Maybe Sandybridge E isn't cutting it anymore

edgedemon

edgedemon

edgedemon

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So, I have made up my mind, ideally last 2 weeks of July, Im building a PC if I can (I have 2 weeks leave then)
My existing PC has served me well (Sandybridge E 3930K, 32G RAM, dual R290's (in x-fire) SATA SSD's and HDD's, but it is struggling now and I kept putting off an upgrade.

I guess the big question for me today (after seeing the price drop for the 7950X) is do I wait for AM5 refresh, or just go current AM5 and take advantage of the price drops as current AM5 is still a big upgrade I presume
I'm sure I saw someone on here say the B850 boards weren't as good as the B650, I remember v19 vs v21, I think some detail of the chipset, but I can't exactly remember. That also made me think current AM5

My main usage will be heavy photo and video editing with some gaming, mainly games that don't play well on the switch or steam deck, AOE4, Age of Mythology retold when it is released, CIV series, you get the picture.
After running a full tower case for all this time I need to reclaim space so Im going ITX with as much power as I can, this is what I was sort of looking at back in Dec 23 when I first started looking at this for costing (In todays prices.)


AMD Ryzen 9 5950X Sixteen Core 4.9GHz (Socket AM4) Processor - Retail £359.99
Asus ROG Strix B650E-I Gaming WIFI (Socket AM5) DDR5 Mini ITX Motherboard £219.95 - could go to X670E for USB4
G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo EXPO 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5 PC5-48000C30 6000MHz Dual Channel Kit - B £239.98
Zotac GeForce RTX 4080 Super Trinity Black 16Gb Graphics Card £998.99 (this does fit in the case)
Crucial T705 4TB NVMe PCIe Gen5 M.2 Solid State Drive £610.99 (could swap for Gen 4 to save cash)
Samsung 990 Pro 4TB M.2 2280 PCI-e 4.0 x4 NVMe Solid State Drive with Heatsink £350.00 - these go on the back of the mobo - do I need to worry about cooling?
Lian Li Galahad II Trinity SL-INF AIO 240mm ARGB CPU Water Cooler - Black £144.94 Not into RGB, will be turning it off, but this gets good reviews

Add to that Dan A4-H20 + 850W SFX PSU and Im looking at £3593.45 originally at Dec 23 prices!

Due to the case size, it seemed necessary for the 8TB of storage as I didn't want to have to rebuild or redo the cable management to add another 4TB in 6-8 months time. 8TB is 60% less than I have now.
32GB of RAM is probably fine, but Ive been running 32GB for years, if Im spending this much I want to feel like it is an upgrade
Could save cash on GFX, but having worked on projects using an Nvidia card elsewhere, the difference is night and day for GPU acceleration and CUDA of course. Maybe a 4070? Or have AMD improved that much?

It is going to be hard as OCUK have a lot of pre order stuff at the mo, ideally around the £2500 mark, though happy to go to 3K if needed.
 
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Either build will wipe the floor with a Soc 2011 system, but for me the AM4 system would have to offer a very strong value proposition over AM5.
 
honestly if i was dropping £2.5-3k, i would want the best
that would mean waiting a few more months to see what ryzen 9000 brings and a 4090
if you can't wait that long, then a 4090 with a 7950x3d (or 14700k/14900k depending on the programs you use for photo/video editing)
 
edgedemon said:
Which is what we would expect? AM4 should drop in price to clear and AM5 will have an early adoption premium?
Click to expand...
AM5 has already been out for a couple of years. if you mean ryzen 9000 and the associated 800 series motherboards then yes
i wouldn't expect AM4 to drop that much more in price, especially their halo chips (5950x and 5800x3d) as these chips are the end-game as far as AM4 is concerned so will hold their value more than the mid/low-tier chips
 
The 5900XT is coming this month. That chip might be a bargain. You can get some serious good deals on prebuilt Threadripper system from the big manufacturers currently.
 
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definitely vote for AM5 over AM4 for a new build
7900X (I personally don't like 12core, but its available for sameish price) is faster than 5950X in any scenario

For the coming stuff, I would wait a month for Zen5 whether its 9950X or lower. A bit faster and a bit more power efficient (good for ITX) than currently available Zen 4
 
edgedemon said:
I guess the big question for me today (after seeing the price drop for the 7950X) is do I wait for AM5, or just go AM4 and take advantage of the price drops as AM4 is still a big upgrade I presume
I'm sure I saw someone on here say the B850 boards weren't as good as the B650, I remember v19 vs v21, I think some detail of the chipset, but I can't exactly remember. That also made me think AM4
Click to expand...
For fully multithreaded stuff the 5900X and 5950X are still pretty good, but AM4 will always be limited to DDR4 (128GB max capacity versus 192/256 with DDR5) and in single thread apps those CPUs are slower than AM5 CPUs by a fair margin which is going to impact on your general productivity and PC responsiveness.

In fully multithreaded, the 12 core 5900X is roughly equivalent to the 8 core 7700 and the 16 core 5950X is roughly equivalent to the 12 core 7900.

(CPU: single, multi)
Ryzen 7 7700: 4063, 34590
Ryzen 9 7900: 4153, 48879
Ryzen 9 7950X: 4285, 62875
Ryzen 9 5900: 3449, 34416
Ryzen 9 5950X: 3469, 45657

AMD Ryzen 7 7700 vs Ryzen 9 7900 vs Ryzen 9 7950X vs Ryzen 9 5900 vs Ryzen 9 5950X [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

www.cpubenchmark.net

If I was buying a new workstation, I'd want a mix of the best single and multi thread performance, with the highest memory capacity and that's no longer AM4.

The 7900 non-X is my prsonal favourite, but will be interested in Epyc 4004 if they ever appear in DIY:
www.youtube.com

Crazy Good Efficiency: AMD Ryzen 9 7900 CPU Benchmarks & Thermals

Sponsor: Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut thermal paste (on Amazon - https://geni.us/JMVNtOE ) & Hydronaut for water cooling (Amazon - https://geni.us/Fsray )This re...
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com

In terms of: X3D versus X/non-X, the loss in gaming performance can be significant, but from the kind of games you play you don't seem like a high FPS gamer.

edgedemon said:
Crucial T705 4TB NVMe PCIe Gen5 M.2 Solid State Drive £610.99 (could swap for Gen 4 to save cash)
Samsung 990 Pro 4TB M.2 2280 PCI-e 4.0 x4 NVMe Solid State Drive with Heatsink £350.00 - these go on the back of the mobo - do I need to worry about cooling?
Click to expand...
PCIE5 SSD: I don't think the benefit justifies the cost unless you're transferring large volumes regularly between drives or loading giant projects.

Cooling: it depends on your usage, most drives you have to push them pretty hard to get significant throttling, but if you're hammering the drive all the time then that could be a problem.

edgedemon said:
Could save cash on GFX, but having worked on projects using an Nvidia card elsewhere, the difference is night and day for GPU acceleration and CUDA of course. Maybe a 4070? Or have AMD improved that much?
Click to expand...
From what I've seen on channels that cover productivity like Tech notice, AMD (RDNA3) are fine for 2D work and video editing, but if you're using CUDA and doing 3D work then they're still behind (same goes for AI). If you were going to drop down, I'd only drop to a 4070 Ti Super (4070 has only 1 NVENC and you'd lose 4GB of VRAM). I wouldn't buy RDNA3 unless you check all the benchmarks for apps that you use regularly, but be aware driver updates can change performance dramatically in apps that are previously poorly supported and unoptimised. I think it is extremely unlikely your workload will bottleneck on the storage more often than the GPU, so keeping a PCIE5 drive and saving on the GPU seems ill-advised.
 
Tetras said:
For fully multithreaded stuff the 5900X and 5950X are still pretty good, but AM4 will always be limited to DDR4 (128GB max capacity versus 192/256 with DDR5) and in single thread apps those CPUs are slower than AM5 CPUs by a fair margin which is going to impact on your general productivity and PC responsiveness.

In fully multithreaded, the 12 core 5900X is roughly equivalent to the 8 core 7700 and the 16 core 5950X is roughly equivalent to the 12 core 7900.

(CPU: single, multi)
Ryzen 7 7700: 4063, 34590
Ryzen 9 7900: 4153, 48879
Ryzen 9 7950X: 4285, 62875
Ryzen 9 5900: 3449, 34416
Ryzen 9 5950X: 3469, 45657

AMD Ryzen 7 7700 vs Ryzen 9 7900 vs Ryzen 9 7950X vs Ryzen 9 5900 vs Ryzen 9 5950X [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

www.cpubenchmark.net

If I was buying a new workstation, I'd want a mix of the best single and multi thread performance, with the highest memory capacity and that's no longer AM4.

The 7900 non-X is my prsonal favourite, but will be interested in Epyc 4004 if they ever appear in DIY:
www.youtube.com

Crazy Good Efficiency: AMD Ryzen 9 7900 CPU Benchmarks & Thermals

Sponsor: Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut thermal paste (on Amazon - https://geni.us/JMVNtOE ) & Hydronaut for water cooling (Amazon - https://geni.us/Fsray )This re...
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com

In terms of: X3D versus X/non-X, the loss in gaming performance can be significant, but from the kind of games you play you don't seem like a high FPS gamer.


PCIE5 SSD: I don't think the benefit justifies the cost unless you're transferring large volumes regularly between drives or loading giant projects.

Cooling: it depends on your usage, most drives you have to push them pretty hard to get significant throttling, but if you're hammering the drive all the time then that could be a problem.


From what I've seen on channels that cover productivity like Tech notice, AMD (RDNA3) are fine for 2D work and video editing, but if you're using CUDA and doing 3D work then they're still behind (same goes for AI). If you were going to drop down, I'd only drop to a 4070 Ti Super (4070 has only 1 NVENC and you'd lose 4GB of VRAM). I wouldn't buy RDNA3 unless you check all the benchmarks for apps that you use regularly, but be aware driver updates can change performance dramatically in apps that are previously poorly supported and unoptimised. I think it is extremely unlikely your workload will bottleneck on the storage more often than the GPU, so keeping a PCIE5 drive and saving on the GPU seems ill-advised.
Click to expand...
Thank you, will go through this in detail once I have left work
 
Tetras said:
For fully multithreaded stuff the 5900X and 5950X are still pretty good, but AM4 will always be limited to DDR4 (128GB max capacity versus 192/256 with DDR5) and in single thread apps those CPUs are slower than AM5 CPUs by a fair margin which is going to impact on your general productivity and PC responsiveness.

In fully multithreaded, the 12 core 5900X is roughly equivalent to the 8 core 7700 and the 16 core 5950X is roughly equivalent to the 12 core 7900.

(CPU: single, multi)
Ryzen 7 7700: 4063, 34590
Ryzen 9 7900: 4153, 48879
Ryzen 9 7950X: 4285, 62875
Ryzen 9 5900: 3449, 34416
Ryzen 9 5950X: 3469, 45657

AMD Ryzen 7 7700 vs Ryzen 9 7900 vs Ryzen 9 7950X vs Ryzen 9 5900 vs Ryzen 9 5950X [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

www.cpubenchmark.net

If I was buying a new workstation, I'd want a mix of the best single and multi thread performance, with the highest memory capacity and that's no longer AM4.

The 7900 non-X is my prsonal favourite, but will be interested in Epyc 4004 if they ever appear in DIY:
www.youtube.com

Crazy Good Efficiency: AMD Ryzen 9 7900 CPU Benchmarks & Thermals

Sponsor: Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut thermal paste (on Amazon - https://geni.us/JMVNtOE ) & Hydronaut for water cooling (Amazon - https://geni.us/Fsray )This re...
www.youtube.com www.youtube.com

In terms of: X3D versus X/non-X, the loss in gaming performance can be significant, but from the kind of games you play you don't seem like a high FPS gamer.


PCIE5 SSD: I don't think the benefit justifies the cost unless you're transferring large volumes regularly between drives or loading giant projects.

Cooling: it depends on your usage, most drives you have to push them pretty hard to get significant throttling, but if you're hammering the drive all the time then that could be a problem.


From what I've seen on channels that cover productivity like Tech notice, AMD (RDNA3) are fine for 2D work and video editing, but if you're using CUDA and doing 3D work then they're still behind (same goes for AI). If you were going to drop down, I'd only drop to a 4070 Ti Super (4070 has only 1 NVENC and you'd lose 4GB of VRAM). I wouldn't buy RDNA3 unless you check all the benchmarks for apps that you use regularly, but be aware driver updates can change performance dramatically in apps that are previously poorly supported and unoptimised. I think it is extremely unlikely your workload will bottleneck on the storage more often than the GPU, so keeping a PCIE5 drive and saving on the GPU seems ill-advised.
Click to expand...

Some pretty questionable reasoning.
 
So something like this (OCUK don't have everything in stock) but this gives me something to look at and compare to. Comes in at £2788.22



AMD Ryzen 9 7950X Sixteen Core 5.70GHz (Socket AM5) Processor
£529.99

Asus ROG Strix B650E-I Gaming WIFI DDR5 Mini ITX Motherboard
£219.95

G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo EXPO 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5 PC5-48000C30 6000MHz Dual Channel Kit - B
£239.99

Zotac GeForce RTX 4080 Super Trinity Black 16Gb Graphics Card
£998.99

Samsung 990 Pro 4TB M.2 2280 PCI-e 4.0 x4 NVMe Solid State Drive with Heatsink
£349.99

Samsung 990 Pro 4TB M.2 2280 PCI-e 4.0 x4 NVMe Solid State Drive with Heatsink
£349.99

Dan Cases A4-H2O A4 Mini-ITX Case - Silver
£159.95

Lian Li GALAHAD AIO SL 240mm High Performance RGB CPU Water Cooler - Black
£144.95


Lian Li SP850 SFX Modular 80 Plus Gold Power Supply


£144.95
 
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