Soldato
- Joined
- 26 Apr 2004
- Posts
- 9,873
- Location
- Milton Keynes
This sort of stuff is exactly why there is
A) No one true king for gaming right now, as whilst the 9800X3D is faster overall, usually in averages, and sometimes its quite dominant in lows, and requires less tuning (and cheaper RAM) to get the best out of it (a lot less), it does still have weaknesses where Raptor Lake does better.
B) It is still worth tweaking RAM timings, at least primaries and secondaries, for gaming, even with an X3D chip, as it still comes into play whenever the cache cannot be leveraged properly; and the high averages of the X3D make the minimums when it falls outside it's comfort zone all the more notable; and in those worst case scenarios, it can actually have a notable impact.
Honestly; I don't like Framechasers' attitude, and he is wrong sometimes, at the same time, a lot of people just disregard him completely because of his attitude, but he's not always wrong, and he's been commenting on this for a while. Do I think he always gets it right, no, but I suspect we will see more of this sort of commentary over time, like this video from DannyZ, as people start to see there are more fringe cases and edge scenarios than there used to be, because CPUs have become a lot more complicated.
Even he does not disagree the 9800X3D is a lot more power efficient in many cases, and having now got both in the same household, I do understand his criticism of the 7800X3D; its a baller gaming chip, but its notably slower around windows than a tuned modern Intel, or 9*** series chips; and can have heavier dips, especially if the RAM is not tweaked to reduce latency; and when latency is tuned on both, even using Buildzoid's easy timings, the 9000 and Intel DO feel that bit snappier; due to a combo of lower system latency, or in Intels' case, monolithic, but even the 9800X3D can suffer dips when the vCache is not able to be monopolised on, because realistically there is just more latency in a chiplet architecture than a monolithic one without VERY clever and advanced engineering. And if rumours are true, AMD have paid heed to that and are going to be reducing physical distance between chips, and improving the interconnect (IF/Sea of Wires) and IO Die itself heavily in 10000 series; whether those rumours come true is another thing though, as I don't like peddling rumours as they're so often wrong, but for gaming especially, and general latency, this is an incredibly low hanging fruit, so it'd be logical it might be true.
Intel 2** series however suffers all the issues AMD had with Chiplets, and they've got less experience tuning them. If I was buying for gaming now, I'd 100% still go a 9000 series AMD, or a 14*** series Intel.
I'd argue, especially out of the box, with the power on top, the 9800X3D is the right chip for most people, price being right, as you need to tune a lot more with Intel, BUT there is still a place for Intel, even more so if you do productivity rather than just gaming on the system; and if it was a choice between a 9600X and a 14600K, unless I was 100% serious about upgrading down the road, I'd probably actually lean towards the 14600K; now the BIOS updates have come out to stop them killing themselves with overaggressive single core boost and voltages.
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