CoffeeLake VS Ryzen - PCie lanes

shankly1985 · 7 Oct 2017 at 16:39

With Intel failure to deliver stock it has made me rethink if CoffeeLake is the correct upgrade path over Ivybridge.

I understand Ryzen has 24 lanes from the CPU this is great for M.2 etc that I plan on buying.
CoffeeLake I can't seem to find correct information about its lanes people saying it's 16 only? Others saying it has 44?

You then have performance sure i7 8700k is much faster at 1080p but I game at 1440p where Cpu bottleneck is less an issue and more GPU "Vega 64"
Also Intel will be faster with older titles optimised for 4 cores but looking at newer titles engines Ryzen does very well and the more engine start to optimise for 8 cores Ryzen does become a better choice it would seem.

You then have the upgrade AM4 platform Ryzen 2 just slot Cpu in done with it.

Thoughts?

jigger · 7 Oct 2017 at 16:43

Ryzen, X99 or X299. Probably in that order.

AndreiD · 7 Oct 2017 at 16:57

Both Ryzen and Coffee Lake offer only X16 PCI-E lanes for dedicated GPUs, they differ in that Intel uses Chipset PCI-E lanes for NVMe drives while Ryzen uses X4 directly from the CPU.
Realistically there shouldn't be any difference in NVMe performance between the two platforms since the DMI (Chipset to CPU link on Z370) won't ever bottleneck 1 NVMe drive. You can find some testing on the issue here: https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/8073/amd-ryzen-ssd-storage-performance-preview/index3.html Ryzen is slightly trailing behind Z270 there for some reason, might just be platform immaturity.

The platforms as a whole have more PCI-E lanes total than what just the CPUs offer, the chipsets themselves have a few which are used for various I/O, reason why you saw different numbers.

Choice wise, you can find 1440p gaming benchmarks that include the 8700K and Ryzens here: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i7_8700K/

smilingcrow · 7 Oct 2017 at 17:22

shankly1985 said:
I understand Ryzen has 24 lanes from the CPU this is great for M.2 etc that I plan on buying.

4 of those are usually used to connect to the chipset which whilst optional is still present on all the boards I've seen and any boards without would be very minimalist.
I wouldn't let that be a major contributing factor for your purchase.

There are pros and cons for all the platforms really so it comes down to a mixture of objective and subjective factors.
If I was building a system primarily for gaming now I'd buy CL if there was stock.
Why? Better to buy the best available now rather than hoping that the competition catch up.
I'm not convinced that the Zen refresh due in 2018 will overhaul CL and Zen @7nm is 2019 more than likely.
That may well offer even more cores, 12C/24T, but as nobody has released a high wattage CPU at 7/10nm yet there's no certainty as to what clock speeds they will achieve. Also I'm not convinced that anything beyond 8C/16T will be relevant for gaming for many years.
So there are a lot of maybes in there which I wouldn't wait for.
Ideally I'd buy CL now and then look at CPUs again in 2 years time.
If I had to recommend for today due to no CL stock then Ryzen makes sense value wise and X299 for offering fuller features and a known upgrade path.

shankly1985 · 7 Oct 2017 at 17:41

AndreiD said:
Both Ryzen and Coffee Lake offer only X16 PCI-E lanes for dedicated GPUs, they differ in that Intel uses Chipset PCI-E lanes for NVMe drives while Ryzen uses X4 directly from the CPU.
Realistically there shouldn't be any difference in NVMe performance between the two platforms since the DMI (Chipset to CPU link on Z370) won't ever bottleneck 1 NVMe drive. You can find some testing on the issue here: https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/8073/amd-ryzen-ssd-storage-performance-preview/index3.html Ryzen is slightly trailing behind Z270 there for some reason, might just be platform immaturity.

The platforms as a whole have more PCI-E lanes total than what just the CPUs offer, the chipsets themselves have a few which are used for various I/O, reason why you saw different numbers.

Choice wise, you can find 1440p gaming benchmarks that include the 8700K and Ryzens here: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i7_8700K/

Thanks
Making me want CoffeeLake more now. It's a great start for Ryzen, maybe Ryzen 2 will be a better choice.

Now just need to wait for stock

hearing CoffeeLake will be hard to buy 2017.

shankly1985 · 7 Oct 2017 at 17:42

smilingcrow said:
4 of those are usually used to connect to the chipset which whilst optional is still present on all the boards I've seen and any boards without would be very minimalist.
I wouldn't let that be a major contributing factor for your purchase.

There are pros and cons for all the platforms really so it comes down to a mixture of objective and subjective factors.
If I was building a system primarily for gaming now I'd buy CL if there was stock.
Why? Better to buy the best available now rather than hoping that the competition catch up.
I'm not convinced that the Zen refresh due in 2018 will overhaul CL and Zen @7nm is 2019 more than likely.
That may well offer even more cores, 12C/24T, but as nobody has released a high wattage CPU at 7/10nm yet there's no certainty as to what clock speeds they will achieve. Also I'm not convinced that anything beyond 8C/16T will be relevant for gaming for many years.
So there are a lot of maybes in there which I wouldn't wait for.
Ideally I'd buy CL now and then look at CPUs again in 2 years time.
If I had to recommend for today due to no CL stock then Ryzen makes sense value wise and X299 for offering fuller features and a known upgrade path.

Thanks

AndreiD · 7 Oct 2017 at 17:48

What are you currently using? If it's something more recent gen, you can probably wait until Zen+ (early 2018) and see how that pans out vs Coffee Lake.

shankly1985 · 7 Oct 2017 at 17:50

AndreiD said:
What are you currently using? If it's something more recent gen, you can probably wait until Zen+ (early 2018) and see how that pans out vs Coffee Lake.

I7 3770k @4.2 DDR3 1866

AndreiD · 7 Oct 2017 at 17:54

Should be able to tide you over until 8700K stock & pricing normalizes, Ryzen probably won't be a substantial upgrade for gaming.
Zen+ is coming in early 2018 if you can wait that long.

DarrenM343 · 7 Oct 2017 at 17:57

AndreiD said:
Both Ryzen and Coffee Lake offer only X16 PCI-E lanes for dedicated GPUs, they differ in that Intel uses Chipset PCI-E lanes for NVMe drives while Ryzen uses X4 directly from the CPU.
Realistically there shouldn't be any difference in NVMe performance between the two platforms since the DMI (Chipset to CPU link on Z370) won't ever bottleneck 1 NVMe drive. You can find some testing on the issue here: https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/8073/amd-ryzen-ssd-storage-performance-preview/index3.html Ryzen is slightly trailing behind Z270 there for some reason, might just be platform immaturity.

The platforms as a whole have more PCI-E lanes total than what just the CPUs offer, the chipsets themselves have a few which are used for various I/O, reason why you saw different numbers.

Choice wise, you can find 1440p gaming benchmarks that include the 8700K and Ryzens here: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i7_8700K/

So, a quick flick through the review benches reveals at 1440p the [email protected] is as good if not faster than the 8700k even when it's at 5.0? A little surprising, would have throught the 8700k would have pipped it (a little) in all 1440p tests

AndreiD · 7 Oct 2017 at 18:01

You have a performance summary at the end, overall the 8700K is still faster, but the 6700K is close, especially at higher resolutions. To note is that they're using a GTX1080 so the performance delta won't be as pronounced as on a 1080 Ti or a Volta/Navi upgrade.

jigger · 7 Oct 2017 at 18:15

DarrenM343 said:
So, a quick flick through the review benches reveals at 1440p the [email protected] is as good if not faster than the 8700k even when it's at 5.0? A little surprising, would have throught the 8700k would have pipped it (a little) in all 1440p tests

Yeah Coffee lake probably hits the ring bus wall before the quad core.

Rainmaker · 7 Oct 2017 at 18:59

AndreiD said:
Both Ryzen and Coffee Lake offer only X16 PCI-E lanes for dedicated GPUs, they differ in that Intel uses Chipset PCI-E lanes for NVMe drives while Ryzen uses X4 directly from the CPU.
Realistically there shouldn't be any difference in NVMe performance between the two platforms since the DMI (Chipset to CPU link on Z370) won't ever bottleneck 1 NVMe drive. You can find some testing on the issue here: https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/8073/amd-ryzen-ssd-storage-performance-preview/index3.html Ryzen is slightly trailing behind Z270 there for some reason, might just be platform immaturity.

The platforms as a whole have more PCI-E lanes total than what just the CPUs offer, the chipsets themselves have a few which are used for various I/O, reason why you saw different numbers.

Choice wise, you can find 1440p gaming benchmarks that include the 8700K and Ryzens here: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i7_8700K/

Doesn’t the Intel DMI 3 chip only have a x4 connection to the CPU for basically every device except the GPU, though? So that’s your NVME drive using all available lanes right off the bat, but then once your Ethernet also takes a piece you’re already effectively bottlenecking the drive as you download to it? I’d decided on 8700k but this issue worries me as I don’t understand enough about it yet.

gavinh87 · 7 Oct 2017 at 19:02

Rainmaker said:
Doesn’t the Intel DMI 3 chip only have a x4 connection to the CPU for basically every device except the GPU, though? So that’s your NVME drive using all available lanes right off the bat, but then once your Ethernet also takes a piece you’re already effectively bottlenecking the drive as you download to it? I’d decided on 8700k but this issue worries me as I don’t understand enough about it yet.

Using nvme on a 8700k as I type this. GPU is at full x16 and speeds on the drive are exactly where the should be.

AndreiD · 7 Oct 2017 at 19:29

@Rainmaker Is there even an NVMe that can saturate X4 PCI-E 3.0 lanes? Even a 960 Pro doesn't get that high in sequential read.
Realistically you'll only run into the DMI 3.0 bottleneck if you RAID NVMe drives, but if that's what you're going for you're probably better served by X399 or X299.

DMI 3.0's data transfer rate is 3.94 GB/s (Bytes!), there's no real consumer use case in which it will become a bottleneck.

Rainmaker · 7 Oct 2017 at 21:56

gavinh87 said:
Using nvme on a 8700k as I type this. GPU is at full x16 and speeds on the drive are exactly where the should be.

AndreiD said:
@Rainmaker Is there even an NVMe that can saturate X4 PCI-E 3.0 lanes? Even a 960 Pro doesn't get that high in sequential read.
Realistically you'll only run into the DMI 3.0 bottleneck if you RAID NVMe drives, but if that's what you're going for you're probably better served by X399 or X299.

DMI 3.0's data transfer rate is 3.94 GB/s (Bytes!), there's no real consumer use case in which it will become a bottleneck.

Samsung Evo 960 is around 3.2 GB/sec at its best, so close enough. It effectively leaves 0.74 GB/sec for gigabit ethernet, SATA and anything else - so should just about be enough with a single drive. It does make all those double and triple NVME slot boards completely redundant though. Der8aur got close to 30GB/sec out of a Threadripper RAID setup (yes, I know that's HEDT); but even with the same card/drives Z370 would bottom out at a single drive's speed. That's pretty lame. Is Ryzen limited to the same 4x PCIe for NVMe, ethernet and SATA etc?

My use case is a bit unusual in that games are barely 1% priority (an occasional mess around) but I do a lot of high speed downloads with RARs and PAR checking, as well as running low level video transcoding all day and running several servers (Plex, Emby, Sonarr, NZBGet) and playing with virtual machines. Thing is it's also my main desktop, so things like browsing and other single threaded stuff is equally important. It's why I've had such a hard time deciding what to upgrade to. My FX8350 may be laughed at in gaming circles but it's done its job exceedingly well for what I want. It's starting to show its age and feeling slow now, though, so time for a change. If it wasn't for wanting fast single threaded speeds and all the horror stories about instability and memory etc, I'd have bought Ryzen a while ago; I think 8700k or 1800x are my 'sweet spot' for performance and value.

My current plan is Phanteks Enthoo Pro M full windowed case, 8700k with 240 AIO or A240 loop, 16GB 3600MHz 8Pack RAM, Asrock Extreme4 mobo (same 12 power phases, caps and high end audio as the Taichi), a 960 Evo NVME for the OS, my 850 Evo SSD as a scratch disk, and my 2TB storage rust spinner. That or 1800x, 8Pack RAM, Taichi, etc. The price is about the same.

PS Apologies to the OP. I'm not trying to hijack your thread but I was literally about to post an identical one when I saw yours. No point doing it now, and the answers should benefit us both.

gavinh87 · 7 Oct 2017 at 22:02

Rainmaker said:
Samsung Evo 960 is around 3.2 GB/sec at its best, so close enough. It effectively leaves 0.74 GB/sec for gigabit ethernet, SATA and anything else - so should just about be enough with a single drive. It does make all those double and triple NVME slot boards completely redundant though. Der8aur got close to 30GB/sec out of a Threadripper RAID setup (yes, I know that's HEDT); but even with the same card/drives Z370 would bottom out at a single drive's speed. That's pretty lame. Is Ryzen limited to the same 4x PCIe for NVMe, ethernet and SATA etc?

My use case is a bit unusual in that games are barely 1% priority (an occasional mess around) but I do a lot of high speed downloads with RARs and PAR checking, as well as running low level video transcoding all day and running several servers (Plex, Emby, Sonarr, NZBGet) and playing with virtual machines. Thing is it's also my main desktop, so things like browsing and other single threaded stuff is equally important. It's why I've had such a hard time deciding what to upgrade to. My FX8350 may be laughed at in gaming circles but it's done its job exceedingly well for what I want. It's starting to show its age and feeling slow now, though, so time for a change. If it wasn't for wanting fast single threaded speeds and all the horror stories about instability and memory etc, I'd have bought Ryzen a while ago; I think 8700k or 1800x are my 'sweet spot' for performance and value.

My current plan is Phanteks Enthoo Pro M full windowed case, 8700k with 240 AIO or A240 loop, 16GB 3600MHz 8Pack RAM, Asrock Extreme4 mobo (same 12 power phases, caps and high end audio as the Taichi), a 960 Evo NVME for the OS, my 850 Evo SSD as a scratch disk, and my 2TB storage rust spinner. That or 1800x, 8Pack RAM, Taichi, etc. The price is about the same.

PS Apologies to the OP. I'm not trying to hijack your thread but I was literally about to post an identical one when I saw yours. No point doing it now, and the answers should benefit us both.

I have both systems, the ryzen is being sold. If that tells you anything.....
Also, if overclocking intel is much more forgiving, just watch the heat as the 8700 is HOT!
Also, nvme speed is much higher on the intel board.
I dont have the same uses as you do but I do have a 960 evo and a 850 and transferring between the both and just general usage has been fine.

Panos · 7 Oct 2017 at 22:04

DarrenM343 said:
So, a quick flick through the review benches reveals at 1440p the [email protected] is as good if not faster than the 8700k even when it's at 5.0? A little surprising, would have throught the 8700k would have pipped it (a little) in all 1440p tests

Yep. At 1440p any CPU is fine, especially the 6/12 ones like 1600/1600X/6800K/6850K/5930K/7800K or the 8 core 1700/1700X. All of them can be found for less than the 8700K.

I have a 6800K at 4Ghz, and based on all the reviews which have used GTX1080ti @ 2560x1440, at best I might gain 1 FPS going to 8700K at 5Ghz. Kinda pointless imho.

8700K is for a very narrow market. Those using GTX1080/1080Ti on 1080p with monitor between 144-200hz, and they want +10 fps over the 100-120fps . Any deviation out of this spec, either higher resolution or lower specced GPU, and makes no sense over the other offerings, which are on better overall platforms with longer life expectancy (AM4 & X299). (Z370 is dead, as it won't support the 8 core CPUs next year)

As for Ryzen pci-e lanes someone asked.
All Ryzen 3/5/7 have 32 Pci-e lanes inside the chip.
Of which 16 are for GPU, 4 for direct connection of NVME, 4 for Chipset and 8 that aren't used on the current X370/B350 platforms.

Hagar · 7 Oct 2017 at 22:08

gavinh87 said:
I have both systems, the ryzen is being sold. If that tells you anything.....
Also, if overclocking intel is much more forgiving, just watch the heat as the 8700 is HOT!
Also, nvme speed is much higher on the intel board.
I dont have the same uses as you do but I do have a 960 evo and a 850 and transferring between the both and just general usage has been fine.

nvme runs the specified Samsung 960 speeds on CH6 board

Rainmaker · 7 Oct 2017 at 22:13

gavinh87 said:
Using nvme on a 8700k as I type this. GPU is at full x16 and speeds on the drive are exactly where the should be.

That's reassuring, thanks.

Panos said:
As for Ryzen pci-e lanes someone asked.
All Ryzen 3/5/7 have 32 Pci-e lanes inside the chip.
Of which 16 are for GPU, 4 for direct connection of NVME, 4 for Chipset and 8 that aren't used on the current X370/B350 platforms.

Good to know, and it certainly does give some extra breathing space even just with the extra x4 for NVME.