i9-9900k, Ryzen 9 3900X or..?

[Bob Gnarley]

I'm playing devils advocate here but how about instead of a new 3700x get a used first or second gen part, say a 2600/2600x, which will give some improvement over your 2500k and use it as a place holder till 4th gen Ryzen hits the market. Then re sell. You might lose a few bucks but you will still have cash towards the new part.

I say this because 3rd gen ryzen mid to lower end desktop parts are on fairly low quality silicon. At the moment the best chiplets go to the server parts (Epyc), then Threadripper with Ryzen getting the stuff that didn't make the cut. I have a 3700x, works as prescribed but is hot and really needs good cooling for consistent boosting. The stock cooler doesn't cut it here.

With 4th gen the server parts will be on either a newer node or process meaning they won't be using the same chiplets. So the very best stuff will go to Threadripper which is a very small corner of the market leaving an awful lot of top silicon for us which should bring interesting power savings and clock gains. Coupled with IPC improvements we might actually see Ryzen draw up alongside, if not ahead with Team Blue.

Also Patriot viper is really well priced at the moment, the faster 4000/4400mhz kits are b-die, can be downclocked for now, and will be ready should you upgrade.

 

[Tommi Ylén]

Buying at the beginning of a gen is usually works out the best but you're mid gen so it's a bit of a compromise.

Intel will give you best gaming performance today but Ryzen will have an upgrade path towards the end of the year. That's basically where you're at.

A 9th gen 9700k/9900k oc'd to 5.2ghz or so doesn't have an equal.

The problem choosing 9700k has been the lack of hyperthreading which I keep forgetting, does it cause stuttering not having it or some other problems? Or is it a problem at all in reality?

I'm playing devils advocate here but how about instead of a new 3700x get a used first or second gen part, say a 2600/2600x, which will give some improvement over your 2500k and use it as a place holder till 4th gen Ryzen hits the market. Then re sell. You might lose a few bucks but you will still have cash towards the new part.

....

Do the 4th gen ryzen work with the current x570 motherboards?

 

[Bob Gnarley]

4th gen will be on the same socket so yes, should be good on all x370/470/570 and b350/450 with the relevant bios.

 

[Tommi Ylén]

4th gen will be on the same socket so yes, should be good on all x370/470/570 and b350/450 with the relevant bios.

Thanks, that helps a lot. I might be going with what you said. I will now just focus on quality X570 motherboard and good RAM. Maybe buy ryzen 5 3600 for meanwhile, it's only 200euros.

 

[RasmusP]

If someone wants the best bang for the buck and the highest average fps regarding cpu limitations for several years:
9600k overclocked to 5 GHz and in 3-4 generations another upgrade to whatever consumer-higher-end cpu then.
It's so massively cheaper here in Germany compared to 9700k or 9900k...

Of course it's not well suited for video rendering etc.

For Photoshop or lightroom however many think a workstation cpu would be great but I had a look and lightroom runs on 1 thread.
When I use too many correction dots my 2600k is lagging like hell but the overall cpu load is about 15%, yay!

 

[Tommi Ylén]

If someone wants the best bang for the buck and the highest average fps regarding cpu limitations for several years:
9600k overclocked to 5 GHz and in 3-4 generations another upgrade to whatever consumer-higher-end cpu then.
It's so massively cheaper here in Germany compared to 9700k or 9900k...

Of course it's not well suited for video rendering etc.

For Photoshop or lightroom however many think a workstation cpu would be great but I had a look and lightroom runs on 1 thread.
When I use too many correction dots my 2600k is lagging like hell but the overall cpu load is about 15%, yay!

9600k has the same problem as 9700k, no hyperthreading Danger of stuttering

 

[RobertR1]

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9600k has the same problem as 9700k, no hyperthreading Danger of stuttering

There’s no danger of stuttering with a 9700k. 9600k yes due to 6 cores which can be an issue in some newer games like shadow of the tomb raider being a specific one.

For sims only, that won’t be the case since no current sim scales past 4 cores on a good day.

There’s one weird case with gta v and rdr 2 due to the engine that if your FPS is high enough and you’re on a 8 core CPU, the engine freaks out but this is a rockstar issue.

 

[Tommi Ylén]

Big thanks to everyone here, you helped lots. I'm still not entirely sure if I went the right path but I went with ROG Strix X570-E, Ryzen 7 3700X and Kingston hyperx fury 3200mhz.

 

[RobertR1]

It’ll be a good jump to what you have and won’t think about it later. Enjoy it! not sure if that ram is bdie. Bdie timings for xmp should be 14-14-14/3200

 

[cmiller493]

I'm still running an i7 4790k at stock clock with a GTX 1070 on a 49" CHG90 and I'm trying to decide what to upgrade to as well and plan to stream.

I'm leaning towards the 3600 but wonder if its worth getting the 2700x or 3700x. I wouldn't say I hate the performance I am currently getting with my CPU but it's definitely my bottleneck. Just don't know whether its worth upgrading now or waiting until next gen ryzen comes out.

 

[Tommi Ylén]

It’ll be a good jump to what you have and won’t think about it later. Enjoy it! not sure if that ram is bdie. Bdie timings for xmp should be 14-14-14/3200

Thanks, I try to update order. I found this for reasonable price
G.Skill 16GB (2 x 8GB) Flare X (for AMD), DDR4 3200 MHz, CL14

 

[Pedro Azevedo88]

If you want a good MB for ryzen with a good price, go with the Asus TUF GAMING X570-PLUS.
It has good VRMs and fairly priced against other altrernatives.

 

[RasmusP]

I'm still running an i7 4790k at stock clock with a GTX 1070 on a 49" CHG90 and I'm trying to decide what to upgrade to as well and plan to stream.

I'm leaning towards the 3600 but wonder if its worth getting the 2700x or 3700x. I wouldn't say I hate the performance I am currently getting with my CPU but it's definitely my bottleneck. Just don't know whether its worth upgrading now or waiting until next gen ryzen comes out.

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X vs Intel Core i7-4790K @ 4.00GHz vs AMD Ryzen 7 2700X [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

Single Thread Performances:
2700x = 2183
4790k = 2529
2700x = 2905
3600 = 2803

The 2700x would be a downgrade for simracing!

For comparison the 9700k has a score of 2813 however these numbers are a bit tricky with the Ryzen CPUs as their single thread performance doesn't scale like the Intel's!

Ryzen CPUs look like this:
4300 Mhz
4200 MHz
3800 MHz
3600 MHz
... same 3600 MHz for the rest

And the more threads you have at the same time running, the lower goes the peak clock of the single cores.
So at 8 threads you won't see any core boosting higher than 4000 MHz for example.

All modern Intels can easily be locked at 5 GHz on all cores.

The problem you get here is that most sims use 2-4 threads so while the i7 9700k would be estimated with:
3x 2813 points = 8439

A Ryzen 3700x for example would rather look like this:
3 threads so only reaching 4200 peak on the most loaded core.
1x 2850 + 1x 2700 + 1x 2670 = 8220

Fantasy numbers but you get the point of it...
The Ryzen 3xxx CPUs are awesome pieces of technology. More efficient, overall better performance for a lower price.
But for simracing: Intel wins...

You could buy a 3600 now with a x570 board and upgrade to a 4th gen Ryzen when it comes out. But we don't know how they will perform and what features you lose when sticking with the x570 board.
Also I really don't like the active cooling on most x570 boards...

Also considering it all, buying a cheapish x470 board and a 3600 and then upgrading to a x670 board + 4600 will probably be better than investing into an expensive x570 now.

Or just buying a 9600k + Gigabyte aorus z390 elite for a massive boost in simracing with some standard, cheap 3200 MHz RAM and looking for what to buy in a year or so might be the best solution...

Have a few friends running a 9600k at 5.1, 5.1, 5.0, 4.9, 4.9, 4.8 GHz without any problems and cooler than their old 4xxx Intels.
The i5 shreds through the simracing titles with ease.

 

[Fat-Alfie]

I just bought a new PC, upgrading from an i5-6500 3.2ghz to an i5-9600k 3.7ghz. I only play AC and combined with a used gtx 1080 it's the best £680 I ever spent!

 

[RasmusP]

I just bought a new PC, upgrading from an i5-6500 3.2ghz to an i5-9600k 3.7ghz. I only play AC and combined with a used gtx 1080 it's the best £680 I ever spent!

Did you overclock it yet?
The boost of the 9600k is pretty low compared to the 9700k and 9900k. Smeels like fake sell arguments from Intel since they can show "out of the box benchmarks" and the higher the price, the better the fps... but anyway said friends of mine don't have expensive motherboards and they all could just go into the uefi and raise the default boost clocks (per loaded thread/1 core active, 2 core active etc) to higher values.

They didn't touch voltages or anything. Just put the boost clocks to 5.0, 5.0, 4.9, 4.8, 4.8, 4.7.
All stable, temperatures totally fine and when checking the voltages it was fairly below what the oc guys recommend

 

[Fat-Alfie]

I haven't tried to oc it yet, no. I only use AC and haven't exceeded 50% cpu load yet, but it is something that I would like to look into. But I have never tried overclocking before so I would have to do lots of research first

 

[Trebormoore84]

Big thanks to everyone here, you helped lots. I'm still not entirely sure if I went the right path but I went with ROG Strix X570-E, Ryzen 7 3700X and Kingston hyperx fury 3200mhz.

Solid choice especially driving a 1070 for now. That MB has a solid 12+4 VRM which is mega and should squeeze out a few more MHZ overclocking, or could easily drive the 12 and 16 core parts.

X570 PCIE 4.0 allows a next gen 4.0 GPU to be plugged into one socket and run at 8x (which is the same bandwidth as 3.0 16x) and still allow 8x lanes in the other socket. This for example could allow 4x NVME Gen 4.0 drives to be installed in RAID on X570. Or a second 4.0 GPU with no bandwidth restriction. Or some other PCIE device.

However these things arguably will not help simracing, but if you used the computer for other things at the same time opens up many possibilities. The kind of things you could only ever do previously on X299, Threadripper or two separate machines. When you use a computer this way suddenly having as many cores as possible starts to make sense.

Another example is running a separate Virtual machine to enable you running two simrigs off one computer, or a media server / game streaming machine as another example. 8 cores and a GPU for your simrig and 8 cores and a second GPU for a gaming rig for the kids streamed to another room. etc etc.

 

[Tommi Ylén]

Solid choice especially driving a 1070 for now. That MB has a solid 12+4 VRM which is mega and should squeeze out a few more MHZ overclocking, or could easily drive the 12 and 16 core parts.

X570 PCIE 4.0 allows a next gen 4.0 GPU to be plugged into one socket and run at 8x (which is the same bandwidth as 3.0 16x) and still allow 8x lanes in the other socket. This for example could allow 4x NVME Gen 4.0 drives to be installed in RAID on X570. Or a second 4.0 GPU with no bandwidth restriction. Or some other PCIE device.

However these things arguably will not help simracing, but if you used the computer for other things at the same time opens up many possibilities. The kind of things you could only ever do previously on X299, Threadripper or two separate machines. When you use a computer this way suddenly having as many cores as possible starts to make sense.

Another example is running a separate Virtual machine to enable you running two simrigs off one computer, or a media server / game streaming machine as another example. 8 cores and a GPU for your simrig and 8 cores and a second GPU for a gaming rig for the kids streamed to another room. etc etc.

Nice! Virtual machine thing especially is intriguing, I've been playing with the two simrigs idea for a while now.

 

[cmiller493]

Thanks for the awesome reply RasmusP!!

I really don't have any major complaints with my rig...mostly play iRacing and stay between 100-144fps with drops to 80 occasionally. Would you recommend me just trying to overclock my 4790k to hold me over until next-gen later this year? Since the boost clock is 4.4 I'm not sure if overclocking to 4.6-4.7 would even make a noticeable difference or not.

 

[RasmusP]

Thanks for the awesome reply RasmusP!!

I really don't have any major complaints with my rig...mostly play iRacing and stay between 100-144fps with drops to 80 occasionally. Would you recommend me just trying to overclock my 4790k to hold me over until next-gen later this year? Since the boost clock is 4.4 I'm not sure if overclocking to 4.6-4.7 would even make a noticeable difference or not.

If you don't really need the fps, don't upgrade yet.
Two friends of mine had the 4790k.
One got into VR and wanted to stay above the crucial 90 fps at all times.
He overclocked his cpu to 4.9 GHz which was running pretty hot but still not really staying above 90 fps.

He then bought a 8700k and is very happy with it. Also runs at 4.9 GHz.

The other friend just wanted to have as high fps as he could with his 165 hz Asus gsync.
He got the 9600k and his fps are a lot higher than before.

But both CPUs only have 6 cores so might be not really future proof...
The 8700k isn't available anymore, with the 9600k you would lose 2 threads (gain 2 cores but you won't have hyperthreading..).
The 9700k is too expensive for what you would get and with the AMD CPUs you wouldn't really improve your single thread performance.

All in all I'd say wait for next gen. AMD might throw another punch at Intel and improve a lot or Intel might put out a nice upgrade due to the pressure from AMD.

I'd say next gen might be a very good time for upgrading. Right now it would only be a good upgrade if you'd really need the performance for something but it wouldn't be the "wow effect".

I'm still on my old i7 2600k that's running at 4.4 ghz for the same reasons. No VR, got a gsync monitor so the bad fps at starts etc don't really bother me.
When I upgrade I want to really feel the evolution.