Best value CPU for single core performance?

[mikehhhhhhh]

I've been on a bit of a trend in my computer buying habits, buying the mid-range overclockable powerhouse throughout the years; Q6600, 2500k and the latest being 4690k.

At six years old, it feels like the 4690k is holding things back, While playing iRacing in VR, past places like the puts, I'm getting frame drops and stuttering which I understand is a CPU limited issue. Graphics card is a founders edition 1080.

iRacing in particular only uses two cores, so single core performance is an important factor.

So, what's the next Q6600, 2500k, 4690k? I'd like to keep the budget at around £500-600 for CPU, Mobo and RAM, but will stretch if there's something that is particularly good value and likely to last me a good deal longer.

From looking around, that budget seems to get me a 9600k or maybe even a 9700k, is that the best choice?

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

I've been searching around. this morning and managed to put a 3600, mobo and 16gb of ram together for £370.

This seems like incredible value with the option to go for a better Zen 2 CPU in the future as they pop up cheap on eBay.

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

Wait another month for the new Intel CPUs to release,and for AMD to release the B550 motherboards. Don't buy a B450 motherboard,as AMD said there is no Zen3 compatibility.

I've been pondering this.

My thoughts were that it didn't matter if a B450 didn't support newer chips, because they are cheap right now (I've found deals for 3600 and B450 ROG Strix for £289) and if I upgrade in the future, it'll likely be to a used Zen2 chip.

But I guess an x570 would let me go for a higher end Zen2 chip.

Probably worth spending a little more an a cheaper x570 board then.

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

It does as everyone will think the same,and it might mean they hold their value,just like with Intel. You will also get PCI-E 4.0 with B550 too.

Looks you got in there before the edit

It seems like a cheap X570 may be a good half-way house for the impatient, then.

Thanks for your help!

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

So here's a curve ball, I placed my order and then thought about the time I disabled my overclock to troubleshoot a problem.

So I went and just enabled the auto-overclock (~4.5GHz) and ran Geekbench 5.

Single threaded score of 1100, compared to 1200 of the 3600. Now I'm worried that this isn't going to be the upgrade I thought it would be. I know benchmarks are artificial, but that doesn't seem very far away for CPUs 6 years apart.

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

You've bought the exact same CPU's as myself, how strange lol Q6600 - 2500k - 4690k.

I was/am in the same position as you, 4690k on 90% load on most games at 144hz. Most of the time it is fine but that's if I have nothing else open in the background.

4690k overclocked to 4.2 at the moment, haven't tried going higher. What are your overclock settings for 4.5?

I was about to get the 3600 or 3700x but held back and I am glad I did now as I think it will be worthwhile waiting for the 4000 series and grabbing a 4700x.

In the back of my mind I always think going from 4 cores to 6 cores in this day and age (especially when consoles going to get 8/16) isn't the smart move. Minimum would need to be 8 cores, ideally 12 but I doubt AMD will release a 12 core for around £300.

I think my rationale is I need a quick fix, hopefully the extra cores and slight single core bump of the 3600 (along with DDR4) offers that now.

But the 3600 is cheap enough that I would have no issue upgrading it and putting it on eBay for 50% of it's price in a years time.

As for overclock settings, I have no idea, when my previous ones had gone, I clicked the ASUS AI Tuner wizard and it did it all for me. I had issues getting 4.6GHz stable before, so happy with an automatic 4.6GHz.

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

Go for X570 then If you can stretch. It'll give you a greater upgrade path with the 4000 series out some point towards the end of the year. Pci-e 4 is a bonus too.

I did in the end, it was about another £40 to jump from a mid-range B450 (Asus Strix) to a lower end X570 (Asrock Gaming 4). I was aprehensive initially, but it seemed worth it to be able to just drop in a Zen 3 chip when they arrive.

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

Might be worth asking someone in the know or double checking bios rom sizes. Ideally you want a 32MB bios rom size.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/c1dnu3/x570x470x370b450b350a320_am4socket_motherboards/

You're not the first to say this, why do I need to care about the bios size?

As far as I can see, AMD have said x570 will support Zen 3 without any caveats?

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

Yeah, it's the one you linked, so looks like we're all good.

I was a bit nervous about straying from one of the more traditionally popular brands, but it looks like the ASRock really is the best of the budget bunch.

Thank you for the heads up.

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

It turned up an hour or so ago, I put it together and to my amazement, my existing windows install booted up no problem.

I played with RAM timings and enabled PBO.

Geekbench single core is ~120 higher than the 4690k but multicore is almost double.

I'm a little bit disappointed the single core jump wasn't bigger, but at least I'll be able to upgrade to a 4xxx chip fairly cheaply when they arrive.

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

Why would you be disappointed? I thought you knew that it wouldn't be much improvement in single threaded performance. Let's hope those extra cores smooth out those drops and stutters you get playing IRacing in VR; I'll be interested to know how you get on.

I think it's disappointment, even though it was expected. I was tempted to return it and re-order a 9600k but ultimately decided that in the long term, having Zen3 as an upgrade path may be the better option.

Now activate CPPC on the bios

What does that do?

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

Have a look here. Look at the article and graphs

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/1usmus-custom-power-plan-for-ryzen-3000-zen-2-processors/

Thanks, his power plan seemed to result in lower scores than the AMD high performance power plan, but it seems to have bumped up single core by a good 30 points consistently;

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2177281

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

I'm yet to test the reason why I actually upgraded. Need to jump in a race in iRacing to test that out, I shall do it at some point over the weekend.

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

Just out of curisoity, what single / multi core numbers are you getting? , I'm asking as I'm pondering a new build to replace my 4790K but am struggling to see the value in replacing my board, CPU & RAM when tbh it still rocks pretty much everything I throw at it,especially O/C around 4.7 / 4.8 that said whilst reading this thread I've found myself running Geekbench and am now curious as to the numbers your getting.

I got 1144 Single and 4004 multi.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2179869

Almost regardless of the numbers though, running Geekbench said it should take 2 - 20 minutes to complete, mine finished in 2:21 which kind of tells me its quick enough for most needs regardless of the scores!

Impressive numbers.

I can’t get over 4.6 on my 4690k, so I had 1100 single and 3800 multi.

I get 1250 single, 7000 multi on the new setup.

So definitely not worth it on single core benchmark figures alone, but I suspect the improvement will be greater than figures suggest.

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

Please report back when you do. Single threaded benchmarks can distort what actually happens in many games. They tend to distort them in favour of Ryzen from my experience so it will be interesting to see what yours is.

Distort in favour of Ryzen, really? To clarify, you're saying benchmarks make the Ryzen look better at single threaded workloads than it really is?

I really hope not

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

So glad I spent £50 on an X570 now AMD has announced support is coming to 400 series boards after all.

 

[mikehhhhhhh]

It will be interesting to see how the single CCX Ryzen 8 core chips perform.

that’s an interesting prospect.

has any such thing been confirmed?