Time to retire my 3770k - Intel or AMD?

haz_mat

Limp Gawd
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Sep 14, 2012
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My trusty old Ivy Bridge setup is finally feeling the crunch. I figure there might be some others on this forum still rocking old setups, or recently upgraded from one, so any thoughts on all this are appreciated.

Looking to jump to an new 8-core setup, mainly for gaming. I've been playing a lot more CPU-bound stuff lately too - so that's got me itching to upgrade for better min fps in stuff like Cities:skylines and Planet Coaster.

I hear that Intel and AMD are on near-equal IPC footing these days, but with Intel pushing faster clocks and coming out ahead for single-thread performance. So that gets me leaning towards Intel.

Given how infrequently I upgrade, I'm not sure which platform would suit me better. If my current board supported a newer CPU I would probably do an incremental upgrade more often, so that gets me leaning back towards AMD since they tend to drag out socket and chipset support longer than Intel.

Budget is not a big issue, but I would like to keep it under $1k for a cpu, board, ram, and new SSD. Overclocking support is nice, but not mandatory since the margins aren't what they used to be.

I'm also wondering if I will need a new PSU - will my Seasonic M12II 750 still plug right on these new boards?
 
I am finding a lot of my friends are upgrading to the 3800x and not overclocking, they all seem pretty happy with the purchase.

If it were me though, I would probably wait a few months for the next series of intel chips, and buy their 8 core with hyperthreading. Their top end for the desktop platform will be 10 core.
 
I replaced my 3770k back in november with the rig in my sig after nearly 8 years. Been very happy with my 3900X system, and you can get some very good bang for your buck with AMD right now.
 
I went from i7 3770k / GTX 1070 to R5 3600 / RX 5700 (BIOS mod to 5700 XT). I've been enjoying this build on 1440p.
 
so I would go NVidia for graphics because of NVEnc, RTXVoice, Cuda and driver support
 
Yeah, right now AMD will get you more performance / $ in general. This isn't likely to change with intel 10 series (coming out really soon). If you are soley looking for gaming speed, Intel still edges out AMD (as you mentioned), any other work loads typically go to AMD. The benchmarks for 10 series should be out shortly, so may be worth checking on those before making a decision. AMD's zen 3 is coming out but you have a bit longer wait, so that's kind of up to you, although I do know a few people getting an x570 with a 3300x as a holdover until zen3 comes out so they can upgrade. Even that $120 chip would easily outrun your current rig, and for gaming it's really not far off of a 3600. Again, it's probably worth waiting on the 10 series benches to show up, AMD's release is a bit further away so everything about their next gen is just speculation. It will have an increase in IPC, but nobody knows how much (and i'm sure it will depend on the work load as well). You will most likely be happy eithrr way though, both setups would be faster than what you're running now.
 
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so I would go NVidia for graphics because of NVEnc, RTXVoice, Cuda and driver support
I just ordered a RTX card and I never knew about RTX voice. Can't wait to test it out when my card arrives.
 
My trusty old Ivy Bridge setup is finally feeling the crunch. I figure there might be some others on this forum still rocking old setups, or recently upgraded from one, so any thoughts on all this are appreciated.

Looking to jump to an new 8-core setup, mainly for gaming. I've been playing a lot more CPU-bound stuff lately too - so that's got me itching to upgrade for better min fps in stuff like Cities:skylines and Planet Coaster.

I hear that Intel and AMD are on near-equal IPC footing these days, but with Intel pushing faster clocks and coming out ahead for single-thread performance. So that gets me leaning towards Intel.

Given how infrequently I upgrade, I'm not sure which platform would suit me better. If my current board supported a newer CPU I would probably do an incremental upgrade more often, so that gets me leaning back towards AMD since they tend to drag out socket and chipset support longer than Intel.

Budget is not a big issue, but I would like to keep it under $1k for a cpu, board, ram, and new SSD. Overclocking support is nice, but not mandatory since the margins aren't what they used to be.

I'm also wondering if I will need a new PSU - will my Seasonic M12II 750 still plug right on these new boards?

If you're spending over $500 on upgrades, get yourself a new PSU with a decent warranty. Assuming the Seasonic M12II was purchased at the same time as your 3770K, it's over 5 years old. Don't cheap out on the PSU.

Personally, I'd go with AMD. The performance/dollar is fantastic, so unless you need the absolute highest FPS, you'll be saving a couple hundred dollars. Also you get access to cheaper upgrades later on.
 
If you're spending over $500 on upgrades, get yourself a new PSU with a decent warranty. Assuming the Seasonic M12II was purchased at the same time as your 3770K, it's over 5 years old. Don't cheap out on the PSU.

Personally, I'd go with AMD. The performance/dollar is fantastic, so unless you need the absolute highest FPS, you'll be saving a couple hundred dollars. Also you get access to cheaper upgrades later on.
He hasn't even mentioned CPU, so unless he's looking to spend $800+ on a GPU and running 1080p, the CPU most likely won't be his limiting factor anyways. That said, $1k for just the CPU, MB, RAM and SSD is a decent budget. Overclocking is still a thing, but it's not as much as it used to be. Tons of heat, little performance gain if you go crazy. You can get a small OC (Intel more so than AMD) if you are into it, just don't expect the gains you used to see.
 
Good advice all-around - thanks guys.

I think I'm settled on a 3800x setup - but there is a shortage on AMD motherboards right now. Not a single x570/x470/b450 at my local Microcenter and Newegg isn't looking good either - even Amazon is cleaned out aside from a few absurdly priced ones. Plenty of chips though! Guess I will clean the dust bunnies out of this thing and hang tight a little longer.
 
Yeah mobos are hard to get at the moment in USA/EU.
Wait it out till Zen 3 or if you come across a good x570 in meantime jump on it. I'm also looking at a x570 +3300 for my gf. 3300s bench as good or better than 9900k for gaming, such a weird chip.
 
Good advice all-around - thanks guys.

I think I'm settled on a 3800x setup - but there is a shortage on AMD motherboards right now. Not a single x570/x470/b450 at my local Microcenter and Newegg isn't looking good either - even Amazon is cleaned out aside from a few absurdly priced ones. Plenty of chips though! Guess I will clean the dust bunnies out of this thing and hang tight a little longer.

Is there a certain 3800x combo at Micro Center? I don't have a Micro Center so I'm looking at Amazon/Newegg prices. Before you pull the trigger there, watch this:



Steve Burke says go for the 3700x over the 3800x, and I agree with him. For $70 more, the 3800x offers 100 Mhz more boost which is trivial, performance wise. The rationale is that $70 can get you a LOT more mileage if spent in RAM (16-->32GB), motherboard features, or SSD capacity.

But again, I'm basing this off ordering from Amazon/Newegg and don't know what sort of combo deals Microcenter has.
 
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I think AMD is the better buy, but doesn't do much good when you can't get a motherboard.
 
So, if it's just the CPU, AMD is certainly doing a lot better (a whole lot in some cases).

Consumer hesitation is actually working both against Intel and AMD right now. When two competitors are jockeying for position (confusing markets with statements, promises and even an overload of new product), people sit on their wallets and wait... and wait.... and wait.... and wait... to see who will be "the best". Especially if people are "ok" with what they have right now. In fact, they might not even be totally "ok", but are waiting because things are changing every time they get close to making a decision. But the competitors fear if they stop (especially you AMD), they will lose their edge.

AMD has cluttered the market and well, with Intel, you just never know when they're going to strike with a tactical strike that makes you go "whoa" (Noting that time is running out for Intel though. People will eventually commit to a muddled marketing mess vs. empty promises).

Don't get me wrong, people are buying AMD, but people with 1st gen Ryzen might be kicking themselves in the pants, you know?

So... why buy Intel today? I thought of one thing....

QSV and Plex

Intel's QSV works really well for Plex, allowing a ton of transcodes without much CPU compute utilization. Essentially a Celeron will transcode a lot more than a top tier Ryzen.
 
Why buy intel?
-Mature platform
-lower idle power

QSV is not as good as NVEnc on the desktop/plex.
 
Why buy intel?
-Mature platform
-lower idle power

QSV is not as good as NVEnc on the desktop/plex.

NVEnc is marginally better than QSV. Marginally. So, <$60 CPU doing 21 or so transcodes, or >$500 CPU+GPU combo doing the same number. With that said, in the case of Intel+Nvidia, Plex will use QSV first, just something to keep in mind.
 
NVEnc is marginally better than QSV. Marginally. So, <$60 CPU doing 21 or so transcodes, or >$500 CPU+GPU combo doing the same number. With that said, in the case of Intel+Nvidia, Plex will use QSV first, just something to keep in mind.
Not sure where you get $500 from, I'd rather pick up a dedicated $60 GPU for transcoding than cut into my CPU (which is what I did, got a P600 off clist for $60).
Then again I don't have a dedicated Plex box~ it acts as a NAS, virtualization host, docker host, NVR, etc.

At the same time, how many folks actually need more than a handful of transcodes at at time anyway for their Plex?
I've only needed 3 simultaneous once since I've been running Plex.
 
Not sure where you get $500 from, I'd rather pick up a dedicated $60 GPU for transcoding than cut into my CPU (which is what I did, got a P600 off clist for $60).
Then again I don't have a dedicated Plex box~ it acts as a NAS, virtualization host, docker host, NVR, etc.

At the same time, how many folks actually need more than a handful of transcodes at at time anyway for their Plex?
I've only needed 3 simultaneous once since I've been running Plex.

Ugh. $60 (a pretty good deal for a P600 btw) GPU + $0 CPU, where do we get the $0 CPU again?

A P600 without a driver hack is going to be limited to 2 transcodes. It's possible you've successfully deployed the driver workarounds in Linux to get around that. At the end of the day, that might be asking a bit much for some people (?).

Sounds like you're happy with your config. And that's great! I was merely pointing out where an Intel CPU with QSV might be a good fit. In your case, you were wanting more than a Plex server, so you saw things differently, and that's fine. Some people have heavily used Plex servers, and need more than "a handful" (read that 2 by default with fully supported P600).
 
Fair, and yes I did do the driver unlock since it can handle half a dozen streams wihtout nvidia's BS limiter.
 
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