AMD Zen 3 (5000 Series), rumored 17% IPC gain.

[b0rn2sk8]

Unless you play fly sims or use for workloads, 32gb wont be a good upgrade.
You want to upgrade to the fastest ssd m.2 as windows be snappier.
Speed matters more than storage.
next is a better ipc cpu with good boost.
Like the upcoming Ryzen series from AMD

The speed gains from going from a SATA SSD to a NVME SSD are so small they are imperceptible to almost everyone. General loading times are not normally bottlenecked by the SATA interface. Moving huge files around, absolutely yes but not loading times.

 

[Joxeon]

I expect you’d end up getting new ram for a new build either way if it’s anything like DDR4.

I have DDR4 in my current PC but I’m planning to swap it when I build a new one for Zen4. I’ve had it for over 5 years and it isn’t capable of anything like the speeds you can get these days. I think it’s only 2666mhz, and I expect DDR5 will be the same with the early chips being way slower than what you can get later down the line.

I think DDR5 is kicking off at 4800mhz so it should still offer a decent bump over DDR4 even in the early days although personally I will hang on till it's been out a year before making the jump for prices to stabilise.

 

[b0rn2sk8]

Oh I don’t disagree but my point was that even if you waited for the first wave of DDR5 boards, you’d get that 4800mhz but by the time you come to upgrade again 3-5 years later the standard will likely be 5800mhz+ at half or a third of the cost in which case you’d just replace it and take advantage of the additional speed. Just as I will be doing with DDR4.

In essence waiting for DDR5 isn’t really future proofing because there is no such thing in the word of electronics.

 

[bakes0310]

My plan is to get a 4950x 32gb memory, 1tb m.2 drive and a nvidia 3060 card and keep the am4 platform for a very long time with the occasional gpu upgrade. I would very suprised if games get so demanding that it requires ddr5 and am5 in the next 5-10 years.

 

[Joxeon]

My plan is to get a 4950x 32gb memory, 1tb m.2 drive and a nvidia 3060 card and keep the am4 platform for a very long time with the occasional gpu upgrade. I would very suprised if games get so demanding that it requires ddr5 and am5 in the next 5-10 years.

I tend to go the other way in spending less and upgrading more often as I find even after a couple of years that much cheaper hardware will generally out perform yesterday's flagship.

 

[CuriousTomCat]

Unless you play fly sims or use for workloads, 32gb wont be a good upgrade.
You want to upgrade to the fastest ssd m.2 as windows be snappier.
Speed matters more than storage.
next is a better ipc cpu with good boost.
Like the upcoming Ryzen series from AMD

Obviously 16Gb is enough today in 2020 but I'm thinking about the future.

10 years ago my gaming pc had 4Gb memory and 8Gb was considered pointless.

In another 10 years I think gaming pcs will have 64Gb memory.

 

[clv101]

I tend to go the other way in spending less and upgrading more often as I find even after a couple of years that much cheaper hardware will generally out perform yesterday's flagship.

Agreed, buying top end, infrequently is not as efficient as buying/upgrading at the mid-range. Today that means buying a 3600 with a good board, then planning to move to an 8 core zen 3 in a couple years time, then swap out for a 12 or 16 core in another 2-3 years. Never paying crazy money and always having enough power.

 

[CuriousTomCat]

Yeah I can understand people who buy high end hardware EVERY generation and stay there. They obviously enjoy high end gaming and that's how they want to spend their cash so good luck to them.

It's pointless though when somebody buys high end hardware and keeps it for 6 years without upgrading. After 3 years they're now a mid range gamer. Then a few years later they become a low end gamer. They could have saved the cash and bought lower end hardware if they're happy with lower end gaming.

Regular upgrades is the way to go, whether it's regular mid range or regular high end.

 

[MissChief]

Without checking the last 5 pages have we got a confirmed release date yet?

 

[Perfect_Chaos]

Regular upgrades is the way to go, whether it's regular mid range or regular high end.

Depends how much of a difference there is in the upgrade, this time is a bit different because of the rumoured 15/20% boost, so would be worth it to those even on Zen 2

 

[CuriousTomCat]

Depends how much of a difference there is in the upgrade, this time is a bit different because of the rumoured 15/20% boost, so would be worth it to those even on Zen 2

I forgot I was in the CPU thread. I was thinking about graphics cards mainly to be honest.

But yeah, Zen 3 will be a very nice upgrade indeed.

 

[clv101]

It's pointless though when somebody buys high end hardware and keeps it for 6 years without upgrading. After 3 years they're now a mid range gamer. Then a few years later they become a low end gamer. They could have saved the cash and bought lower end hardware if they're happy with lower end gaming.

I think its worse than just becoming a mid range or low end gamer. That 6 year old state of the art system may only have the performance of a low end system - but it'll have a much higher power consumption of a modern low end system, the GPU may have the same compute power of a low end system but might be missing some key modern features... old (even once state of the art) technology is often just out of date.

 

[Joxeon]

I think its worse than just becoming a mid range or low end gamer. That 6 year old state of the art system may only have the performance of a low end system - but it'll have a much higher power consumption of a modern low end system, the GPU may have the same compute power of a low end system but might be missing some key modern features... old (even once state of the art) technology is often just out of date.

If company's like AMD continue to bring 15% IPC every year then today's CPUs will start to age a lot faster than the last 10 years when Intel were only bring around 3% every generation.

Even buying extra cores won't help as we can see by comparing an 8core ryzen 7 1700 to a 6 core 3600, it gets decimated in gaming.

 

[Mr Evil]

Yeah I can understand people who buy high end hardware EVERY generation and stay there. They obviously enjoy high end gaming and that's how they want to spend their cash so good luck to them.

It's pointless though when somebody buys high end hardware and keeps it for 6 years without upgrading. After 3 years they're now a mid range gamer. Then a few years later they become a low end gamer. They could have saved the cash and bought lower end hardware if they're happy with lower end gaming.

Regular upgrades is the way to go, whether it's regular mid range or regular high end.

Let's see how that would have worked out for my CPU, going by the price on release listed on Wikipedia...

I bought an 1800X when it was released, which was the highest-end CPU AMD made at the time. If I had paid the listed price, that would have been 499. A cursory search for 3xxx bencmarks tells me that an 1800X is roughly equivalent to a 3600 now. Assuming consistent numbering from AMD, if I had upgraded regularly instead of buying high-end right away, I would have paid 219+199+199=617 for a 1600, 2600 and 3600. Some of that probably would have been offset by reselling the old CPUs, which would have depreciated by less than my 1800X by now, but I think it still would have ended up costing more.

I don't think it makes sense to aim for high-end or low end. I buy the parts that will give me the performance I want at the time, and upgrade when that is no longer enough. Sometimes that means I buy something high-end and keep it for only 6 months, sometimes 6 years. Sometimes something at the low end is enough.

The 1800X has been fast enough for the last 3.5 years, so I haven't upgraded. I'm beginning to find myself waiting for it more often now though, so I'll probably get a 4xxx CPU when they arrive - maybe high-end, maybe not.

 

[Joxeon]

Let's see how that would have worked out for my CPU, going by the price on release listed on Wikipedia...

I bought an 1800X when it was released, which was the highest-end CPU AMD made at the time. If I had paid the listed price, that would have been 499. A cursory search for 3xxx bencmarks tells me that an 1800X is roughly equivalent to a 3600 now. Assuming consistent numbering from AMD, if I had upgraded regularly instead of buying high-end right away, I would have paid 219+199+199=617 for a 1600, 2600 and 3600. Some of that probably would have been offset by reselling the old CPUs, which would have depreciated by less than my 1800X by now, but I think it still would have ended up costing more.

I don't think it makes sense to aim for high-end or low end. I buy the parts that will give me the performance I want at the time, and upgrade when that is no longer enough. Sometimes that means I buy something high-end and keep it for only 6 months, sometimes 6 years. Sometimes something at the low end is enough.

The 1800X has been fast enough for the last 3.5 years, so I haven't upgraded. I'm beginning to find myself waiting for it more often now though, so I'll probably get a 4xxx CPU when they arrive - maybe high-end, maybe not.

I dont think you need to change out the cpu every year though, every 2 or 3 years is enough.

 

[BS Dave]

Let's see how that would have worked out for my CPU, going by the price on release listed on Wikipedia...

I bought an 1800X when it was released, which was the highest-end CPU AMD made at the time. If I had paid the listed price, that would have been 499. A cursory search for 3xxx bencmarks tells me that an 1800X is roughly equivalent to a 3600 now. Assuming consistent numbering from AMD, if I had upgraded regularly instead of buying high-end right away, I would have paid 219+199+199=617 for a 1600, 2600 and 3600. Some of that probably would have been offset by reselling the old CPUs, which would have depreciated by less than my 1800X by now, but I think it still would have ended up costing more.

I don't think it makes sense to aim for high-end or low end. I buy the parts that will give me the performance I want at the time, and upgrade when that is no longer enough. Sometimes that means I buy something high-end and keep it for only 6 months, sometimes 6 years. Sometimes something at the low end is enough.

The 1800X has been fast enough for the last 3.5 years, so I haven't upgraded. I'm beginning to find myself waiting for it more often now though, so I'll probably get a 4xxx CPU when they arrive - maybe high-end, maybe not.

im with you Mr Evil. Imagine buying a mid range i5 and motherboard every other generation, when you could have bought the 2700k to start off with and lasted until a couple of years ago.

it’s also nice to know you have the best you could afford as well, especially when you’re after as many frames you can get

 

[Joxeon]

im with you Mr Evil. Imagine buying a mid range i5 and motherboard every other generation, when you could have bought the 2700k to start off with and lasted until a couple of years ago.

it’s also nice to know you have the best you could afford as well, especially when you’re after as many frames you can get

CPUs back then were only advancing by a few % every generation but now we are seeing 15-20% gains year on year if not more with the core counts increasing also.

Could you imagen buying a pentium 4 1.5ghz in 2001 for $800 and trying to run modern games on that 10 years later?

 

[sityeuropa]

CPUs back then were only advancing by a few % every generation but now we are seeing 15-20% gains year on year if not more with the core counts increasing also.

Could you imagen buying a pentium 4 1.5ghz in 2001 for $800 and trying to run modern games on that 10 years later?

a 17% upgrade wouldn't be enough change for me.

I went from a 1700 to a 3900x for £290. I got more than double the multi core performance. For me I would need to see more than a 50% change I think.

I got £100 for my 1700.

 

[BS Dave]

CPUs back then were only advancing by a few % every generation but now we are seeing 15-20% gains year on year if not more with the core counts increasing also.

Could you imagen buying a pentium 4 1.5ghz in 2001 for $800 and trying to run modern games on that 10 years later?

There’s no one size fits all rule. Whilst the 3600x might be great most of the time, if there’s 1 game that uses 8 cores fully and I play it a lot I’m gonna get the 3700x or 3800x.

 

[Joxeon]

There’s no one size fits all rule. Whilst the 3600x might be great most of the time, if there’s 1 game that uses 8 cores fully and I play it a lot I’m gonna get the 3700x or 3800x.

I don't think there are any games where your fps tanks on 6/12cores vs 8/16 currently even on games that can take advantage of 12 cores. If you want to keep the CPU for 3 year+ though then 8 core will be the better option even though it will most likely get beaten by a newer 6 core CPU in 3 years time