Still rocking an i5-8400 and a 1060. It’s fine for FFXIV and most other games.
Until GPU prices come down, the CPU is the least of my worries. I’ll play anything that needs decent hardware on my PS5.
Everything is expensive and everyone’s underemployed thanks to all the damage large corporations have done to the job market and the economy as a whole.
I just want to make almost as much money as I made as a shift manager in fast food 10 years ago, which is a job I ironically walked away from to get educated. I just hope the democrats win so they can maybe reverse some of that anti homelessness stuff because we’re all going to need it.
100%
People are making more money and growing poorer by the month.
People are not growing poorer, they are growing richer
https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekly-earnings-over-time-total-men-women.htm
People make more money now than before the pandemic, even inflation adjusted
Inflation adjusted looking pretty flat and that’s if you trust their optimistic inflation calculations that likely underestimate it. Housing, education, and health care greatly outpace inflation btw, but hey, at least TVs are cheaper.
Don’t come here with your data and upset our dearly held opinions.
https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
We measure this. Underemployment is not that high.
Exactly. I really like the term “vibecession” coined by Kyla Scanlon, because it really hits this perfectly. People think things are bad, despite all evidence to the contrary.
From the numbers I’ve seen, the average household (i.e. making <$70k/year) is maybe paying a few percent more on net than they were 5 years ago. Wages tend to lag inflation, so it makes sense that people’s wages would still be catching up now that inflation is pretty much back to normal. It’ll probably take another year or two, but it’ll get there.
They sell everything they put into laptops, in that market they can’t keep up with demand. Similar story for enterprise.
In the DIY desktop market, which this article is about, It’s been instilled into everyone to wait for the X3D chips, by basically every reviewer. And for good reason.
Certainly doesn’t help that:
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a Windows 11 bug made performance look over 10% worse than it actually was on release, which is when all benchmarks are done and opinions are set (E: btw this has been fixed, and the fix also helped older CPUs too)
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AMD decided to massively lower energy usage at the expense of out-of-box performance (I actually love this decision, I’m sick of components getting more and more power-hungry, and I’m sick of a hot stuffy room. Most gaming-focussed reviewers hated it though, which bugged me tbh because they also moan when power usage is high. I think they just like being negative because it drives engagement). At previous-gen TDPs, Zen 5 gains a lot of performance, but that’s not how they are benchmarked.
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the price of Zen 4 has dropped, and the 7800X3D in particular looks compelling to those who might’ve wanted Zen 5.
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most DIY PC builders are PC gamers, and what do we need new CPUs for? Most gamers are more GPU bottlenecked right now, especially as people are moving to 1440p, 1440p ultrawide, or 4K. Add to that the fact that there have been very few good PC game releases this year and of course we’re in a slump.
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the only people who can buy a Zen5 CPU and drop it in their machine easily are Zen4 users, who won’t see a large uplift and likely won’t bother. People with earlier systems are looking at a significant investment - new motherboard and DDR5 RAM, why bother with that when the 5700X3D is such an insanely good value proposition that still won’t be bottlenecked unless you’re running an insanely good GPU?
Let me agree with you explicitly on loving the return to a sane power configuration here. I was watching Hardware Unboxed’s retest of this after the patches and it takes almost fifteen minutes of them reiterating that the 9700X and the 14700K are tied for performance and price before they even mention the bombshell that the 9700X is doing that with about half the wattage.
The fact that we keep pushing reviews and benchmarks focused strictly on pedal-to-the-metal overclocked performance and nothing else is such a disgrace. I made the mistake to buy into a 13700K and I have it under lower than out of box power limits manually both to prevent longevity issues and because this damn computer is more effective as a hair dryer than anything else.
We don’t mention it much because Intel was in the process of catching on actual fire at the same time, but the way this generation has been marketed, presented to reviewers, supported and eventually reviewed has been a massive trainwreck, considering the performance of the actual product.
I just wrote a reply to this post as well, where I wrote that I’m going to upgrade my CPU soon but I’m probably going to get a Zen 4 X3D because they’re faster than a Zen 5 CPU but based on what you wrote, should I change my decision? They’re a good bit cheaper and without that Windows bug (I use Linux anyway) and if I overclock it to the TDP of the Zen 4 X3Ds, might they be faster after all? I saw something about that Windows bug and that they run at a lower TDP out of the box but I didn’t find anything about how they run now and if you can overclock them since there’s more headroom.
Edit: Also to just give a little context, I’m currently running a Ryzen 5 3600 with 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM but since I need to get a new mainboard and RAM anyway, I’m upgrading to 32 gigs of DDR5 RAM
If you’re gaming tbh I’d rather go with Zen4X3D or if you really want to, wait for Zen5X3D. Standard Zen5 isn’t really worth it considering the dropping of Zen4 prices IMO
Even with the performance boost of turning up the TDP, you’re looking at pretty similar performance to the X3D chips, and in some games that really love cache, still a decent amount worse
I also just upgraded from a 3600, but I did it to a 5700X3D, because it barely cost anything and only required dropping in a new CPU
The thing is, the Zen 5 CPUs are actually cheaper in Germany than the Zen 4 X3D CPUs but if the performance of Zen 4 X3D is still better, I’m getting that, thanks
Standard Zen5 isn’t really worth it considering the dropping of Zen4 prices IMO
Unless you’re like me and upgrading from something quite old like an i5-6600k. I switched to a R5 7600 for now that’s at least on the AM5 and was less than 200 so I have a lot of upgrade paths later on when I have more funding (blew my entire budget on a 4080 LOLOL)
Still miles better than the i5/1060 setup I had lmao
the price of Zen 4 has dropped, and the 7800X3D in particular looks compelling to those who might’ve wanted Zen 5.
This is the big one.
Literally the best gaming chip from any company is a Zen 4 and surprisingly cheap
For most people they won’t need anything more than a 7800x3d for 5 maybe even 10 years?
I’d hate to say what GPU it takes to make cpu the bottleneck on one of those.
Agreed, I bought a 7950X3D over the 9950X as it was $150 cheaper. Seemed like the smarter move.
I did the same thing also assuming kernel drivers were more mature. I’ll let someone else beta test for me.
I’m playing Satisfactory at High or Ultra settings 1440p ultrawide Lumen on with a Ryzen 7700x and a Radeon 7900GRE, and maintaining frame rates in the 80’s. What is out now, or is in the works, that my machine can’t run well?
For most people they won’t need anything more than a 7800x3d for 5 maybe even 10 years?
I know from experience, it is very difficult to get 10 years of gaming out of a processor. I’m a pretty frugal guy, and I’m actually ok with merely “acceptable” gaming performance, but I think the most I’ve ever managed was 8 years on the same processor, and that was with the core 2 duo. I called it the super chip, the chip that stayed competitive even when multiple new architectures were available. And honestly, 8 years was really pretty good. But when I switched to a quad core i5, it was definitely a necessary change.
The Phenom 2?!
I barely remember it, but yeah, it was a beast.
But my 1700x went hard for five years. The only reason I tacked the extra 5 on was x3d changes things up.
Now, since I’ve made that comment AMD has solved the Zen 5 latency issues but cutting it by more than half. That’s what was holding it back. So when the Zen 5 x3d comes out, it’s going to be nuts.
But…
It’s going to take a while for those changes to become industry standard. It might be a year before Zen 5 x3d, I’m not sure if they’ve even announced when. So games won’t take full advantage of them right away.
It takes like a 4070 super to CPU bound a 7800x3d, and fine tune some settings and it’ll balance out
We’re not going to have a new screen resolution jump, and that combo can max out 4k 120fps on pretty much anything thanks to frame generation without even touching upscaling.
There’s just not a lot to improve until we see a major jump like VR finally taking off.
idk I was using a 12 year old cpu and it worked fine for gaming. Only upgraded because I wanted to compile stuff in reasonable timeframes.
100%, it’s the lack of the X3D parts. Zen 5 on its own is compelling but not for gamers and DIY, would I buy it in a pre-built desktop or a business machine, Yes I would all day long. But if I’m gaming and there’s no X3D part why would I get anything else other than a 7800 X3D. AMD really shot themselves in the foot and what’s worse is we warned them it was coming yet they chose not to listen.
I still have my 3700X and it keeps up well enough with a 4070 even on cyberpunk.
I’m still on my Zen1 1600, with DDR4 RAM and RX580 8GB which I built back in 2018. Whenever I’m thinking of upgrading I just look at the prices. I’d basically need to upgrade everything, maybe aside from GPU which would become a giant bottleneck, so it should be upgraded as well.
I really don’t even want to think about gutting my PC and upgrading, I’d much rather switch to a console.Go grab you something later in the AM4 line, like a 5600 or so, and an RX6700, as long as your power supply is up to it.
You could chuck a 57 or 5800X3D up in there for a substantial boost if your board vendor offers BIOS support.
even a 5600 would be a massive leap for about $100. Add something like a used 6600XT or a 3060 and you’ll be back at current gen gaming at around $300€ total.
Very true, just thinking about a terminal platform here, and just fully sending it off, but regular vermeer is no slouch either, and will serve well for many years to come (along with a shiny new gpu)
Jup, built a new pc last year and went with a Ryzen 7600. The next CPU will be whatever has the best price to performance ratio of the last gen my mobo supports.
Yeah I’m still on my 5950X and it’s an absolute champ in terms of CPU load. Its second incarnation when I eventually upgrade is going to be a proxmox box.
My 3080 FE is starting to choke though… starting to get stutters and freezing and framedrops, and once in a while a full system lockup when I’m in Forza Motorsport… thinking of doing a coppermod to see if that addresses it, but I’m worried the GDDR may have just had to put up with too much heatsoak and might be going out :(
What’s up with 5800x3d prices being all wacked out
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Thats 5700x3d, 5800 is well over 300
Doh! You are absolutely right.
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I got an 5800x3d and 64gb of ddr4. I see no need to jump up to a new CPU and invest in ddr5 memory yet. The performance benefit is only a few percent just isn’t worth the upgrade in my opinion
I thought about an upgrade for a minute from my 3700X, but I realized none of the games I play or programs I use are demanding on CPU enough that it would make any real difference in my experience.
Games have kind of stalled out for me too, I haven’t played a AAA game in years it feels like, and the other games I do play are not that demanding on modern hardware.
I would also need to upgrade to DDR5 RAM which is just more cost for a marginal upgrade.
I’m in the same boat.
Have the 3600 with a 1050ti (!), and its does a good job when I play the 2-3 games I like to play. 32gb for my apps and docker containers. Plenty.
I see no reason to upgrade.
It has always been like this for me. Sticked to a platform until it died and never upgraded (OK ram maybe) until I was forced to.
Same here. I have a 3600X with 32GB RAM and a 3070ti. I see no sense in upgrading for a performance boost that I have no need for. I mostly play indie games and AA Titles. And even graphically heavier hitters like Space Marine 2, Wukong and The First Descendant run fine on 3440x1440.
Before Playstation 6 and Xbox Series X MK. 2 Y Type Z (or whatever MS will name that) i don’t think there will be a significant need to upgrade.
Most of the flag ship titles of this generation run perfectly playable on most mid tier gaming PCs and laptops. And the PC handheld market is also cutting into the traditional PC gamer market as well. Things like the steam deck, legion go or ally x all have taken away a share of people that would have usually bought an upgrade by now.
You can also buy a used 5xxx CPU and drop it into your current board. They aren’t terribly expensive on the used market. Check out the 5600 and 5600X.
Just make sure you update your bios first. A bunch of boards need it to run 5xxx chips.
I’m currently in the market for a new CPU for my PC, so I did my research and I’m not going to buy a Zen 5 CPU either. The reason is simple: The Zen 4 X3D CPUs are faster. Because of that, everyone who wants a new CPU now is getting the Zen 4 X3Ds and everyone who can wait, is waiting for the Zen 5 X3Ds. There’s no point in getting the Zen 5 CPUs that are currently out.
Edit: Actually, after reading the top reply, I’m not sure anymore if the Zen 5s aren’t the better choice after all
I’m still using a i7-3630QM and a R5-1600.
They are both enough for what I do with them. Why would I upgrade?
What are you using your computer for?? Just web browsing or something‽ I just upgraded from an i5-6600k/1060 setup and for like the past year and some change I’ve been hitting 100% CPU usage with just a few programs open, not even gaming lol
And that was with a CPU 3 generations newer lmao
Sounds like some bad software or something extra CPU intensive then. I use R5 2600 on W11 and it can handle everything I need with ease like web browsing (depending on pages and tab count it can be quite demanding), at least 3 VMs at the same time (2 Windows, 1 Linux), gaming, video transcoding. All that is not happening at the same time, but I can’t remember last time I checked Task Manager to see what is using my CPU.
The R5 2600 is not only newer than my old i5 and faster, it also has a LOT more threads (12 vs 4) and an extra 2 full cores
Making it excellent for the multi threaded workloads (VMs) and leaving room for non-multithreaded optimized workloads
I have an RTSP client program running all the time displaying a handful of camera feeds. It had a ~45-55% average CPU usage even with GPU decoding/encoding enabled on it.
That same piece of software on my much newer 7600 changing absolutely nothing else software wise (I just dropped in the SSD from my old build) that same software barely cracks 5%
iCUE (for Corsair RGB control (yes I know there’s open source versions I just never got around to it lol)) had a similar story with ~30-40% before and barely 4% now
I thought the comment was for R5 1600 which is close to my R5 2600 and those Intels were close in performance. Checked specs of them and I see they are not, also thought that i5 6600K was 4/8. In this case, yeah, upgrade probably was more than noticeable.
Gaming, working (data processing, physical modelling).
The trick is to use a lower overhead OS than Windows.
Gaming is one thing, a lot is GPU bound anyways, probably the same with “physical modeling”
But you cannot tell me your “data processing” would not be greatly sped up by using a newer proc (assuming it’s not also GPU bound). Does it work, sure, but if it takes you 2 hours for it to process now but <30 minutes on something newer that’s just a waste of time, resources and money. It’s incredibly inefficient.
On the flip side, if all your work is GPU bound no wonder a 3rd gen proc from 2012 is keeping up lol
We’re all broke and performance improvements have been basically stagnant?
We’re spending our money on fucking groceries… It’s time to optimize, not upscale.
You’d think there would be some value-add in cranking out the older chips faster and at a lower price point, rather than aiming for a marginal improvement in spec that nobody has a use for yet.
Waiting for 9000 X3D. For most people, 7800X3D is more performant than anything 9000 series.
Me, with a 7800X3D:
My ex, with a 7800X3D:
Anotger friend, with a 7600:
Collectively: “why would we upgrade just one generation?”
Like, sure, I have a Threadripper 1st and 2nd gen. I’m weird like that. I have a VII and a 7900 XTX. But the 7xxx is fine. I went from TR 2950X to the 7800X3D. Do I want more cores? Fuck yeah. Am I going to pay thousands of dollars for a modern high-core TR? Lmfao no.
If I was building a new machine for someone, sure, 9xxx. But shit, even a 3xxx in my network is still kicking ass. Why the hell would I upgrade when I don’t want to? And the 7xxx is cheaper and - mostly - offers the same performance.
Drop the price if they want to sell more, simple as that. And don’t expect upgrades every release family.
Let’s use the car as an example… Imagine you must get to point B from point A following all the rules of the road which prevent the 🚓 🚨 police from chasing you and shooting you until they run out of bullets. Well then you will be on highway 5 at some point if you’re in California, so let’s assume you can’t go faster than 85mph but at 5pm or 8am you can only go 2mph. So why would you buy a car that can drive at 5000mph is you don’t want to? I totally agree with you on that point. Why eat ice cream 🍨🍦 if I don’t want to…and it costs 10billion times more than not actually eating ice cream?
Same for cpus. Why get a new CPU if they put some bullshit things in it that your Linux can’t use because they are made specifically for windows 11 and no one wants to use windows 11. Friends don’t let friends use windows 11. Heck I wouldn’t drive over a cat and then let the cat get windows 11. Only let the people you hate the most actually get windows 11. Like your boss. Fuck him. Let him get windows 11!
I’m still on AM4, mainly because the jump is very expensive, essentially a new pc.
I would need a new CPU, motherboard and Ram to fit in my itx case.
I’m honestly thinking of building a new AM4 PC. 5700X3D is under 200€ new, cheap mobo, cheap DDR4 RAM and tbh the benchmarks aren’t that far off this new 9xxx series in gaming (which is the only thing I really care about). I’d rather save some money and get a better GPU
Exactly, and my 5600 is still doing a great job. Give me a good deal and I’ll upgrade, but I don’t have a compelling reason right now to upgrade. Oh, and if I do need more performance, I can look at the AM4 X3D chip, which would be cheaper than getting AM5 and rebuilding my PC.
I got another 3-5 years with my 5800X3D
I have an other 2-3 years with my 1600.
I’ve got another 5 or 6 years with my FX-8150.
F
I’m sorry, but I don’t have a grand to throw at a single fucking processor. I can put together a whole computer for that kind of coin.
I’m considering it, but only just, my 5800x is good enough for most gaming, which is GPU bound anyway, and I run a dual xeon rig for my workstation.
zen 2-4 took care of a lot of the demand, we all have 8-16 cores now, what else could they give us?
They do still seem to be making advances in single-core performance, but whether it matters to most people is a different question. Most people aren’t using software that would benefit that much from these generation-to-generation performance improvements. It’s not going to be anywhere near as noticeable as when we went from 2 or 4 cores to 8, 16, 24, etc.
Single-thread is really hard, we’ve basically saturated our l1 working set size, adding more doesn’t help much. Trying to extend the vector length just makes physical design harder and that reduces clock speed. The predictors are pretty good, and Apple finally kicked everyone up the ass to increase OOO like they should have.
Also, software still kind of sucks. It’s better than it was, but we need to improve it, the bloat is just barely being handled by silicon gains.
Flash was the epochal change, maybe we have some new form of hybrid storage but that doesn’t seem likely right now, Apple might do it to cut costs while preserving performance, actually yeah I see them trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Otherwise I don’t know, we need a better way to deal with GPUs, there’s nothing else that can move the needle, except true heterogenous core clusters, but I haven’t been able to sell that to anyone so far, they all think it’s a great idea, that someone else should do.
Also, software still kind of sucks. It’s better than it was, but we need to improve it, the bloat is just barely being handled by silicon gains.
The incentives are all wrong for this, except in FOSS. It’s never going to be a priority for Microsoft because everyone is used to the (lack of) speed of Windows, and “now a bit faster!” isn’t a great marketing line. And it’s not in the interests of hardware companies that need to keep shifting new boxes if the software doesn’t keep bogging each generation down eventually. So we end up stuck with proprietary bloatware everywhere.
“what intel gives, microsoft takes away”
dates from the mid 90s, still relevant.
Let’s be fair, Ms was vastly outrunning Intel for a long time, it’s only slowed down recently, and now the problem isn’t single-thread bloat so much as it is an absolute lack of multicore scaling for almost all applications except some games, and even then windows fights as hard as it possibly can to stop you, like amd just proved yet again.
Yes, mostly the applications aren’t there, if you need real cpu power (or gpu for that matter), you’re running linux or on the cloud.
But we are reaching a point where the desktop has to either be relegated to the level of embedded terminal (ie ugly tablet, before it’s dropped altogether), or make the leap to genuine compute tool, and I fear we’re going to see the former.
I have a 5900x and honestly don’t see any need for an upgrade anytime soon.
A new CPU would maybe give me like 10 fps more in games, but a new GPU would do more. And I don’t think the CPU will be a bottle neck in the next few years
Even beyond that, short of something like blender, Windows just can’t handle that kind of horsepower, it’s not designed for it and the UI bogs down fairly fast.
Linux, otoh, I find can eat as much CPU as you throw at it, but often many graphics applications start bogging down the X server for me.
So I have a windows machine with the best GPU but passable cpu and a decent workstation gpu with insane cpu power on linux.
What is your problem with Windows, though?
Meh, not nearly as configurable as linux, some things you can’t change.
NFS beats SMB into a cocked hat.
You start spending more time in a terminal on linux, because you’re not dealing with your machine, you’re always connecting to other machines with their resources to do things. Yeah a terminal on windows makes a difference, and I ran cygwin for a while, it’s still not clean.
Installing software sucks, either having to download or the few stuff that goes through a store. Not that building from source is much better, but most stuff comes from distro repos now.
Once I got lxc containers though, actually once I tried freebsd I lost my windows tolerance. Being able to construct a new effective “OS” with a few keystrokes is incredible, install progarms there, even graphical ones, no trace on your main system. There’s just no answer.
Also plasma is an awesome DE.
Ah, ok, I thought you were taking about Windows not being able to run CPU at full speed. But yes, it’s certainly a different OS with ups and downs.
Well, it can’t run multithreaded jobs at full speed.
Exhibit A: The latest AMD patch for multicore scheduling across NUMA.
what else could they give us?
AI!!!
^^/s
My gaming desktop has a 5950x, I can run virtual machines and all games just fine. No reason to upgrade.
My Plex server runs an Intel 10400, handles everything I throw at it just fine. No reason to upgrade.
My home theater PC runs a Ryzen 1700 and again, runs just fine. No reason to upgrade.
I think the newest CPU in my house is either my Steam Deck’s APU or the one in my PS5.
Both the PS5 and Steam deck’s CPU architecture are Zen2. So the 5950X is the most modern (Zen3)
