AMD Zen Discussion Thread

BloodBath

You might as well wait for the 4000 series at this stage which should have better IPC and clocks again.

wotzgoingon

BloodBath wrote: »

You might as well wait for the 4000 series at this stage which should have better IPC and clocks again.

It's still a fair few months away and that was before the CV19 bullsh*t so who knows what will happen now.

shootermacg

wotzgoingon wrote: »

I have a Aorus X570 Ultra and doesn't have as many USB 3.2 ports as that B550 Master has. The difference a year makes.

Same, but i regret nothing, it's a good board.

wotzgoingon

Just came across this. Who knows if true but if it is Zen 3 must be a lot further away than we think. Why release two new chips with a bit of a tune and two months later release a newer better Zen 3 architecture.

https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-7-3850x-3750x-mattise-refresh-desktop-cpu-rumor/

AlmightyCushion

wotzgoingon wrote: »

Just came across this. Who knows if true but if it is Zen 3 must be a lot further away than we think. Why release two new chips with a bit of a tune and two months later release a newer better Zen 3 architecture.

https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-7-3850x-3750x-mattise-refresh-desktop-cpu-rumor/

They're replacing the existing 3700x and 3800x and the only difference seems to be a clock boost. Not like it's a big change. Can't see why it would mean Zen 3 is coming a lot later than expected.

.G.

So its actually 3 refreshes, 3600XT, 3800XT and 3900XT

https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-9-3900xt-ryzen-7-3800xt-ryzen-5-3600xt-matisse-refresh-desktop-cpus-confirmed/

Popoutman

I recently upgraded my main desktop from a Xeon E5-1680v2 on a P9X79Pro board from Asus to a Ryzen 9 3900X on a 570x board also from Asus. Oh boy, there's a big difference. The octacore Xeon was no slouch, especially with a stable overclock under watercooling of 4.3GHz, but the 3900x walks all over it. At worst the ryzen about 40 percent faster than the overclocked Xeon, and at best it's turning out to be about 4 times faster. That's made the update worthwhile. Both systems were with OS on SSD, the Ryzen is on NVMe so there's a small but perceptible difference there. Everything else has been wow. Both systems were using RTX 2080's so it's been interesting to see the differences there in the benchmarks.

I took the opportunity to update the monitor from a Dell 27" 1920x1200 to a 32" Asus 1440p 144Hz monitor - and that has also been a revelation. The higher refresh rate possible is just wonderful to see.

wotzgoingon

Nice username Popoutman. You just pop out to post every couple of years. Mad low post count for someone who joined 20 years ago.

mossym

been pc-less for 3 week now. turned off the pc one night, next day flicked it on and nothing. gigabtye x570 auros pro with a 3700x. queue lots of troubleshooting, all the usual tricks, spot the cpu light is flashing, reseated, no good, flash bios, the whole works. guessed it was the mobo, so back to ccl it went, who confirmed it dead. great, but now it goes back to gigabyte and predicted timescale is months, not weeks.

so i bought another identical board, which is in dpd athlone and would be great if it arrived tomorrow, if those b550 boards were available they might have made an interesting choice

here's hoping the 3700x is okay when that new board arrives.

Mr Crispy

Months? That sucks big time. Hopefully it's all smooth sailing now.

Inviere

Bit deflated after watching DF's 10600K review...it seems to go between 10-30% ahead of a 3700X in most games (@1080p, GPU not a bottleneck). I refuse to buy another 14nm chip for my next build (currently sitting on a still respectable 7700K), and am dead set on going Ryzen (waiting patiently for Zen 3).

I suppose this is a new-gen Intel, versus a year old AMD comparison, but isn't it unlikely to see Zen 3 pull ahead of Zen 2 by ~30% in gaming? Or is it achievable? Rocket Lake is not too far away either though, with presumably another bump in performance coming.

seraphimvc

mossym wrote: »

been pc-less for 3 week now. turned off the pc one night, next day flicked it on and nothing. gigabtye x570 auros pro with a 3700x. queue lots of troubleshooting, all the usual tricks, spot the cpu light is flashing, reseated, no good, flash bios, the whole works. guessed it was the mobo, so back to ccl it went, who confirmed it dead. great, but now it goes back to gigabyte and predicted timescale is months, not weeks.

so i bought another identical board, which is in dpd athlone and would be great if it arrived tomorrow, if those b550 boards were available they might have made an interesting choice

here's hoping the 3700x is okay when that new board arrives.

I am checking everyday to see when will these B550 available on Amazon:p 'official' launch date is mid-June but i expect they will put up for sales soon.

I am getting that Asrock ITX board

djivide_

Inviere wrote: »

I suppose this is a new-gen Intel, versus a year old AMD comparison, but isn't it unlikely to see Zen 3 pull ahead of Zen 2 by ~30% in gaming? Or is it achievable? Rocket Lake is not too far away either though, with presumably another bump in performance coming.

All depends on what monitor and setting up go for, if you are after 1080p with ultra high fps then intel all day unfortunately but as you move up to 1440p/4k or higher quality settings and move work from cpu to gpu it really does not make much difference from a gaming perspective. With the next gen ampere and "big navi" gpus i think its really time to move away from 1080p, I can understand it from a benchmarking perspective as it puts more load on the cpu.



And as for waiting for zen3 it will come down to memory latency, yes there are going to be ipc improvments and if the leaks are true probably clock speed improvements but for ultra high fps needs to get the memory latency down to compete with intel.



my personal upgrade plan is zen3 + ampere gpu on my 1440p monitor

Inviere

djivide_ wrote: »

All depends on what monitor and setting up go for

It'll be 1080p for me for the short term, with an eye on moving that to 4k late next year. I wouldn't say I'd be looking for 'ultra high' FPS, but nothing lower than 60 anyway, with all the bells and whistles turned on.

Cuddlesworth

djivide_ wrote: »

All depends on what monitor and setting up go for, if you are after 1080p with ultra high fps then intel all day

That assumes your budget is unlimited.

The new I5 + cooler + mobo is circa 450 Sterling
A Ryzen 3600 and B450 is circa 250 Sterling and probably dropping soon.

200 Sterling spent on a graphics card over the CPU+Mobo is going to give you more FPS then the Intel CPU over the AMD.

Homelander

Was just going to post that. This whole "Intel is better for gaming" thing is a relic from the past that won't die. Unless you're building an insanely high-end PC where budget isn't a concern, there's really not much reason to go Intel.

I mean the i5-10600K is almost double the price of the Ryzen 3600. I struggle to understand why most people would buy it.

Inviere

Homelander wrote: »

Unless you're building an insanely high-end PC where budget isn't a concern, there's really not much reason to go Intel.

Is that what it comes down to really? Looking at something like the Kingdom Come Deliverance benchmark, the 3700X is dipping below 50fps @1080p/Ultra, whereas the 10600K is keeping it's head above water in that regard...

Is that game very Intel-centric perhaps?

Homelander

Possibly, but you'll always have cases like that. It's the reason people tend to buy Intel for flight sims as well. In the same way that you have some games perform way better on AMD, and others that perform way better on Nvidia. Granted, it's rare that games perform better on Ryzen in general when core/thread counts are equal.

But for the average gamer, really, Intel doesn't make sense. I mean if you look at benchmarks - sure, the i5-10600K really is faster than the 3700X, no disputing it. But you're talking about means of 150FPS vs 180FPS or whatever.

90%+ of builds won't have the GPU and other system specs to keep pace with the raw CPU power. But yet you still see some people giving priority to Intel over the past few years despite the fact their overall build will never be able to capitalize on that CPU headspace.

If you're coming with "I want to build a high-end 144hz PC and my budget is €2,000" then sure, Intel's in there.

But 90% of the time people just want a bog standard 60hz build. The other 10% of the time, probably 9 times out of 10, even with the 144hz in mind, the budget isn't so big that the enormous gap between Intel and AMD can't be better spent on a GPU anyway!

EG I would much rather a 2070 Super + Ryzen 3600 over a i5-10600K + 5600XT or whatever.

Inviere

Homelander wrote: »

But 90% of the time people just want a bog standard 60hz build.

And at that level, the difference between the two is largely irrelevant? This tallies with what was said above, in that Intel only matters if you're looking for bleeding edge fps...

I'm thinking along the lines of a 4700X (depending on the Zen 2 lineup), paired with a 3080 (again depending), should be a nice upgrade over my current 7700K with 1070? I'd hope to be able to push 60fps at 1080 without breaking much of a sweat, and then play at native 4k60 with settings tweaked to allow it.

Cuddlesworth

Inviere wrote: »

Is that what it comes down to really? Looking at something like the Kingdom Come Deliverance benchmark, the 3700X is dipping below 50fps @1080p/Ultra, whereas the 10600K is keeping it's head above water in that regard...

Is that game very Intel-centric perhaps?

Never heard of that benchmark before today but I'd stand behind my statement. Take two new systems at the same budget with that game aiming for 60fps and the AMD will win out because you have the better graphics card, until you get to the high end where performance over cost becomes unreasonable.

The game itself is curious, a new release on a old engine at this point, running dx11(very single core dependant) even thought the developers have done a good job multi-threading the game(will see 12 threads utilised).

Just because something is unreasonably stressful, does that alone make it a good benchmark? What are you benchmarking exactly?

Homelander

Yes but what I was also getting at is that, in most cases even with the 144hz in mind, the person doesn't have the budget to afford a bleeding edge GPU that can capitalise on the Intel headroom.

So for example you can take your i5-10600K over say, a Ryzen 3600, but with a 5700XT or RTX2060 Super (from what I can see, the most common cards picked for 144hz builds here), there isn't really going to be any real difference as the GPU will remain the hard ceiling.

So for me, the only scenarios in which Intel makes sense is a) very specific uses in mind that favor Intel and b) very high budget.

For mainstream users, I don't know who at all would buy Intel outside of a narrow niche. I mean the 10600K is £120 more expensive than the 3600. The cheapest Comet Lake CPU is almost double the RRP of the cheapest hex-core AMD, 1600AF.

edit: On Kingdom Come, that game is poorly optimised. I remember running it on a i7-2700K with a GTX1070 and it actually dipped below 30fps at some points. I think it has high dependency on single core performance or something. If I recall correctly it runs terribly badly on the consoles and dips below 20fps regularly.

TitianGerm

Inviere wrote: »

And at that level, the difference between the two is largely irrelevant? This tallies with what was said above, in that Intel only matters if you're looking for bleeding edge fps...

I'm thinking along the lines of a 4700X (depending on the Zen 2 lineup), paired with a 3080 (again depending), should be a nice upgrade over my current 7700K with 1070? I'd hope to be able to push 60fps at 1080 without breaking much of a sweat, and then play at native 4k60 with settings tweaked to allow it.

Surely a current gen 3700X and a 2080 can run every game (or the vast majority of games) at 1080P at 60FPS.
So next gen should be well above that?

Hell my R5 1700 and RTX2060 gets to 60FPS at 1440P in most of the games I've tried.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you?

Inviere

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Just because something is unreasonably stressful, does that alone make it a good benchmark? What are you benchmarking exactly?

I was referencing the results in the DF video I posted a few posts back. I'm not suggesting it's a good/bad benchmark, I'd not heard of it until I watched the video...so I was wondering why the results at 1080p seem to seriously push both the 3700X and the 10600K, with the latter maintaining >60fps, and the former not. It's been explained since.

Homelander wrote: »

Yes but what I was also getting at is that, in most cases even with the 144hz in mind, the person doesn't have the budget to afford a bleeding edge GPU that can capitalise on the Intel headroom.

Even further to that, Rich in the DF video mentions that to achieve the results seen in the video, you need to run that 10600K on a Z board in order to access the higher memory speeds...so you're pairing a 'mainstream' CPU with an enthusiast level board, just to access RAM speeds that the CPU can natively access. Madness.

TitianGerm wrote: »

Surely a current gen 3700X and a 2080 can run every game (or the vast majority of games) at 1080P at 60FPS.
So next gen should be well above that?

Hell my R5 1700 and RTX2060 gets to 60FPS at 1440P in most of the games I've tried.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you?

Sorry, I'm probably talking arseways. I'm not in a position to buy yet, so will be waiting until next year, at which point I may as well wait for Zen 2/RTX 3. I'll also be upgrading the 1080p panel to a 4K oled by then too, so resolutions higher than 1080p are in the mix of considerations for me too.

beauf

If you were looking to build a budget system (but with decent case, PSU as a base) from scratch would you go B450, or wait for a cheaper B550 perhaps matched with a 3300x

DirkVoodoo

beauf wrote: »

If you were looking to build a budget system (but with decent case, PSU as a base) from scratch would you go B450, or wait for a cheaper B550 perhaps matched with a 3300x

Was just going to ask this! I can launch is early June but with covid who knows what supply will be like and how long you might be waiting.

Homelander

I wouldn't advise the 3300X over the 1600AF or 2600, same price but they have more cores and threads.

With games already scaling to hex and octo-core, and particularly with the new console generation looming built on 8 core processors, it'd be madness to build a new gaming machine now with a quad core in my opinion.

Best budget combo is Ryzen 3600 + A320M, can be had for £190 and gives killer performance for the money. Even even a 1600AF and A320M is only £150 or so and an excellent base.

beauf

What's the future upgrade path for that motherboard?

savemejebus

I wouldn't skimp too much on the motherboard. I think an x470 max board could be a good half way point

Cuddlesworth

beauf wrote: »

What's the future upgrade path for that motherboard?

How common are CPU only upgrades?

beauf

Personally I've done it quite a bit. Desktop's and PCs over the years Though a lot of talk about future proofing pcs seems to suggest it almost never happens. People just build a new PC each time. But I think they aren't really people on a tight budget.