Ryzen 2700x a worthy upgrade for games from i5-6600k?

Burticus

Supreme [H]ardness
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Hi guys,

I've got the upgrade itch, and my Skylake i5 system is 3 years old now. I skipped the first gen Ryzen on my main box (I did recently buy a second hand 1700 for my video encoder/plex server) because I mainly play games on this rig. There didn't seem to be real reason to upgrade from i5 (with a GTX 1070, 1440p gaming). But with the glowing 2700x review and it's auto overclocking features... I'm ready to jump ship. Anyone think it's worth it? I've been scouring the web trying to find apples to apples benchs for 2700x vs 6600k but mostly just finding gen 1 Ryzen 1700 stuff.

I liked Kyle's review, but he benched against an 8700k, I don't know how much worse a 6600k is bench wise. 20% I guess?

Looking at Microcenter, 2700x with Asus x470 board for about $500 after tax. Assuming my ram (should be ok, Patriot 3000) and ssd will carry over... I assume I can sell the 6600k and Asus z170 board for $200-250ish. So really a $250 upgrade... but if it's only a 10% gain in games it's probably not worth the effort.
 
Hardware.fr has a good overall performance index chart for both applications/content creation and games. They don't have an i5 6600k on the chart, but they do have an i5 7500 which is very close. You can see the relative difference between a 2700X and a 7500. The 2700X is 131% faster than the 7500 in productivity & content creation. It is 22.9% faster than the 7500 in games.

https://www.hardware.fr/articles/974-19/indices-performance.html

Alternatively, you could compare to the 7600k. There the differences are 111% faster and 14% faster, respectively. Somewhere between those two groups of figures is what you can reasonably expect.
 
Hardware.fr has a good overall performance index chart for both applications/content creation and games. They don't have an i5 6600k on the chart, but they do have an i5 7500 which is very close. You can see the relative difference between a 2700X and a 7500. The 2700X is 131% faster than the 7500 in productivity & content creation. It is 22.9% faster than the 7500 in games.

Groovy. I wonder if will speed up the horrible Civ slowness in between rounds when it is calculating the CPU's moves.
 
You have MC nearby I say do it. Or wait another month for them to cut prices further and do it. They just took $10 off the price today after what a month on the market with a $50 combo discount. Maybe its just a temp sale not a permanent price reduction but I dont think these are moving very quickly granted Im just guessing of course.
 
probably worth it alrigth. while i personally would wait for intel to release counterparts i wouldnt believe that it will be massively better, so it probably wouldnt be a bad buy and the price is very good now, atleast here in norway. but like intel style from before, it will be better and faster. like a sligthly faster coffe lake with 8 cores instead, something like it, on a more effective node, 10 nm. it cant be too long until that now. if u dont want to wait for it, buy amd. any game that utilize alot of cores well, one i play is bf1. will give u better fps, but i can disable 2 cores and play just fine. me, i dont play a whole lot atm and, well i dont really need a new cpu just yet but, im waiting to see icelake?
 
I say it is not worth it. People have a hard on for pushing people to upgrade to Ryzen Needed or not when they have a perfectly capable Intel systwm.
 
I say it is not worth it. People have a hard on for pushing people to upgrade to Ryzen Needed or not when they have a perfectly capable Intel systwm.

The 'worth it' argument is somewhat subjective. There is definitely no NEED to upgrade from a 6600k. That's a perfectly good CPU. But if OP has the itch to upgrade anyway - then the numbers are as listed above.
 
I have 2 game account and I play simultaneously both also with VMware ( ubuntu ) .that's why I went 1600X but i regret it I could get ryzen 1700 and oc it to 3.9.
 
This would be for my primary rig, so mainly game/surf/movies/office type stuff. Yeah I know it's overkill and I don't "need" it.

If you don't do a lot of heavy thread load stuff might be worth checking out the 2600/x. I've enjoyed the crap out of my 1600 but the clock speeds on zen+ were a huge upgrade for me.
 
Something to factor in, but only if you feel you'd utilize them, would be the fact that changing motherboards by going with Ryzen may provide new features available.

On the flip side, though, is if they are thing you would like to have, are there any motherboards out there for your Intel CPU that would also provide them? Because just upgrading the motherboard would of course be cheaper than a new board and CPU.

BUT, flipping it once again, you now contend with the fact that if you only upgrade your current motherboard, you're still stuck on an Intel platform that has no active upgrade path. While you will indeed have CPU choices that are better than your current CPU, they'll be 2nd Hand purchases.

Overall though, as much as I love Ryzen and would like to convince anyone and everyone to switch to it, I'm not going to do that! lol For me, Ryzen being awesome is satisfaction enough, and I'm far more proud of not being a fanboy... So with that, I can say I'm not sure you'd truly benefit that much from it enough to justify the purchase. There's always this that you can consider: Ryzen having brought a lot of cores to the masses may finally have an impact on games taking much better advantage of the extra threads being available, which as such may mean upgrading to an 8C/16T part will last you quite a number of years and let you get away with just GPU upgrades. This was sort of the standpoint I was at, though, I also needed an upgrade period. I didn't need an 8-core upgrade as I don't do anything with my system by game (though I did spend 2 months Mining and made $160 in Bitcoin at todays price), but I wanted it to last me well into the future, so that was my justification for it.
 
Something to factor in, but only if you feel you'd utilize them, would be the fact that changing motherboards by going with Ryzen may provide new features available.

On the flip side, though, is if they are thing you would like to have, are there any motherboards out there for your Intel CPU that would also provide them? Because just upgrading the motherboard would of course be cheaper than a new board and CPU.

BUT, flipping it once again, you now contend with the fact that if you only upgrade your current motherboard, you're still stuck on an Intel platform that has no active upgrade path. While you will indeed have CPU choices that are better than your current CPU, they'll be 2nd Hand purchases.

Overall though, as much as I love Ryzen and would like to convince anyone and everyone to switch to it, I'm not going to do that! lol For me, Ryzen being awesome is satisfaction enough, and I'm far more proud of not being a fanboy... So with that, I can say I'm not sure you'd truly benefit that much from it enough to justify the purchase. There's always this that you can consider: Ryzen having brought a lot of cores to the masses may finally have an impact on games taking much better advantage of the extra threads being available, which as such may mean upgrading to an 8C/16T part will last you quite a number of years and let you get away with just GPU upgrades. This was sort of the standpoint I was at, though, I also needed an upgrade period. I didn't need an 8-core upgrade as I don't do anything with my system by game (though I did spend 2 months Mining and made $160 in Bitcoin at todays price), but I wanted it to last me well into the future, so that was my justification for it.

I definitely use all 8 cores. In fact, my only regret was not going Threadripper.
 
I definitely use all 8 cores. In fact, my only regret was not going Threadripper.

I would have loved to go with TR on my video encoder/plex server system. But the cost is just too much. The R7 1700 did 3x better with encoding than my standing FX 8320 system during testing. I'm going to migrate/rebuild that one this weekend. I'm trying to copy off the Plex metadata as I type this. But $200 vs $1000 just for more threads, couldn't justify it.
 
I was going to say that it might pay off waiting for Ryzen 2800x but then again supposedly that is only coming if Intel releases something outstanding. If you are going to buy AM4 motherboard make sure the ram works check QVL it can cause some headaches sometimes and end up not working at certain speeds.
But back to Ryzen 2800X would prolly not be much more then 2700X (unless it is a different stepping).
 
I was going to say that it might pay off waiting for Ryzen 2800x but then again supposedly that is only coming if Intel releases something outstanding. If you are going to buy AM4 motherboard make sure the ram works check QVL it can cause some headaches sometimes and end up not working at certain speeds.
But back to Ryzen 2800X would prolly not be much more then 2700X (unless it is a different stepping).

nah 2800x is going to be a cherry picked golden halo cpu but i don't see it releasing until after they've acquired enough chips for the zen+ threadrippers to make sure they can hit the clock speeds they need to make it worth buying.
 
For Civ Ryzen would be great. If you play Civ a lot I'd do it personally. It'd be way faster.
 
nah 2800x is going to be a cherry picked golden halo cpu but i don't see it releasing until after they've acquired enough chips for the zen+ threadrippers to make sure they can hit the clock speeds they need to make it worth buying.

I don't think so look at the difference between 1700X and 1800X then project the difference on 2700X and 2800X the difference would prolly not be enough.
old 3.4 ghz turbo 3.8 ghz vs 3.6 ghz turbo 4 ghz.
new 3.7 ghz turbo 4.3 ghz vs 3.8 ghz turbo 4.5 ghz <--guessing here

See the problem here? There is not enough room and the performance is bound by the same limited 12nm process unless there is a new stepping the peak performance of the turbo prolly not going to last long enough to make a difference. Don't forget that the golden samples don't grow on trees and it would need a large volume to come up with a consumer part which is also unlikely.
 
Ryzen is great for Civ! On my old Sandy 2500K @ 4.8ghz the late game was pain in the ass because of how long the turns started to take. With Ryzen 1600 the turns go much faster.
 
I just finished a Ryzen 2700x system for my brother last night that was still on a core 2 quad q6600. That was a definite worthy upgrade and I have considered replacing my dual e5-2665 v1 rig with the same as its nearly the same multithread performance with half the power usage. I see those as worthy upgrades. A 6600k is by no means a slouch in gaming at this point and really the only benefit from Ryzen for you would be multithreaded tasks. So the question you need to ask is how much actual multithreaded work do you do?
 
Thanks for the feedback, Civ players. I play a lot of Vox Populi and the later game cpu turns are brutal. But if I get up and do something else (bathroom break, make a drink, etc) I end up not catching everything the CPU does and I miss stuff.

I think I'm gonna do it, maybe next weekend when I'll have some time to work on it. And it's not like I'm throwing the 6600k away, I suspect I can get $225-250 for it from a $400 purchase price 3 years ago... $50 devaluation per year isn't bad. I definitely know what happens when you keep cpus and motherboards a long time... you end up giving them away for pennies on the dollar.
 
I don't think so look at the difference between 1700X and 1800X then project the difference on 2700X and 2800X the difference would prolly not be enough.
old 3.4 ghz turbo 3.8 ghz vs 3.6 ghz turbo 4 ghz.
new 3.7 ghz turbo 4.3 ghz vs 3.8 ghz turbo 4.5 ghz <--guessing here

See the problem here? There is not enough room and the performance is bound by the same limited 12nm process unless there is a new stepping the peak performance of the turbo prolly not going to last long enough to make a difference. Don't forget that the golden samples don't grow on trees and it would need a large volume to come up with a consumer part which is also unlikely.

I suspect AMD has a 2800X binned part, roughly around where you suggested... but that it'd only be released if Intel did something that put the hurt on the 2700X. A stopgap until Zen2 if needed. If not, I doubt AMD would bother. The difference would be academic, and the best dies are probably better served going into threadrippers, otherwise.
 
I suspect AMD has a 2800X binned part, roughly around where you suggested... but that it'd only be released if Intel did something that put the hurt on the 2700X. A stopgap until Zen2 if nee
ded. If not, I doubt AMD would bother. The difference would be academic, and the best dies are probably better served going into threadrippers, otherwise.

And indeed Zen2 is around the corner and that should change things around enough for AMD.
 
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