New Office Build - 2700X or 3600?

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Lumpus

Limp Gawd
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Sep 2, 2005
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New build for my sister to replace a 10 year-old Dell. She runs strictly MS Office 2010 and Photoshop - zero gaming.

The 2700X is golden for heavy multitasking, but the 6-core 3600 might perform just as well for her.
Both are nearly identical in price right now - so for NON-GAMING, what wins?

/will run on either MSI B450 Tomahawk or X470 ASRock Tachi (to be determined)
//good VRMs for futureproofing - which I doubt exists much anymore ;)
///also vaguely considering the 2600X but the price/performance goes 2700X or 3600 there (especially with the Wraith cooler)
 
Can you go 3600x? That will just about match the 2700x in multithreaded apps but crush it in low threaded stuff. If not, none of those apps are heavily threaded so the 3600 might still be a little better.
 
if that's all she's doing i'd save the money and go with the 2600x.. as far as i'm aware photoshop doesn't really leverage cpu cores and is more core clock dependent. but kamikazi's 3400g suggestion is probably a good one as well.
 
I like the 3400g idea. Or, if you have a GPU lying around, lots of good prices on the 2600 lately. Something like the recent newegg combo deal (now expired) for a 2600 + Asus x570 Prime would be perfect, I think.

Watch Newegg for CPU + Mobo combos. Seems like they've been having some good ones lately. And most all of the X570's have decent VRM's, if that's a concern.
 
Lumpus said:
New build for my sister to replace a 10 year-old Dell. She runs strictly MS Office 2010 and Photoshop - zero gaming.

The 2700X is golden for heavy multitasking, but the 6-core 3600 might perform just as well for her.
Both are nearly identical in price right now - so for NON-GAMING, what wins?

/will run on either MSI B450 Tomahawk or X470 ASRock Tachi (to be determined)
//good VRMs for futureproofing - which I doubt exists much anymore ;)
///also vaguely considering the 2600X but the price/performance goes 2700X or 3600 there (especially with the Wraith cooler)
Click to expand...
Go 2700X(or non X) as it will be a wash for performance even if your sister uses a stop-watch. Having 16 threads just makes everything smoother. Run office and photoshop at the same time, with 48 tabs open on your browser!
If she isn't hard core gaming skip the 3000 series. Buy any 470/450 MB and be assured all the bugs are worked out for the platform.
As others have said, a 3400G if you don't have a GPU is quite good, or even a lowly 2600/1600 is really so much better then most would expect or need. TBH a 1600 is more then most will ever be needing for non pro work. And is seconds ever a concern? (1600 vs. 3600)
Have decent RAM and a good SDD or better for the greatest improvement.
 
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2600 is $100 bnib in my area.
2600 vs 3600 gains for the $ diff isn't there unless you plan on pcie 4.0 nvme right now.
People are buying combos and recouping some $ bc they wanted the motherboard.
~$200 X570 combo would be ideal for reasons below.

Pshop likes frequency, it doesn't use over 8 cores.
If she's a Pshop power user id look at 9700k.

GPU acceleration is a thing to consider, 1070s are easy enough to get.

Caveat picking a platform is how many nvme drives you'd want to run.
Cheapie B450 or X470 might run a pair of nvme drive with a slot that may not be as fast as the other.
Even at $160 for a base X570 board your storage capability and components are simply better for this use case.

AMD can be problematic if you need 2+ nvme drives at full speed, you are going to the higher end of X570 if you wanted a 3rd nvme drive for scratch drive.

You can always do a cpu upgrade later.
 
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Another vote for 3400g here, but if it HAS to be either the 2700x or the 3600, I'd go 2700x. For one thing, PBO on that CPU is magic and just works, so it is essentially "set and forget." For another thing, AMD processor releases are always hairy for the first few months, and unless your friend is comfortable doing BIOS and chipset driver updates, I'd avoid the 3000 series for her for now - the 2000 series chips on the last pre-3000 BIOS revisions are rock solid. For this same reason, I'd avoid x570 boards and stay in b450 or x470 territory instead. Take the money you save from a 2700x/b450 combo and get a bigger SSD - she'll likely appreciate that more. The deals you can get on that much CPU power are insane right now, and if you ever decide to upgrade it for her (after everything settles down of course), you will have no trouble unloading it.
 
Office use? So not even workstation?

2400G on B450... $200 to $230 combo, still future proof'd but not overkill for simple apps. Graphics can handle any office stuff, and light games. Get DDR4 3200MHz to get the most out of the APU and that can be used for a future CPU/APU as well.
 
I'm also with the 2400 \ 3400g camp. People here tend to grossly overestimate PC requirements given we are a bunch of elitist [H]ardware enthusiast.

We have installed tons of 2200g machines at work with 8gb and an SSD for office use and everyone loves the damn things. The APU is even fast enough for our users that do light CAD or CC work.
 
For an office computer there is no chance I’d buy anything without an integrated gpu.
 
I'm in the APU camp as well. Anything from a 2200G to 3400G. I doubt anyone could actually tell the difference between a 2200G and 3900X on an Office PC.
 
I hadn't considered the 3400G. Paired with the MSI B450 Tomahawk this would be a good cheap option, but she's not overkill adverse and budget isn't the primary concern atm.

She is a serious Photoshop power-user. She has a $20k+ microscope hooked up direct to her work research computer and takes hundreds of pictures of tiny things a week and then brings it home to process on her home pc and run all the bells and whistles on them before publication.

/leaning now for the 3600X - better cpu cooler + silicon lottery binning/more future-proof
//any rumor on when the B550 boards launch? 4Q?
 
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Photoshop with massive images is a different story. That's a workstation. I'm thinking maybe 3600 since i think PS seems to like IPC over # of cores. However I believe it utilizes both, and likely to gear more toward cores in future updates, since that's where the hardware is headed. 3700X would be ideal though... better IPC plus 8c/16t.

I vote 3600 or 3700X now... but that's only IF the images she uses are so big that you regularly measure the time it takes to load/render them.
 
I would be hesitant to believe she is that much of a serious Photoshop power-user if she has been getting by on a 10 year old core 2 \ first gen i series dell until now.
 
Old Dell was a quad-four (Intel 2.2Ghz) with a decent AMD video card (for 2010) - It was the best OEM PC I could find at the time - Grant $, so it had to be off the shelf and not a Lump-built special.
It's slow today... load 5 pics from the USB then go check on the dogs or email for a minute or two - rinse/repeat all weekend long.
It did the job but now the system is unstable and it's overdue for replacement anyway.
/shrug
//unfortunately it's still a better pc than her university provided one :(
 
I have several accounting firms and a funeral home who are all 2400G systems and they are happier than clams with the performance. 8 GB RAM and SSD in them. A 3400G would sound like a great route to go.
 
2200g or 3200g ... My wife ran the 2200g with 3 monitors .. Hulu on one monitor, spreadsheets on another and Chrome with about 20 tabs open on the other. I upgraded her to the 3200g of which had a better memory controller to run 4 sticks of ram stably. The 2200g ran 2 8gb sticks just fine though..and they are pretty cheap to get a hold of
 
Buy for what you need now, bc next year 3600 will be $100 and 3700s will be $150 ish if 2020 sticks to AM4.

When there's a socket change then load up on whatever the penultimate CPU is cheap as you can get it and roll with it until DDR5 speeds settle.
 
Personally I'd go newer gen - so it lasts longer. Since we know the multi cores performance vs single core performance won't be an issue for her, I'd rather get the benefits of the newer generation tech (however little that might be).

For quality of life purposes, I'd say (like everyone has already said), it will be more important that she get an SSD or a good monitor / keyboard / mouse (stuff that is more tangible to a non [H]/non-gamer) than what specific CPU is inside the box.
 
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