Currently there's a lot going on on the CPU market and as it seems there's finally a reason to upgrade from my trusty old 2500k.

This thread is not for specific deals but to get some perspective on the different products on the market. I will be considering any CPU that is going to sell for under $500 in the foreseeable future. I'm still looking for the "best bang for the buck", not necessarily the fastest or cheapest.

For the following questions consider this: I use my CPU mainly for gaming and general purpose tasks. There's going to be a bit of video conversions and decoding 4k material. However, I'll try to offload that to the GPU whenever I can conveniently do so.

So what do you think, SEN
- is it time to upgrade? Better to wait? Why? Until when/what?
- is AMD back in the game, or is Intel still king?
- which platform makes sense? Kaby-Lake, Coffee-Lake? Threadripper?
- which CPU shines in what area? (overclocking, heat-efficiency, power consumption, multi- vs. single-threaded performance, etc.)
- what else is there to consider?
- what do I have to keep in mind when looking for a matching motherboard?
- is RAM somehow a factor?

- AMD is back as long as you dont need that single thread count to be a bit higher. You can get a 16 core for that price point that will just eat up tasks for you. The issue is some applications/games specifically still don't do great with over 4 cores. So if your single core count is slower you may notice some issues with processing said application. This is pretty rare now adays, but you still might come across it. I would just water cool and push single core up a bit on the amd and you have an awesome capable machine. 1700x or 1800x both pretty good imo. I have a 6700k as well and the puppy does just fine especially with those high clock counts, but you still half about half the processing power as the Ryzen, as long as the application supports multicore.

I use my Ryzen build for my livingroom/media server. It still has a 980ti and games just fine, but it also is virtualzing a Domain Controller,web server, node server, Plex server.

I use my 6700k for straight gaming for the most part/personal 4k machine.

If you are looking to save money you can prob get a quad core ryzen for pretty cheap and OC it to get close to the single thread speed as an i5, but pay half as less.

Thanks for the reply. I still believe single-threaded performance to be the most important spec because many applications, especially most games, can only use 1-4 cores. Mostly everything that can take advantage of 4+ cores usually has GPU support. Please correct me if that assessment is wrong. Also you can find a lot of benchmarks that explore this venue, so I don't need this to be the focus of the discussion. (but thanks for mentioning it anyway!)

I was thinking more about any information that is not as prevalent in the media, for example how will the platforms fare in the future, are there stupid design decisions, etc. I'd be also interested in in-depth analysis of the specs/properties and how they could affect application.

Finally I'd like to note that I never ventured deep into overclocking territory, and I'm not planning to do so. I was thinking more of a mild overclock if it's safe and easy to do so. That being said, I'll definitely stay on air cooling.

If you mainly play video games, Intel will be the best. If you do things that are heavily enhanced by multi-core processing like encoding, media stuff, video editing, etc, you'll benefit greatly from Ryzen. My 7700k does what I do perfectly- video games and recording with OBS. Just food for thought, I guess.

- is it time to upgrade? Better to wait? Why? Until when/what?
--This should always be determined by your needs and if you feel your PC is not living up to your expectations. People like me (crazy people) upgrade because we want the newest platform with the newest things, so we have an excuse to try that new sleek case and do a new build color scheme. But this is largely due to preference/'needs' as an enthusiast who always has to have the latest rather than actual failings of our rig to accomplish tasks. It is an expensive habit and I don't recommend it.

- is AMD back in the game, or is Intel still king?
--AMD is making a very convincing case for gamers and streamers on a budget. One could argue they've been the value proposition for a long time, but they're starting to gain some ground. The X299/i9 release from Intel (which I'll be getting soon) was a panic response to Ryzen/Threadripper. What I think most people forget is that people who build their own PCs are a very small subset, even if it is growing, and of them an even smaller subset actually understand what makes a rig 'good' rather than just being compatible. To your average gamer and average builder the larger number indicates a better part. That's as far as they know or want to know. So if AMD can do from 8c/16t to 16c/32t at a price point they can afford and Intel has that only for the top end super expensive CPU / Xeons, then they figure AMD's CPU is 'better' because 'the core/thread count is higher so that means its better'. This is like when Core 2 Duos/Quads were new and people on the internet reasoned that a Quad that did 3GHz was akin to a single core doing 12GHZ (3x4 = 12) which we obviously know is not true.

- which platform makes sense? Kaby-Lake, Coffee-Lake? Threadripper?
--Depends on what you need to do and your budget. A gamer who's doing their build on the cheap is going to get great value out of Ryzen. Especially if they want to stream. LinusTechTips I believe did some comparisons of modern platforms for gaming and streaming and gave some very in depth findings. Not just frame numbers but actual image quality comparisons laid side by side. There is no substitute for doing the research for your particular situation. No magic 'just get this one' answer exists, and this is because now, more than any time in the last 10 years, AMD is actually competing.

- which CPU shines in what area? (overclocking, heat-efficiency, power consumption, multi- vs. single-threaded performance, etc.)
--Intel holds dominion over single threaded performance as they have for years. Currently, AMD can get you a higher core/thread count at a better price in return for each core being 'less' than each Intel core, though not by a lot in most real-world applications. Overclocking is going to vary by chip as it always has, and you should account how much you plan to spend on a OC-feature-packed mobo, higher end CPU cooler, and proper RAM for that OC to determine if its going to be worth it. I think the OC landscape has changed a lot, I remember fondly overclocking an E2140, stock 1.6, to 3.2, and paying 40$-ish for a CPU cooler that enabled me to do it. The 100% OC days are over but people are seeing 5GHz on air for some of the new Intel chips which is an exciting milestone to me.

- what else is there to consider?
--I've covered that a bit thus far but see my RAM answer.

- what do I have to keep in mind when looking for a matching motherboard?
--Features, power phases, form factor, memory slots, M2 support, I/O, all depending on your individual needs. I will say in my opinion anyone doing a build in 2017 and beyond who isn't using an M2 NVME SSD is a fool. Storage has been our Achilles heel since I started building, and we are finally starting to have our storage catch up to the rest of our parts. A balanced build is the best kind of build, the weakest/slowest link in the chain defines your builds performance, so be mindful of it.

- is RAM somehow a factor?
--DDR4 RAM is such an interesting thing right now. I want to establish first we are not as matured on our DDR4 manufacturing as we maybe think we are or should be at this stage in the game. Frequencies, timings, and densities, continue to improve, as do the yields on mem ICs that can actually reach the milestones we're trying to hit. Balancing frequency vs timing in DDR4 is extremely interesting, especially when you start thinking about using all 4 channels that quad channel DDR4 kits allow. I don't even have a rough estimate for 'any frequency over X with no more than Y latency should be good' like I did for DDR2/3, because its becoming a much more complex problem. And the kits that do seem to go beyond the usual frequency:latency ratio are extremely expensive right now in dollars per gig. Due to RAM's importance in overclocking, the aforementioned ratios, and deciding to go dual or quad channel DDR4, there's just so much to consider. My solution for me personally is throwing money at it and getting the best ratio quad channel kit I can, but I'm not sure what the logical, economical choice is yet.

Thanks a lot!

Lets say the CPU is starting to show its age. It's still not 'slow' by any means (as you know) but many games and even watching UHD videos push it to the limit and it does sometimes limit my frame rate. This also increases temperatures and with that noise levels. (I got a really quiet build, which I very much enjoy.)
These things are more of a nuisance, but I could easily afford an upgrade, which is why I'm thinking about it. However, if now's not a good time because I can expect new tech or a price drops within the next year I'd have no problem to wait it out.


Budget and needs were mentioned. I'm not afraid of doing my research, it's more of a question where will I get quality info. That being said, I'll definitely start with LinusTechTips.


So it'll definitely be worth to getting k-variants on a Kaby-... platform?


what's that?


Got a 512GB Samsung EVO 850, so I'll proabably still use that with the new platform, but I'll make sure I have appropriate expansion capabilities should I feel the need.


Interesting.

I agree with Excalibur. Intel is single-thread performance king and AMD is value for money, if you want many cores.

BUT Intel is releasing their 8th generation of CPUs this year. Their new flagship 8700k raises the single core performance to 4.7ghz on 6 cores from 4.5ghz on 4 cores.
If you want a CPU that might last many, many years, I assume that chip will be amazing until you somehow need more than 6 Cores (=12 threads via hyperthreading).
This release will most likely mean that the 7th generation's prices might drop a bit more due to the new CPU being noticeably better and future proof.

I bought a 7700k in April (for 360€, today: 320€) and overclocked it to 4.7ghz with a small voltage increase (default: 1.2V, my OC: 1.232V, max via AVX instructions: 1.264V) cooled by air.
So far, I have no problems with it. But it needs excellent cooling because the CPU can become really hot if you stress multiple cores. But most of the time, my case fans are shut off making my computer pretty silent (just that darn hdd and its vibrations are left). The temperatures of the Intel chips became a bit more extreme. My overclock reaches about 80°C when stressed and even without overclock, the temperatures can get high. A good airflow in your case is a must.
A higher OC is pointless with my chip due it hitting a bit of a wall for voltage required to be stable resulting in higher temperature and therefore more noise for just a tiny bit of more speed.
So, the 7700k is amazing, if you have cooling and 4 cores are enough. The possibly-not-future-proof core amount might be pretty much its only downside.

I doubt that the new generation can be overclocked a lot without running into temperature problems. We will see when it is released, but I guess that only 100 or 200mhz can be added using air cooling without drawbacks. I was actually surprised that Intel added 2 Cores and managed to raise the guaranteed speed.

AfaIk, RAM is more important than it was pre-DDR4. I use a 3.2ghz. Check some benchmarks for your CPU and compare prices, so you won't throw money out of the window for marginal speed increases that you might never notice. For my i7700k, the sweet spot seemed to be at 3.2ghz. Going faster did not really yield in improvements compared to price increases.
But I still overclocked my RAM because I had the time and patience to do so, usually that is not advised because the gain is not noticeable.
Today, my RAM costs 10% more than it did a few months ago (128€ -> 140€ for 2x 8gb sticks).

Intel prices are up there, but if you just want to game and never have issues they are the way to go for sure. Honestly though I feel like more cores is better for future proofing. Higher thread counts is awesome especially as developers get out of old habits, but this is shrinking and getting smaller every day. any AAA game made in the last few years my Ryzen handles just fine without even needing to overclock. Every game of mine hits 60fps and never drops once on both my computers ha.

However I would be curious to see what happens with Intels next consumer release. The prices might be a bit more in line now. If you are constantly doing other application task the ryzen is the clear choice. If you just play games the intel prob better choice, but if you are trying to future proof I almost guarantee most applications in 2-4 years will benefit more on hardware with more cores, than faster cores. (I am also not an AMD fanboy, I have not owned an AMD since like the athlon era ha)

Being on the 2500k you might be able to push it a bit to wait for Intels next release IMO. I just replaced my 2600k ha with that 6700k this January. (really only did it because I broke one of my Mobos SLI slots ha) Otherwise I was planning on replacing it Jan 2018.

For instance DX12 supports 8 cores, I bet we will see higher core counts as time goes on as well. Which would make the AMD better once games like that start to come out, but that is just guesses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emEEjJtFVL8

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 1 2017, 4:40 pm by Ashamed.

Ya, I'd feel more comfortable with 6-8 cores as well, but only if I'm not sacrificing other things for it.

I know that you made this thread about 'upgrading the CPU' and are asking about CPU / motherboard stuff specifically, but one thing that is conspicuously absent from the above discussions is VR.

Do you think it is likely that you're going to jump on the VR bandwagon in say the next 18 months? VR at this point heavily relies on the GPU (and probably always will), but its a factor worth considering.

I think anything beyond 18 months however, you'd be looking at upgrading again or buying a new GPU, since VR technology is still evolving pretty quickly right now (I've seen talk about a fully wireless system being in development, which would be great because the cables suck right now).

no VR.

Power phases supply power to your CPU. The more power phases a motherboard has, the less load on each, the less heat they'll produce, and it lessens the chance they will fail. That power is also usually 'cleaner' in a certain respect because it goes through multiple modules all of whom are trying to ensure that it is exactly the amount of power that needs to be delivered. This is important for overclocking because you will need to increase voltage and when an OC'd CPU ramps up it demands more power, and needs it immediately.

If it isn't the M2 version and is instead SATA 6Gbps I'd replace it. NVME is the future. SATA is dead for OS drives as far as I'm concerned.

This is interesting as I wasn't aware DirectX had influence over such things.

VR is a joke. It is no more suited to take over from the traditional keyboard and mouse than when Nintendo introduced motion controls on the Wii. Now, Nintendo consoles are gimmicky curiosities, no one takes them seriously for top tier titles, and no one should.

In your case Nude I'd recommend something like this provided you don't mind the expense:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel - Core i7-7800X 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor ($402.20 @ SuperBiiz)
CPU Cooler: be quiet! - Dark Rock 3 67.8 CFM Fluid Dynamic Bearing CPU Cooler ($69.42 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: Asus - TUF X299 MARK 2 ATX LGA2066 Motherboard ($266.43 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws 4 series 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory ($309.21 @ Newegg)
Total: $1047.26
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-09-01 18:44 EDT-0400

Otherwise sit it out for the next gen of Intel CPUs and see how much you need to spend to get more than 4c/8t.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 1 2017, 11:01 pm by Excalibur.

Hey, if you can quote where I said that, I'd be mighty interested.

VR has a way to go, but it promises story telling and immersive games that you can't experience any other way. Maybe that's not your cup of tea.

I see. Interesting.

Ya, if I was buying new, but that drive is a little too expensive to just throw it away, and if I sell it privately it will lose value and I'd have to go through the hassle to make an offer, package and send it.
And for what? Probably not much real-world advantage for the following reasons:
- I tend to not install AAA games on it and small games have no long durations where they just wait for the storage drive. Even for big titles I'd assume you'd be hard pressed to notice a difference in loading speed because a lot of time is used for renderring and preparing data.
- When transferring large files it's basically always to something that's even slower than the SSD (HDD or USB stick) (I barely ever copy large files towards the SSD)
- The OS can't benefit much from higher sequential read speeds because it loads many small files, which benefit from high IOPS, which aren't increased on the PCIe interface.

I'm probably telling you nothing new with this, so I'll mark that recommendation down as "'needs' as an enthusiast".

woo, pricey but I'll take a look, should I get serious about doing the upgrade. Is there any reason not to put in 2x8 GB RAM and wait for RAM prices to go down again until I put in the rest? It's not like I'd have an immediate use for that much RAM.

Will you even have an immediate use for 16GB of RAM?

VR is triggering because people do the same thing they did with the Wii's motion controls: ITS THE FUTURE OF GAMING!!!!!!!!!1111

I know you didn't say that personally but that seems to be the general reason people bring up/talk about VR.

Nude:

Installing disk-intensive games, like Bethesda titles (Fallout, TES, ect.), especially once you start modding them, or any large modern game, on a mechanical drive is the worst decision you can make and almost defeats the point of having an SSD. EARLY SSDs were for 'OS only' type deals due to their low endurance and low capacity, but this hasn't been the case in the last 3 years or so. Compared to the early days we have much larger and much more durable SSDs and to neglect to leverage their advantages when loading things like large textures is absurd. This is one of those things where I think people's perception of SSDs are usually fundamentally wrong, and I would go as far as to say the 'for OS only' opinion extends to a very large number of builders even today which is extremely disappointing. Why pay so much just for faster bootup and web browsing? You should be leveraging your SSD in any application you can.

Generally speaking you'd be right, HOWEVER, my beef right now is with SATA 6Gpbs primarily when you compare its limitations to that of an NVME M2 drive. The NVME part is also very important as well as M2 in and of itself although theoretically faster usually isn't much better. Anyway, if you think about how many things your SSD is handling at a given moment, which is pretty much anything being called upon that isn't currently cached in memory, it stands to reason that even if your particular transfer source/target isn't pushing more than a fraction of SATA's total bandwidth, all of the things your SSD is doing in that given moment could when combined be at or close to that limit. Again, storage has been the weakest link in the chain going back to when I started building during the first generation of Core2. Anyone buying fresh in 2017 needs to leave SATA in the dirt where it belongs where OS/primary is concerned. SATA is now regulated to handling storage drives. SATA Express is too little too late.

I had a response I wanted to give for this but I have to be mindful of being a responsible voice of reason when talking about tech, because as strongly as I may lean toward a given answer, I have a reputation to uphold. Not that I was going to be rude, but as I said before DDR4 is a very interesting subject right now. I FEEL like its a very backwards move to upgrade to a quad channel DDR4 capable platform and not take advantage of it, HOWEVER, the difference between similarly spec'd memory (frequency/latency) in a dual channel configuration probably won't be at all apparent in real world usage. I do believe newer DirectX and newer engines may be able to leverage more memory bandwidth extremely effectively but because that isn't proven or in stone its speculation at this point. So yeah, you could drop 2x8GB and probably be fine.



I have 16GB currently and I've reached over 80% memory usage in games like PUBG while I have Discord / Firefox open on my 2nd screen. 16GB is the new normal.

Turns out kiddo was indeed wrong. I remember having tried that out with some game before, with my 128 GB Samsung 830 but the results weren't even remotely to as clear as they were this time.
For anyone interested here are the numbers:
4TB Hitachi Deskstar NAS: 150 MB/s (avg) loads modded Fallout 4 in 18s and a savegame in an additional 72s.
512GB Samsung EVO 850: 390 MB/s loads modded Fallout 4 in 13s and a savegame in an additional 21s.

Methodology: I've repeated the tests twice confirming the results within measurement accuracy. Before each run I did a warm restart and waited for 1 minute on the desktop before starting the game.



Honestly? Because I could. I needed to upgrade my 830 because I kept running into space issues. Just doubling the size seemed like too small an upgrade to justify it, so I went for 0.5TB. I don't regret it either, because I could easily set aside 100GB for Linux and I can download and extract large games or movies/shows on the same drive, which is much quicker.
Given the above findings I probably should move the 2-3 AAA titles I'm currently playing at any given time on it. I was just used to not doing it.
Though once I do it I'm, sure I'll have to move downloads a lot more often than now - so maybe I should've gotten 1 TB.
Or just direct the dls to the HDD and suffer longer extraction times. Wouldn't be biggie, because most of the time I'm getting stuff ahead of time so I'm not waiting for it to finish.




Currently I have 8GB, only 3 of which are free upon a fresh restart and opening Firefox. Another 3GB are cached data, which would be available when necessary. I've had games that made use of all of those 6 GBs and even smaller games usually have to empty some cached data. Not to mention when I used the system for a while (I don't restart for days or weeks) and started and closed assorted programs the formerly free mem will all be used for cache.
In Short: I can use more than 8 GB, but probably not much more.

I'm late to the party, but I'll just express my opinions on the original post.

It's not really the time to upgrade if you're going Intel. The next-gen lineup will have two additional cores for i3/i5/i7, so if you want a 6-core with high IPC, you could get an 8600k for probably around $230.

CPUs are not a bottleneck for gaming until you start getting very high-end GPUs (and even then it's a difference of a handful of frames), so you can get by with AMD's recent offerings just fine. AMD really shines in multi-core processing right now.

At this point, I'd say there's no reason to go for Kaby Lake unless you need the fastest CPU right now, or if you already have a motherboard for it and don't want to spend the money to upgrade both the CPU and mobo.

Coffee Lake is likely what you're going to want if you can wait for it. With the increased number of cores, I can see the i5 from this generation becoming the new standard for gaming, like the Sandy Bridge i5 was for its time.

Threadripper doesn't fit your requirements, though that's not to mistake it for Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7. The IPC on Ryzen is naturally weaker than Intel, but this is not terribly important in two aspects: the IPC is competitive with Ivy Bridge, which is still easily sufficient for gaming; and games that see heavy CPU use are generally optimized for multi-threading, something that Ryzen does very, very well. If you can't wait for a reasonable Intel 6-core, I'd say you should absolutely consider this path. The only real disadvantage is that it will perform about as well as an older i5 for poorly-optimized games. I've personally been considering the 1700X as my upgrade path, since right now my i5-4590, while it can run my games just fine, can cause delays in other applications due to a lack of processing resources.

Obligatory plug to UserBenchmark (which I know you're already aware of). In general, Intel is better in efficiency and single-threaded performance, but AMD has caught up significantly in these areas with Zen, and they're easily the best value for multi-threaded performance.

Not really. I have a dual-monitor setup, so I tend to have multiple things open when gaming, and the only time I've needed more than 8GB of RAM is for Photoshop; 16GB is sufficient, and you can leave room for expanding if you really want it.

Hmm...

- While Intel's pricing doesn't budge much, AMD does tend to adjust their prices. Waiting for Coffee Lake would be worthwhile even if you plan on going AMD.
- Your 850 EVO is fine. Don't burn a hole in your wallet on storage; if anything, that money goes to the GPU first and CPU second.
- RAM prices could just as easily go up in the near future, rather than down.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Sep 7 2017, 4:30 pm by Roy.

There's no late to the party as I'm in no rush to buy, so your input is much appreciated. On that note, a thank you to everyone having helped me to wrap my head around all this stuff.

A few points I'm taking from all this:
General consensus seems to be that AMD will be at least just as good as Intel for everything that makes good use of multithreading, but will fall behind in things that don't multithread, or do it badly. The future will move towards more and more multithreading, so this is a plus for AMD and a reminder for the Intel route to make sure to pick something with as many cores as reasonably possible*. Since Intel is about to get a generation out that offers more cores, and AMD prices will probably go down a bit when they release, it makes sense to wait until that regardless of the platform I choose.

* Hindsight confirmes this point, as the Sandy Bridge i7's are still faring a good bit better in many games today than their i5 counter parts, despite being even back then. So I'll probably move a step up and pick an i7 this time. Especially considering that there's now an i9 line.


I think I've reached that point. I bought the GTX 1070 as soon as it got released. What's particularly annoying is that many games dance around 50-70 frames (even though benchmarks show that at 1080p I could get much higher framerates) denying me to enable vync, or suffer through framrates jumping from 30 to 60 all the time.


... because I made you aware of it.


Fine indeed - good enough, at least. While I don't share Ex's point of view regarding use of SATA for OS, due to IOPS being the major factor here, he has a point regarding game loading times. These probably would benefit quite a bit. However, at the moment I don't think this would be reason enough for me to spend that much for it. I will, however, make sure I have the option in the future.


Aren't chip prices quite high atm due to high demand (that currently cannot be satisfied) for electromobility, ai and ssd hype? In a couple of years I expect demand to be saturated for SSDs, and production capabilities to catch up because of continued demand of the other areas.

Eh, the fact that an i9 line exists shouldn't influence your decision; the i7 would be the same with or without the higher tier, and something I wouldn't recommend to most people only interested in gaming.

I suppose I wasn't counting 2+ years as part of the near future; if you can wait that long for RAM, the prices fluctuate plenty over the long term.