Ryzen 4 Reviews Are Out.

$600 for a motherboard. LOL never.

I'm a $175 to $250 price mobo guy.
I went super cheap on the motherboard this past time with a B450 Tomahawk. Cost me $110. Considering that I just bought a 5800x3D as a drop in upgrade, and the board is capable of accepting up to a 5950x, it was probably the best $110 I've ever spent.

These crazy prices on new AM5 motherboards make me happy I decided to get the 5800x3D and wave off AM5 for now.

Of course, if you need absolute MT speed, the 7950x is the king of the hill. No doubt about that one.
 
Im tentatively targeting the ASUS Prime X670E-PRO. It seems like a decent value mix of price point, capability, and looks. It's also about $150 more than I expected to spend on a mobo as of a few weeks ago, but I can live with that if the B650Es are underwhelming
 
Better than the Z690 one then. Whew
Yeah and just think of the future potential comparison between Z690 and X670E...AM5 will be the standard for a good while. Not the right way to look at it, I guess - but a new AMD platform may house 2-3 CPUs in its life time.
 
Yeah and just think of the future potential comparison between Z690 and X670E...AM5 will be the standard for a good while. Not the right way to look at it, I guess - but a new AMD platform may house 2-3 CPUs in its life time.
Oh agreed. It's an advantage. Then again, my use cases tend to rotate whole systems out for use cases, so I haven't done that much.
 
Yeah and just think of the future potential comparison between Z690 and X670E...AM5 will be the standard for a good while. Not the right way to look at it, I guess - but a new AMD platform may house 2-3 CPUs in its life time.
Granted I haven't built a rig since 2010, but I feel like I went through this same song and dance when trying to decide whether I'd stick with an LGA 1366 or jump to LGA 1155. The price of adoption was higher at the time for 1155, but it was the "new" system and more future proof. I went with 1366 and only managed a single meager upgrade with my CPU and a 2x of RAM down the line. I'd love to have more flexibility this time around and am definitely willing to pay extra for it.
 
So does Newegg have all the stupid x670 boards? Nothing on Amazon Lmao. I hate Newegg they locked my last account because of Apple Pay address issue and then told me to f**k off after wards and create new account Lmao.
 
It’s always been a “rich person hobby” at the high end. Unfortunately, Nvidia is making it worse with their $900 RTX 4060 Ti masquerading as a 4080.
True, but theres a significant up cost going on here even for the low end x670 boards. Cheapest I see is $260 and you get a whopping 4 sata ports and minimal heatsinks.
 
Thanks, so do you happen to know whether the 7700x and 7900x have one or two CCDs?
Both the 7950x and 7900x will have 2 and the 7700x should has 1 CCD. It is max 8 cores per CCD and in general the broken CCDs with less than 8 functioning cores go into the 7900x and 7600x.
 
The motherboard prices were just released and are ridiculous on the am5 platform. The Asus Strix boards are more expensive then what I paid for my x570 corsshair viii dark hero and more than twice the price of the x570 strix boards. The boards with a decent amount of features costs more than the 7700x and are priced more like HEDT boards than consumer. If the boards had 60 PCI-e lanes, CPUs had 32 cores etc. then the pricing would have made sense, but this time around it might be Intel that drives the price down which is highly dissapointing.
 
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The motherboard prices were just released and are ridiculous on the am5 platform. The Asus Strix boards are more expensive then what I paid for my x570 corsshair vii dark hero and more than twice the price of the x570 strix boards. The boards with a decent amount of features costs more than the 7700x and are priced more like HEDT boards than consumer. If the boards had 60 PCI-e lanes, CPUs had 32 cores etc. then the pricing would have made sense, but this time around it might be Intel that drives the price down which is highly dissapointing.
A lot of people were warned about the early adopters prices. Wait until B650 comes out if you want to go AMD.
 
About what I expected.

I have a 5800x, more than enough cpu for me right now. Probably wait it out for Zen 5 before upgrading again or what ever intel has then. Probably not even then will we be cpu bottlenecked for 4k gaming.
 
Is there going to be a full line-up of 3D chips (ie: 7600X3D) and what prices are people expecting?
Not really interested in a last gen 5800X3D.
Yes; as soon as you buy a 7900X they will release the 7800X3D. Echoing Brackle, for gaming I would wait on 3d-vcache CPUs since it's a huge benefit in many games and hopefully by then DDR5 and motherboards will drop in price.
 
Are you always running your CPU at 100% load or something?

I find this slightly funny - I’m using an overclocked 3960X that puts the power numbers on Zen4 to shame; don’t have issues keeping it cool on air. Now if I load it up for a render or something sure- it gets hot, and in the summer it’ll warm things up- but the gross majority of the time it’s not pulling that kind of load or pushing much heat. It’s not like modern CPU are locked to full TDP

Yes, traditionally thats how it works. But if you're playing a game with high load, this CPU is going to keep boosting until it hits full temperature. Your cooler is then going to respond by following the fan curve, which at 90-95C is usually 100% fan. This is the expected behavior as far as I can tell.

The only solution I can think of is to set a custom fan curve with a low max speed and let it throttle itself when it bangs into the 95C wall, which again why would you buy this thing if by doing that you lose the gains you got from the higher clocked chips.
 
The only solution I can think of is to set a custom fan curve with a low max speed and let it throttle itself when it bangs into the 95C wall, which again why would you buy this thing if by doing that you lose the gains you got from the higher clocked chips.
That won't work - the chip is designed to hit 95 no matter what. Obviously, if you have custom water cooling you will hit 95 with more performance headroom.
 
Hey, I fondly remember my Abit/300A@450Mhz. Felt like i cheated the world back then.
Heh. I started in the 286 days. I remember paying $300 for a 3.5” floppy drive. So much is cheaper now, so much is equally expensive. We were spoiled with low cost options for a good while - now it’s ticking back up again.
 
Yes, traditionally thats how it works. But if you're playing a game with high load, this CPU is going to keep boosting until it hits full temperature. Your cooler is then going to respond by following the fan curve, which at 90-95C is usually 100% fan. This is the expected behavior as far as I can tell.

The only solution I can think of is to set a custom fan curve with a low max speed and let it throttle itself when it bangs into the 95C wall, which again why would you buy this thing if by doing that you lose the gains you got from the higher clocked chips.
Outside of a couple of games, most don’t hit the CPU with all cores max load. Maybe 2-3, 4 at most. I’ll easily cruise along at 65c on my 3960, and that’s with a 4.6ghz all core overclocked. Peak is 4.8 and even then gaming doesn’t heat it up that much except that one RTS game they use as benchmarks 😂.

And again, this is on air, in the summer.
 
That won't work - the chip is designed to hit 95 no matter what. Obviously, if you have custom water cooling you will hit 95 with more performance headroom.
cpu-temperature-gaming.png


I doubt any game will achieve to use it enough for a cpu to be able to reach 95c, at least from my understanding no it rarely achieves to reach 95, a NH-u14s is a nice cooler but still a single fan not specially big tower. They seem to use around 45 watt in gaming scenario, in the 60 watt for the Battlefield 5 type.
 
Outside of a couple of games, most don’t hit the CPU with all cores max load. Maybe 2-3, 4 at most. I’ll easily cruise along at 65c on my 3960, and that’s with a 4.6ghz all core overclocked. Peak is 4.8 and even then gaming doesn’t heat it up that much except that one RTS game they use as benchmarks 😂.

And again, this is on air, in the summer.
I also have a 3960X (but on water), yeah overclocked it can pull 400W+ on it's own. But that's nothing close to an apples-apples comparison. You're talking about 4 CCD's instead of 2, and bigger CCD's at that. The problem with the 7000 series isn't the overall heat output, it's the thermal transfer. The heat is in a smaller area, and apparently has a shockingly thick IHS to make the package thick enough to maintain compatibility with AM4 coolers. It doesn't matter how good your cooling is (until you're talking about sub-ambient), the core-cooler delta will be massive because of the difficulty in heat transfer.

But it's also true that no game is going to load up a 7950x anything like prime95, so this isn't going to be an issue with gaming. Just super heavy compute tasks (encoding, etc.)
 
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I doubt any game will achieve to use it enough for a cpu to be able to reach 95c, at least from my understanding no it rarely achieves to reach 95, a NH-u14s is a nice cooler but still a single fan not specially big tower. They seem to use around 45 watt in gaming scenario, in the 60 watt for the Battlefield 5 type.
You are correct. I don't think any modern PC game will max out a CPU fully. Now, I can see a 6core getting taxed, but I don't think a 8-16core CPU Will ever run 100% on all cores for any game.
 
View attachment 514233

I doubt any game will achieve to use it enough for a cpu to be able to reach 95c, at least from my understanding no it rarely achieves to reach 95, a NH-u14s is a nice cooler but still a single fan not specially big tower. They seem to use around 45 watt in gaming scenario, in the 60 watt for the Battlefield 5 type.
Around 4:15


Sorry I guess I wasn't clear - it will boost to 95 C based on cooler choice.

But yes, to your point - games will probably not get there.
 
These board prices are insane. I was just thinking of things a bit and came up with what I think is a decent comparison.
Anyone remember the Gigabyte X399 Aorus Xtreme? Second gen X399 motherboard for the 250W 2990WX cpu.
Huge E-ATX board, huge LGA socket, decently powerful VRM, quad channel ram, dual network ports, wifi, 4 pci-e slots for video cards, sli, metal backplate, etc. Nice board.
MSRP? $429.99

https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8932/gigabyte-x399-aorus-xtreme-amd-motherboard-review/index.html#:~:text=The X399 Aorus Xtreme costs $429.99.

How do these board prices make any sense in comparison?
 
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i wasn't going to but I got the 7950x for like 599.99 after my cash back and 10% off coupon at best buy lmao. IDK so I just clicked submit order and think about the rest later lmao.

I have bunch of old parts to sell that should cover the motherboard and the memory.
 
$500 for the Aorus Master?! o_O These AM5 motherboard prices are outrageous!

I think I'll be going with the 13700K and a Z690 board at this point.
 
I also have a 3960X (but on water), yeah overclocked it can pull 400W+ on it's own. But that's nothing close to an apples-apples comparison. You're talking about 4 CCD's instead of 2, and bigger CCD's at that. The problem with the 7000 series isn't the overall heat output, it's the thermal transfer. The heat is in a smaller area, and apparently has a shockingly thick IHS to make the package thick enough to maintain compatibility with AM4 coolers. It doesn't matter how good your cooling is (until you're talking about sub-ambient), the core-cooler delta will be massive because of the difficulty in heat transfer.

But it's also true that no game is going to load up a 7950x anything like prime95, so this isn't going to be an issue with gaming. Just super heavy compute tasks (encoding, etc.)
Bingo. Totally agree on all that. I would be twitchy doing compute on the 7950, but not games.
Chasing the highest end boards will only net you features you'll never use. And a huge dent in your wallet.
Unless you really need them
 
So fun fact, you can buy Zen 4 CPU's and x670 motherboards from overclockers.co.uk for cheaper shipped to the US than US prices because the exchange rate is so insane.
By about $52 for the board I was looking at. However I'm scared Ill end up having to pay import tax... Just my luck.
 
Seeing my 3900x that low on the charts in a few tests makes me want to upgrade.

Seeing the prices makes me want to keep what I've got

I'm keeping what I've got.

1440p Ultra Wide on the games I play I'm almost always GPU limited with my 3080

I do some video editing, but I typically use NVEC whenever possible which minimizes any benefits I'd see from a 7900/7950x

I dabble with 3D mapping using my drone, I'm sure there would be huge gains there, but it's a hobby not a career

I think my current box has enough legs for one more GPU upgrade before it's retired

Until then, I will live vicariously through PC Parts Picker once all the necessary components including Ada GPU's become available.
 
Seeing my 3900x that low on the charts in a few tests makes me want to upgrade.

Seeing the prices makes me want to keep what I've got

I'm keeping what I've got.

1440p Ultra Wide on the games I play I'm almost always GPU limited with my 3080

I do some video editing, but I typically use NVEC whenever possible which minimizes any benefits I'd see from a 7900/7950x

I dabble with 3D mapping using my drone, I'm sure there would be huge gains there, but it's a hobby not a career

I think my current box has enough legs for one more GPU upgrade before it's retired

Until then, I will live vicariously through PC Parts Picker once all the necessary components including Ada GPU's become available.
Upgrade when you feel sluggishness in what you do. If gaming, and at high resolutions 1440p and greater, you will be almost always GPU limited. Save the $ for future GPU upgrades, when they become worth it again.
 
Well, DDR5 prices aren't as insane as I feared. $200 for memory and $260 for a motherboard later and it's time to test out this 7950x. I didn't see any reviews focused on the power efficiency side of things for CPU intensive tasks so I uhh.... needed to buy one to be sure. Seems like AMD has designed PBO to max out performance, which should be best for most users, but I'm curious about potential efficiency gains vs prior gens if you tweak settings.
 
Newegg still has the 7950x in stock, it is just tied to bundles. They had a bundle with the board I wanted anyway.

For some reason they have a boat load of bundles with 240mm aio coolers.
 
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