figuring that I'd do a mild overclock to compensate for the slow frequencies. I've heard that people have been able to use Asus' BIOS settings to auto-clock the 1950X to ~3.9 GHz, which appears to be plenty fast.

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Ash19256 said:

I was figuring that I'd do a mild overclock to compensate for the slow frequencies. I've heard that people have been able to use Asus' BIOS settings to auto-clock the 1950X to ~3.9 GHz, which appears to be plenty fast.

From my knowledge, overclocking threadripper does have a performance increase, by a small margin, but its definitely worth it.

[Streetguru]

35 minutes ago, RadiatingLight said:

Threadripper isn't any better for gaming than Ryzen.

It kind of is, because it'll generally clock a bit higher than desktop Ryzen, can get up to 4.2ghz is what I keep hearing.

 

38 minutes ago, Ash19256 said:

 

You need more detail to actually answer your question, what engine? Does it include doing 3D modeling work? What graphics API?

[SnowyMus]

47 minutes ago, Ash19256 said:

What I want to know is if either of these builds will bottleneck on the GPU or CPU

At 1440p ultrawide, it depends. In some games, the 1080 Ti will be the bottleneck, but you may still get CPU bottlenecks in especially older titles. The Threadripper 1950X will be more of a limiting factor than the Intel Core i7-8700K, so be sure to check benchmarks for this. Overclocking should at least help you a bit. You should still get good performance, either way.

 

47 minutes ago, Ash19256 said:

which is the best for the intended use

With Threadripper, you're getting a 16 core/32 thread CPU that runs at a pretty decent clock speed, making it a (expensive) monster at multi-threaded workloads. But if your main concern is which part bottlenecks what in gaming, a HEDT CPU like this one is not for you.

 

With the Intel Core i7-8700K, you're getting less than half of the cores, but they're very fast cores, and you're still getting a decent amount of them. This gives you a good option for a powerful multi-threaded CPU without having to totally break the bank like what a $1000 CPU + $300+ motherboard would cost you. And yes, this is excellent for gaming, perhaps even the best, but if that was all you wanted, you could just get an Intel Core i5-8600K.

 

37 minutes ago, RadiatingLight said:

only at 1080p AFAIK

This person is getting a 1440p ultrawide monitor, though.

 

But yes, at 1080p, if you're actually using a 1080 Ti to play at 1080p, your CPU will be the bottleneck at least 99% of the time regardless of what CPU you choose.

[Ash19256]

3 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

It kind of is, because it'll generally clock a bit higher than desktop Ryzen, can get up to 4.2ghz is what I keep hearing.

 

You need more detail to actually answer your question, what engine? Does it include doing 3D modeling work? What graphics API?

I'm figuring it would likely max out at using Unreal Engine/Unity, with capacity to develop for DirectX (Ideally up to DirectX 12) and at least a little 3d modeling.

[Streetguru]

Just now, Ash19256 said:

I'm figuring it would likely max out at using Unreal Engine/Unity, with capacity to develop for DirectX (Ideally up to DirectX 12) and at least a little 3d modeling.

Then Threadripper for the core/thread count, PCI-e slots and RAM capacity, and possibility of moving up to 16 cores.

Any build like that should also include one AMD and one Nvidia GPU for testing, and likely multiple 4k displays for productivity.

Though Vulkan should be the goal over DX12 IMO.

[Ash19256]

1 minute ago, Kavawuvi said:

With Threadripper, you're getting a 16 core/32 thread CPU that runs at a pretty decent clock speed, making it an (expensive) monster at multi-threaded workloads. But if your main concern is which part bottlenecks what in gaming, a HEDT CPU like this one is not for you.

 

With the Intel Core i7-8700K, you're getting less than half of the cores, but they're very fast cores, and you're still getting a decent amount of them. This gives you a good option for a powerful multi-threaded CPU without having to totally break the bank like what a $1000 CPU + $300+ motherboard would cost you. And yes, this is excellent for gaming, perhaps even the best, but if that was all you wanted, you could just get an Intel Core i5-8600K.

One testing method I was thinking of, to save on the number of machines required and money spent, would be using virtual machines to emulate less powerful systems for testing. This is something that I'm fairly certain would get an advantage from the Threadripper's larger core count when OCed.

[Ash19256]

1 minute ago, Streetguru said:

Then Threadripper for the core/thread count, PCI-e slots and RAM capacity, and possibility of moving up to 16 cores.

Any build like that should also include one AMD and one Nvidia GPU for testing, and likely multiple 4k displays for productivity.

Though Vulkan should be the goal over DX12 IMO.

Good point on the AMD GPU and the multiple monitors thing. And as for Vulkan vs. DX12, why not both?

[Streetguru]

1 minute ago, Ash19256 said:

Good point on the AMD GPU and the multiple monitors thing. And as for Vulkan vs. DX12, why not both?

Because using DX12 forces the user onto windows 10, Vulkan runs anywhere, is FOSS, and looking at idtech6/DOOM 4 it can work wonders.

AMD has been working on hardware virtualized GPUs for a while that can be shared across an office. But overall that's maybe not worth it unless your resources are very limited. Better to have individual PCs most likely unless you need a render farm.

http://www.amd.com/en-us/solutions/professional/virtualization

[Ash19256]

23 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

Because using DX12 forces the user onto windows 10, Vulkan runs anywhere, is FOSS, and looking at idtech6/DOOM 4 it can work wonders.

AMD has been working on hardware virtualized GPUs for a while that can be shared across an office. But overall that's maybe not worth it unless your resources are very limited. Better to have individual PCs most likely unless you need a render farm.

http://www.amd.com/en-us/solutions/professional/virtualization

Good points.

[[YT]GoldenJosua]

The thread ripper is not that good for gaming but if your steaming recording and gaming it’s perfect it will out performs most if not all other cpus with that type of workload