Tech Gaming Hardware discussion (& Hardware Sales) thread

Madmick said:
If you read what I just wrote a bit more carefully you might have extrapolated an inference. Notice the differences in the cooling designs in the spreadsheet linked above for the more expensive models. Notice the two priciest models are E-ATX motherboards: more space for more features. That's why it supports so many PCIex16 slots; so many m.2 cards. This Dutch website is still filling in their exhaustive spec sheets, and they're not as reliable as they used to be for comprehensive review (the shutdown of the US site suggests they are struggling as a business), but it will give you a deeper idea of the many differences between motherboards that are rarely listed:
https://nl.hardware.info/categorie/1/moederborden/producten

Is it a competitive value? Of course not. It's no different than the "Dream" builds you see where PCs cost like $20,000. It's almost entirely luxury with little advantage to performance-- especially gaming performance.
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Yeah, so the marginal value after $300 drops of a cliff as I expected.
I see the trend of course but I was just curious whether those $700+ mobos had some killer features I was unaware of. Thanks again.
 
Newegg just got the 3700X in stock. Sitting here debating at the checkout screen...........
 
jefferz said:
I just ordered one.
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Decided to wait. Instead ordered a USB flash drive for i have no idea where my optical drive is. Believe i possibly threw it out when i upgraded my Pc case last year from my 2005 Pc case.

What CPU you moving up from?
 
KaNesDeath said:
Decided to wait. Instead ordered a USB flash drive for i have no idea where my optical drive is. Believe i possibly threw it out when i upgraded my Pc case last year from my 2005 Pc case.

What CPU you moving up from?
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I'm currently using a 1700 on a Strix x470 mobo paired with a 1070ti. I'm going to take that 1700 and upgrade my htpc.
I'll probably upgrade to a new graphics card in the next couple months, I'm going to wait and see if AMD gets the kinks in the 5700xt ironed out.

cmoebk7f7r331.gif
 
With all eyes on Ryzen 3000 any who are building with a focus on pure gaming value might keep their eyes on deals like this:


It has popped back up to $230, but that's still an extraordinary value. The Asus ROG Strix X470-F Gaming is one of the finest boards Asus produced for the X470 socket, and one that discretely costs $190 right now. As you can see from the previous page, it's assigned to the "High-End" Tier of motherboards by that spreadsheet's maker due to its cooling design, so it can aggressively overclock the R5-2600X. Not only that, but it is the best Asus board from X470 that already boasts compatibility with Ryzen 3000 chips.

The R5-2600X was a chip that until the past two months had been selling in the $190+ range. Today it runs at a low of $160 (lowest sale I've seen including through these months is $135). Of course it is only ~2% shy of AMD's best gaming processor (the R7-2700X) in terms of gaming performance that existed before Ryzen 3000.
https://pangoly.com/en/review/amd-ryzen-5-2600x/price-history

The deal also carries the $30 value of the new 3-month Xbox Game Pass subscription package. Historically perks have always been free games for GPUs.

So weighed against the value these components held in March: $190 + $190 + $30 = $410 (195% of $210).
 
Madmick said:
With all eyes on Ryzen 3000 any who are building with a focus on pure gaming value might keep their eyes on deals like this:


It has popped back up to $230, but that's still an extraordinary value. The Asus ROG Strix X470-F Gaming is one of the finest boards Asus produced for the X470 socket, and one that discretely costs $190 right now. As you can see from the previous page, it's assigned to the "High-End" Tier of motherboards by that spreadsheet's maker due to its cooling design, so it can aggressively overclock the R5-2600X. Not only that, but it is the best Asus board from X470 that already boasts compatibility with Ryzen 3000 chips.

The R5-2600X was a chip that until the past two months had been selling in the $190+ range. Today it runs at a low of $160 (lowest sale I've seen including through these months is $135). Of course it is only ~2% shy of AMD's best gaming processor (the R7-2700X) in terms of gaming performance that existed before Ryzen 3000.
https://pangoly.com/en/review/amd-ryzen-5-2600x/price-history

The deal also carries the $30 value of the new 3-month Xbox Game Pass subscription package. Historically perks have always been free games for GPUs.

So weighed against the value these components held in March: $190 + $190 + $30 = $410 (195% of $210).
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You can get a 2600X with a Gigabyte B450 Aorus even cheaper than at Microcenter. That board is fine for overclocking a Ryzen 5: https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1046357-motherboard-tier-list-now-with-included-vrm-list/
 
Apparently the next windows update will address Ryzen and help their performance, this may close the gap on Intel in gaming? maybe.....
 
Woldog said:
Apparently the next windows update will address Ryzen and help their performance, this may close the gap on Intel in gaming? maybe.....
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Don't rest your hopes on it. Patches never change things more than ~1% (as with the AGESA patch-- notice somebody conspicuously vanished from the thread once those results were updated).
LifeIsNotFair said:
You can get a 2600X with a Gigabyte B450 Aorus even cheaper than at Microcenter. That board is fine for overclocking a Ryzen 5: https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1046357-motherboard-tier-list-now-with-included-vrm-list/
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Those are all sold out, dude.

That motherboard has weak cooling relative to the Asus ROG Strix X470-F Gaming, anyway, and the total I'm seeing doesn't match this one's low: it's $220 ($140 + $110 - $30 = $210). For the 80% of us Americans that don't live near a Microcenter running any particular deal, with it in stock, once we add the cost of paying some gopher to go buy the combo, and ship it to us, it wouldn't be cheaper. Even those who live within striking distance might calculate the added cost of gas if you're making a 3hr+ round trip because it's 100+ miles away.

Besides, the R5-2600X isn't really the optimal Ryzen to buy unless one is after more extreme overclocking setups, not good-enough setups (since there is little variance in the ceiling between Ryzen processors, and the R5-2600X is already clocked so much closer to this ceiling). The MSI B450 Tomahawk I mentioned a page back carries a starting price of $109 that has been eligible for those Ryzen combos knocking off an additional $30. That also hits $220, and is the one I prefer if I were intrigue myself with what are merely paper sales to me.
 
My biggest thought right now is that if Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord supports using multiple CPU's instead of a single core (Warband only used a single core) a Ryzen may be the top choice for running that with hundreds of troops on the screen. Bannerlord for me is the one game I actually look forward to playing for a few thousand hours.
Do we think more games will support multicore in the future now that 4+ cores is the norm everywhere.
 
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Woldog said:
My biggest thought right now is that if Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord supports using multiple CPU's instead of a single core (Warband only used a single core) a Ryzen may be the top choice for running that with hundreds of troops on the screen. Bannerlord for me is the one game I actually look forward to playing for a few thousand hours.
Do we think more games will support multicore in the future now that 4+ cores is the norm everywhere.
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Next gen consoles will have 8 core processors AFAIK. I think more new games will utilize it.
 
ssBaldy said:
Next gen consoles will have 8 core processors AFAIK. I think more new games will utilize it.
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This gen's processors have 8 cores. It really didn't change things much. Furthermore, the i9-9900K has 8 cores.

I'd say there is something to wait for with the R9-3950X, but that won't help AMD. As Der8auer detailed the Ryzen 3000 chips aren't even hitting their listed peak turbos (except for the R5-3600X) while being benchmarked. Nevertheless, despite having more cores, the higher the CPU in their lineup, the higher the turbos it did hold, so we can reasonably expect the R9-3950X to be their supreme gaming CPU once it is released since it has the highest theoretical turbo at 4.7 GHz. While this is great for production software it won't help AMD in games.

The reason is shown below. The FPS Review did a direct IPC comparison of Coffee Lake Refresh vs. Ryzen 3000, and as you can see, while it clobbered Intel in all the productivity workloads, the R9-3900X still lost to the i9-9900K convincingly in 2 of the 3 games (and effectively tied in the game it won) despite both being clocked to 4.2 GHz:
https://www.thefpsreview.com/2019/07/07/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-cpu-review/9/

At this point, for anyone looking to purchase the supreme gaming CPU, the most interesting thing to wait for is Intel's response. Otherwise, the i9-9900K and i9-9900KF still own the throne, decisively.
 
LifeIsNotFair said:
So the 3900X is only 3% faster in gaming than a 9400F but costs 233% more.

<{MingNope}>
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The only problem with this is that it is also getting crushed in games by the $199 R5-3600 (which is running right alongside the i5-9600K at stock):



 
@15:33 Jason talks about the FX chip being slower in more things than just gaming benchmarks.
 
I've noticed that AMD have significantly less headroom for overclocking? or at least that's what the reviewers seem to show. This confuses me as AMD used to have huge room for overclocking their chips.

Edit: At this time I'm strongly considering the 3700x. I can get $100 off at my local store right now. It's better than my 7700k and at 1440p it should be pretty good. But I'll continue to wait a lil bit before I decide.

Edit: nevermind I just got $4,900 tax back.... I can buy whatever I feel like without my Mrs killing me.
 
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jefferz said:
I'll probably upgrade to a new graphics card in the next couple months, I'm going to wait and see if AMD gets the kinks in the 5700xt ironed out.
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Current rumor is Mid August for 3rd party cards. One of the lesser known tech websites put the R9 290 Asus cooler on the 5700XT and it literally fixed everything (gained a couple FPS in the test due to no throttling, temps never broke 67C, and the fan made almost no noise).
 
Woldog said:
I've noticed that AMD have significantly less headroom for overclocking? or at least that's what the reviewers seem to show.
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Definitely.
This confuses me as AMD used to have huge room for overclocking their chips.
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Well, this is the third refinement of Zen, so the fact the clocks are that much higher out of the box is probably the single greatest reason why-- less headroom in the tank. Also, AMD listed their turbos more optimistically than ever before because this is the first time their chips haven't actually hit the listed turbos. Beyond that, notice the best overclockers so far relative to their listed turbos are the lower-core chips. It's more difficult to maintain a stable overclock way above the base frequency when you're running so many cores.

Few are showing the OC'd 9900K next to the OC'd 3900X or 3700X. It shows how much larger the lead grows for Intel once this is done for those with powerful CPU coolers who can achieve them. Tom's Hardware is one of the few:
  1. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ryzen-9-3900x-7-3700x-review,6214-7.html
  2. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ryzen-9-3900x-7-3700x-review,6214-8.html
  3. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ryzen-9-3900x-7-3700x-review,6214-9.html
  4. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ryzen-9-3900x-7-3700x-review,6214-10.html

*Edit*
Here are the Silicon Lottery figures for context:
https://siliconlottery.com/collections/coffeelake-r
  • 9700K
    • 4.8 GHz = 100% (Guaranteed)
    • 4.9 GHz = 100% (Guaranteed)
    • 5.0 GHz = 89%
    • 5.1 GHz = 36%
    • 5.2 GHz = 10%
  • 9900K
    • 4.8 GHz = 100% (Guaranteed)
    • 4.9 GHz = 87%
    • 5.0 GHz = 35%
    • 5.1 GHz = 7%
    • 5.2 GHz = N/A
  • 9900KF
    • 4.8 GHz = 100% (Guaranteed)
    • 4.9 GHz = 92%
    • 5.0 GHz = 31%
    • 5.1 GHz = 4%
    • 5.2 GHz = N/A
 
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Amazon got the 3700X in stock. The MSI motherboard on Newegg i was looking at went out of stock then was restocked yesterday.

Just placed my orders after spending the previous two days debating. New build will be in the mail next week : )
 
KaNesDeath said:
Amazon got the 3700X in stock. The MSI motherboard on Newegg i was looking at went out of stock then was restocked yesterday.

Just placed my orders after spending the previous two days debating. New build will be in the mail next week : )
Click to expand...

Are you upgrading cases as well?
 
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