8 core vs 12 core

[adrichardson81]

Hi everyone

I've decided to give my rig a mid-life upgrade and switch my 3700x for either a 5800x or 5900x. My 3700x is 1st gen silicon and a bit of a dog - it took an undervolt and a lot of PBO tuning just to hit 4.3GHz single core and it won't post if I go over 3200 on the ram.

My main uses are photo editing (42mp raws in DXO PL, and tiffs in Photoshop and Alien Skin/Nik collection) and gaming (targeting 4K 60fps).

Question is am I better off with 8 cores and a single ccx for better latency or upgrading to 12 cores? I know the next gen consoles are 8 core, but they are also more resource light so I'm wondering if having 4 cores free for Windows to faff around with in the background is preferable.

Any thoughts?

 

[adrichardson81]

Thanks everyone! I use dxo for the heavy lifting on my photo editing, so it looks like that would be an argument in favour of more threads.

Likewise Nik doesn't seem overly impressed with the gpu upgraded, so I'm assuming it's cpu bound too.

 

[adrichardson81]

There's a single thread topic here, (where humbug wrongly bragged his Ryzen 3600 was faster than my 9700k in DXO - it was 35% slower) in it you will see the comparisons I did using DXO.
If you are doing single photos at a time then DXO will only use a max of 8 threads. This is why my 8/8 clocked 9700k is faster in DXO then my very well tuned 12/24 3900X.
For the 3900X to be faster I need to batch export at least 2 photos.

I use NikTools and Photoshop but these generally don't take advantage of multi-core and rely more on single thread speed.

I will be testing out both the 5800x and 5900x to see which one is better overall in our scenarios but I would probably opt for the 5900x if making a pre-review decision.

I do tend to batch process, so I'm leaning more towards 12c. I know it's only 100MHz, but the higher boosts won't hurt either.

 

[adrichardson81]

As others have mentioned it doesn't make much point switching from a 3700X to another 8 core unless you really are aiming for max frames at say 1080p (maybe 1440p). Personally I would snap up a 5900X and sell the 3700X whilst it still holds a good value. hopefully you wont have to spend much over £300 for a tasty 12 core chip. The ability to have 4 spare cores whilst gaming would be very beneficial for various other software in the background may not be your use case now but who knows how it will evolve over the next 2 - 3years. Certainly where I will be heading anyway.

Thanks! Given that gaming is going to be 8 cores for the foreseeable and 4k gaming will be cpu bottlenecked anyway, I'm likely to get better mileage out of a 5900x for my photo editing workflow.

I did think about holding off for ddr5 and pcie 5.0, but I can't see either tech being groundbreaking in the 1st iteration.

 

[adrichardson81]

Thats exactly my feeling, I will be getting a 5900X to replace my 3700X and then move on when DDR5 matures. either way a good time to be into PC's given the stagnation over the last 10 years

Yeah since going 4k (too soon, just like I did with 1440p!) it's the first time I've felt it really flies.

 

[adrichardson81]

I'd go 5900X you'll be keeping the CPU for 5 years in all likelihood and 12 cores are bound to get used more in future. For the price difference I don't see the point in compromising especially as productivity tasks
will be so much faster on 12 cores.

Yeah 4-5 years would be nice. Nvidia has more than had their early adopter tax out of me for going 4k, so I'll probably limit myself to gpu upgrades when there's a compelling reason.