Yeah got me too.Some really decent savings.
Yeah, really quite decent. Saved on a number of parts that hadn't been dropping much recently, and meant I was able to overspend a little on RAM, which should give me more options for tweaking etc down the line if i want to, or just run XMP and know I'm getting pretty top tier performance out the box.
My rebuild had been coming for some time, so I'd been watching prices for around 6 months. I genuinely wasnt expecting to get a new 9800X3D for under £400, given how well they've stuck for £450 or higher, with
occasional drops to 420. I mean they stuck at 499+ for quite some time with no movement.
Honestly, I'd been trying to kinda get away with my laptop for as long as I could, see if I made it to Black Friday, but a few of my games, Helldivers 2 for example, really push the laptop to the edge due to its heavy CPU utilisation (it'll use every core you throw at it), which just ends up with my laptop bouncing off power/thermal limits, even if the mobile 4080 (which is kinda a lower clocked 4070Ti) still has headroom; and that just becomes annoying. Even with UV, and increasing power limits, it's just not possible to keep it running anywhere near its maximum all core clocks, the power draw and heat load is just too high; which is perhaps not surprising when the 13700HX is essentially a tweaked and power limited 12900K. It works really well for stuff thats a bit more traditional in CPU usage though, but its just not equivalent to a fully unleashed desktop setup; it just doesnt have the same thermal or power headroom.
I did consider just grabbing a 14900K and an AIO and being done with it, as my old motherboard would have taken that, and it'd have been a much cheaper outlay than a completely fresh build+; but as I was on DDR4; it just wouldnt have really made sense. The 14900K when fairly well tweaked, with decent RAM (as long as you get a decent IMC) can hold its own, and even beat the 9800X3D in some scenarios, even in games, but by the time I'd have spent the money on replacing the motherboard, switching to appropriate DDR5 etc, it just didn't really make sense; and the 9800X3D just starts to look a better deal, faster in many cases, and not massively behind in most that it loses, without much if any of the tweaking required, and theoretically has an upgrade path as well, whereas 14900K would be end of the road for that platform, and Arrowlake is just a bit of a dud for gamers, and again needs heavy tweaking to get the best out of it for games.
Ultimately, if AMD just improve the IMC/IO Die next generation to increase performance there when interacting with the memory and storage, and bump the cache again, even if they didn't make any changes to the actual core or core count, it'd probably destroy most of the remaining Intel advantages due to the sheer IPC, whereas at the moment it seems like most of Intels few remaining advantages lie either in the monolithic design and faster access to memory, or just sheer core volume right now. You can tell that the IO/Memory is the bottleneck by just how much difference the 3D Vcache makes vs standard Zen 5 parts, keeping more information closer to the core, without having to go out to memory.
