At first I thought people were praising the AMD Ryzen 3950x due to it's price and since I'm looking to build another computer I thought I was in for a bargain. That is until I checked the price of the AMD Ryzen 9 3950x and saw it's £689. So why all the rave for AMD Cpu's? The Intel i7 9700k has better performance in games and it's cheaper at £570.

Yeah I forgot about thread title ;). So sure for gaming if you go top of the line intel has an edge because they still dominate in single threaded performance ,(but less than they used to) so for pure gaming in general if you go top end intel still win. AMD shine however where multiple cores benefit more.Just for gaming tho I would never go top end tbh. It's just wasted money you are far better buying a faster GPU or if you have that already then put it towards a holiday when lockdown ends

I changed from a 7700K to a 2700 a couple of years ago - just as an experiment - and stuck with the AMD CPU as it does offer a few spare cores when running several apps.Not had any obvious issues gaming, no slower or faster, so no gripes.I may go for the 3700 or 3900 later as I have the X570 chipset so there would be gains over the 2700, plus 7nm architecture to play around with.The 2080 Super appears to be a nice compromise too, handles 4K gaming nicely and VR too, although I suppose one day I'll have to run actual benchmark tests to see if the combo is as good as it appears :)

RedRizla said: @bigmike20vt - I'm was comparing the highend intel and AMD Cpu's. I'm haven't looked at the pricing for the mid range Cpu's, so AMD night come out top when it comes to pricing in that range.AMD do pretty much come out on top in the midrange (I7 / Ryzen 7) series, not by a massive amount but still worth considering.I'd only suggest that the 'benefit' to AMD currently is that upgrading from the previous generation to current doesn't require a motherboard with a different socket. I can go from my G2 Ryzen 7 to a G3 Ryzen 9 just by swapping CPU and nothing else :)

pyroth309 said: bigmike20vt said: Yeah I forgot about thread title ;). So sure for gaming if you go top of the line intel has an edge because they still dominate in single threaded performance ,(but less than they used to) so for pure gaming in general if you go top end intel still win. AMD shine however where multiple cores benefit more.Just for gaming tho I would never go top end tbh. It's just wasted money you are far better buying a faster GPU or if you have that already then put it towards a holiday when lockdown endsYea exactly, unless there was some old niche title that is CPU heavy that you plan to play primarily. It's a shame game engines and developers haven't gotten better at using multiple cores. Even the ones that support it tend to load up a single core more than the others and do a bad job distributing the load. That's because in programming - there isn't really a "good" or "best" way to share workloads between all the cores. For example, in Python we just more recently just got the ability to do share memory between cores. It was possible already if you wrote your own manager, but now that it is support module, I see a big jump in users using it more already. I do blame hardware for not making it easy for use in some ways, but software does take time to play catch up as well. From a hardware stand point - it would be super crazy to see parts of the chip redesign themselves for difference purposes and smart memory to help off set the process needed to ask where the data should go that also sits between everything.1) Any time you move data between you cost time and power <-- bring stuff closer to it thus have more sections/big smart cores that can do it all - This is way a CPU core has more stuff vs a simple GPU core.2) Any time you move a size of data you also cost time and power <-- compress data - GPUs are famous for this3) Any time you have to wait for a section of the Core to open up you cost time and power <-- allow more process access to the same core (threading).4 etc etcFuture improvements:1) Sections of the chip that can do more than one type/reconfigure themselves a bit to fit the work better. For example, turn some of the IO part of the core into a math unit or have the math unit - wait for for IO data. Thus more core is used and more work can be done per cycle.2) Make it easier to get to the same data. Right now its just takes way too long to access the same data from one end of the chip to the other end. This is one of the reasons why current CCXs will be reconfigure in Ryzen 4000 to share the same pool of memory inside each chip-let vs set of cores.3) Lots of smaller dummer cores from Intel and ARM attach to a few bigger smarter cores. This is a bit of cheat to the reconfigure chips I talk about - but same idea in that the CPU it self will spread the work better depending on the work load needed to get done.4) A chip that is seen as a single unit vs a chip that is seen as multi cores. Sort of like how MT works - it would be a lot nicer from a programming stand point to say the CPU is just a single giant core that just did the work for us in spreading up the work we give it. Even though we would still have to think/protect our selves from dead locks - it still would be a lot easier to program like we did in the past vs trying to wrap our brains around having to manually spread the work ourselves.

For gaming, it seems it doesn't matter for now - I'm still with Intel for compatibility, also for the mainboard chipsets. i7 9700k may be a tiny bit faster in games - probably because games don't efficiently support so many cores...https://www.anandtech.com/print/15043/the-amd-ryzen-9-3950x-review-16-cores-on-7nm-with-pcie-40

Why are people praising AMD Ryzen 9 3950X over the i7900k?

45 Replies

RuneSR2
Grand Champion
5 years ago
For gaming, it seems it doesn't matter for now - I'm still with Intel for compatibility, also for the mainboard chipsets.

i7 9700k may be a tiny bit faster in games - probably because games don't efficiently support so many cores...

https://www.anandtech.com/print/15043/the-amd-ryzen-9-3950x-review-16-cores-on-7nm-with-pcie-40
pyroth309
Visionary
5 years ago
Yea once you hit a certain threshold of cpu power it seems to become pretty irrelevant for gaming unless you're going for high fps on 1080p with low settings anyway. GPU bottlenecks before CPU does on graphical games and high resolution stuff like VR. That said, AMD outperforms Intel these days on most non gaming tasks. I find the 3950x to be overpriced personally. Can't say I could justify buying it over a 3900x.
Fazz
Honored Visionary
5 years ago
@RuneSR2 @pyroth309
I just saw that intel are bringing out the intel 10900KF, but it still has 14nm and I was hoping for 7nm. I currently have a Skylake 6700 and a Geforce 2080ti. Do you think it's best if I just go with a i7 9700k for my upgrade given the intel 10900KF, is only going to have about 10% better performance in games.
RuneSR2
Grand Champion
5 years ago
I've not seen any game (ok, I don't play RTS with thousands of units) where I can't get 90 fps using my i7 7700K (4.5 Ghz). I've seen a few games recommending 8700K, but I still got solid 90+ fps.

Unless you need cpu for certain and very specific tasks, you may end up wasting a lot of money going for the lastest and on-paper greatest processors.

RTX 3080 Ti might be interesting - personally I got no reason to care for cpus right now.

But I just reinstalled Diablo III on my office rig, and the Q6600 from 2008 is actually starting to feel a bit slow - because although I get same performance using 800x600 Low or 2048x1536 Ultra - it's no longer 85 fps, lol.

PS. I actually bought a pancake game yesterday - I'm so proud of myself :D - but I think it'll run just fine with my Q6600 (quad-core, 2,4 GHz):

https://youtu.be/owbKz1qcnUI

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
MINIMUM:
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows 7
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 | AMD Phenom II X4 965
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 | AMD Radeon HD 6670
Storage: 8 GB available space
Fazz
Honored Visionary
5 years ago
@RuneSR2 - But do you reckon my i7 6700k might be bottle necking my 2080ti? I'm also looking at getting a 3080ti when that's available, but I'm just curious to know if my i7 6700k will ruin the Geforce 3080ti performance in some way.
RuneSR2
Grand Champion
5 years ago

RedRizla said:

@RuneSR2 - But do you reckon my i7 6700k might be bottle necking my 2080ti? I'm also looking at getting a 3080ti when that's available, but I'm just curious to know if my i7 6700k will ruin the Geforce 3080ti performance in some way.

That'll probably depend a lot on the game. I don't think your 6700K will be bottlenecking anything using CV1 or Reverb. But if you're into 144 or 240 Hz pancake gaming, then maybe.

If you increase res and get same performance - you're cpu may be the bottleneck. If you increase res and get reduced performance, the gpu is probably the bottleneck.
Fazz
Honored Visionary
5 years ago

RuneSR2 said:

RedRizla said:

@RuneSR2 - But do you reckon my i7 6700k might be bottle necking my 2080ti? I'm also looking at getting a 3080ti when that's available, but I'm just curious to know if my i7 6700k will ruin the Geforce 3080ti performance in some way.

That'll probably depend a lot on the game. I don't think your 6700K will be bottlenecking anything using CV1 or Reverb. But if you're into 144 or 240 Hz pancake gaming, then maybe.

If you increase res and get same performance - you're cpu may be the bottleneck. If you increase res and get reduced performance, the gpu is probably the bottleneck.

How could I try this? I game on my Samsung TV at 2k sometimes because I have an option to play games at 120Hz in 2k on this Samsung TV. However, I can only play at 60Hz in 4K because this Samsung TV doesn't do 120HZ at 4k.
RuneSR2
Grand Champion
5 years ago

RedRizla said:

RuneSR2 said:

RedRizla said:

@RuneSR2 - But do you reckon my i7 6700k might be bottle necking my 2080ti? I'm also looking at getting a 3080ti when that's available, but I'm just curious to know if my i7 6700k will ruin the Geforce 3080ti performance in some way.

That'll probably depend a lot on the game. I don't think your 6700K will be bottlenecking anything using CV1 or Reverb. But if you're into 144 or 240 Hz pancake gaming, then maybe.

If you increase res and get same performance - you're cpu may be the bottleneck. If you increase res and get reduced performance, the gpu is probably the bottleneck.

How could I try this? I game on my Samsung TV at 2k sometimes because I have an option to play games at 120Hz in 2k on this Samsung TV. However, I can only play at 60Hz in 4K because this Samsung TV doesn't do 120HZ at 4k.

Maybe you can use a program like fraps to measure fps. And maybe you can compare 2K 60 fps vs. 4K 60 fps?

If you're cpu bottlenecked, you may get let's say 38 fps in both 2K and 4K. But if you get like solid 60 fps in 2K and maybe 40 fps in 4K, then you may need that 3080 Ti.

If you turn off vsync, Hz should no longer matter.
RuneSR2
Grand Champion
5 years ago
BTW - made these tests in august 2003 - they're as hot as ever B)

This is how to see when you're gpu bottlenecked - as res increases fps decrease:

- and this is how it looks when you're cpu bottlenecked - fps are the same no matter the res:

Note - these are actual benchmark numbers using a Radeon 9700 Pro and Athlon XP 2100+.
pyroth309
Visionary
5 years ago
You can tell if you have a cpu bottleneck in games by looking at the percentage of GPU usage. It should be close to 99% usage. If the GPU isn't 99% then something else is holding it back. In low graphical games/pushing high frames the CPU should be the bottleneck but if you try and bench 4k and your GPU isn't working to it's max something's wrong. A lot of programs can throw your GPU usage on screen in game like MSI Afterburner.

Another way is to run a benchmark tool that compares your system to others. If your score is drastically lower then that could indicate a bottleneck.