My i7 2600K build is still good 10 years on - What current CPU has best VFM over the next 10 years?

[chaparral]

Ouch if new at the time that would have been painful and expensive
I always erred on the cautious side with
Cpu voltage even though custom
Watercooled
Luckily my 2600k was a really good sample so didn't have to worry about it

If i remember right these 2600k's where being water cooled at the time

 

[Mcnumpty2323]

If i remember right these 2600k's where being water cooled at the time

Were you whacking 1.4v + through them lol

 

[ianh]

However, while everything still works fine right now, I know that at some point my poor CPU/MoBo or RAM will eventually fail and I'll need to swap to a whole new setup

Keep it and invest in a new gpu when the latest ones come out.

Thats my plan so far as the 2600K still works fine, so it's more of a "when this eventually breaks" question.

If it ain't broke don't fix it? You could literally wait for the latest GPU's and upgrade that... and see how it all works out.

Thanks for the reply but again, as per the OP, this is a "I'm not changing anything yet but whats best when it does break" question.

 

[chaparral]

Were you whacking 1.4v + through them lol

I can't remember now as it was many years ago

 

[ianh]

So looking at the replies, the main CPU's are the 3600x, 3700x and 3900x - I'm quite surprised that Intel has been completely left out of the recommendations but then seeing that their 10th Gen release line up looks a little Meh then it's no surprise I guess.

With the AM4 socket hitting it's EoL with Zen3's release and requiring new MoBo's and Intel 10th Gen needing a new MoBo as well, I'm hoping my PC lasts long enough to avoid this "your new MoBo may only support 1 generation of CPU" issue.

 

[LabR@t]

Q9550 was a beast of a CPU.

 

[McGraw]

So looking at the replies, the main CPU's are the 3600x, 3700x and 3900x - I'm quite surprised that Intel has been completely left out of the recommendations but then seeing that their 10th Gen release line up looks a little Meh then it's no surprise I guess.

With the AM4 socket hitting it's EoL with Zen3's release and requiring new MoBo's and Intel 10th Gen needing a new MoBo as well, I'm hoping my PC lasts long enough to avoid this "your new MoBo may only support 1 generation of CPU" issue.

I wouldn’t worry too much. Buy the right cpu at the time and you’ll nearly always be looking at a full platform replacement.

I would probably have dropped in a 9700k into my z97 board if it supported it but that was never going to happen.

 

[Poneros]

Look at Doom Eternal. That's the pinnacle of cpu-optimised high fps gaming. That's the benchmark for the next 10 years. So if we look at that we can see that there's not much gain in going past 8c/16t. There's also still a significant advantage for intel but who knows if ringbus will keep its advantage over ryzen's big fat cache in other games. Make no mistake tho, you won't get games make better use of more cores than Doom E, if you look into the details you'll understand. People who think more cores than 8 will magically see better use are not paying attention to reality at all. This is not a trivial problem in the slightest & even hitting those 8c right will be difficult.

Talking vfm I'd say go ryzen. Price is unbeatable and fps difference isn't important unless you plan to stay at 1080p and rock a 240hz or faster monitor. More importantly in the long run having pcie 4.0 will be very important for ssds & gpus. Plus with ray tracing getting a bigger push you'll still be heavily gpu bound.

My vote is 3700x today.

 

[Troezar]

Look at Doom Eternal. That's the pinnacle of cpu-optimised high fps gaming. That's the benchmark for the next 10 years. So if we look at that we can see that there's not much gain in going past 8c/16t. There's also still a significant advantage for intel but who knows if ringbus will keep its advantage over ryzen's big fat cache in other games. Make no mistake tho, you won't get games make better use of more cores than Doom E, if you look into the details you'll understand. People who think more cores than 8 will magically see better use are not paying attention to reality at all. This is not a trivial problem in the slightest & even hitting those 8c right will be difficult.

Talking vfm I'd say go ryzen. Price is unbeatable and fps difference isn't important unless you plan to stay at 1080p and rock a 240hz or faster monitor. More importantly in the long run having pcie 4.0 will be very important for ssds & gpus. Plus with ray tracing getting a bigger push you'll still be heavily gpu bound.

My vote is 3700x today.

That pretty much sums up my purchasing decision. Still fancy going 16C at some point but you make a good argument for why it's not going to be worth it unless you really know you can utilise those extra cores now.

 

[bakes0310]

Good post Ponero. Would you say then a 3900x-3950x would be a waste for a pure gaming build that wanted to last as long as possible with just the odd gpu upgrade. Theres people still on 2500k (overclocked) with good gpus and gaming at pretty reasonable settings. I would like to be in that position with my cpu and buy whatever the top 4000 ryzen cpu is for that reason.

 

[r22snapper]

It's not exactly the same but I went for the Q6600 when the correct gaming choice was a dual core. It lasted a lot longer than it would if I'd bought a dual core at the time. The consoles will be 8 core shortly so 8 core would be a sensible choice for gaming. At less than £400 I thought the extra for the 12 core was worth paying and I expect to get longer out of it. Of course nothing is guaranteed and I might be wrong but for an extra £120 or so over the 5 years I expect the board and processor to last it made sense for me.

 

[ianh]

Good post Ponero. Would you say then a 3900x-3950x would be a waste for a pure gaming build that wanted to last as long as possible with just the odd gpu upgrade. Theres people still on 2500k (overclocked) with good gpus and gaming at pretty reasonable settings. I would like to be in that position with my cpu and buy whatever the top 4000 ryzen cpu is for that reason.

I would put that ability down to the lack CPU Core increase progress for a 5 year section of 2012-2017 rather than 2500k/2600k being future-proofed when created.

My reasoning is this - We had at least 5 years (2012 to 2017) of continuous 4C/8T stagnation from Intel for their top end desktop CPU's which massively limited games/software dev's who simply decided, why waste time/money optimising for more cores when we've had 5 years of the same 4C/8T. It finally took the PS4/Xbox One releases in 2015 with their 8C/8T APU's to start getting games developers to use more cores for games (although PC game dev's were still hamstrung) and it's only now that they'll start to increase multi-core development as both desktop CPU's and PS5/XBox X are hitting 8C/16T as the mainstream, but we lost 5-ish years of dev optimisations due to Intel.

It's really that Intel deliberate stagnation bloody annoys me, because after AMD launched Ryzen we "suddenly" get Intel's top end desktop CPU's going from 4C/8T to 10C/20T within just 3 years (7700k in 2017 to 10900k in 2020) showing that Intel had deliberately stopped CPU core growth in the mid 2010's rather than hitting any tech limit.

Taking that further (and into the realms of guesswork) if Intel hadn't deliberately stopped core progression then we should have seen 6C/12T by 2013, then 8C/16T by 2015 and 10C/20T by 2016 then who knows how soon we would have seen Intel make 12C/24T (or even 16C/32T) for 2020 to compete with Ryzen 3950x, I mean if that had even existed as I think Ryzen would have flopped if Intel were kicking out 10C/20T CPU's in 2016 and just imagine what game/software multi-core optimisations would be like now if game devs had those 10C/20T CPU's as mainstream back in 2016 (again, all guesswork)!

 

[Poneros]

That pretty much sums up my purchasing decision. Still fancy going 16C at some point but you make a good argument for why it's not going to be worth it unless you really know you can utilise those extra cores now.

16c is pretty much pointless outside of work programs. But I mostly wrote with VFM gaming in mind. Remember, even if some games might end up benefiting from >8c the question is - how long & what will prices look like then? And also, what are the other advantages of newer CPUs comparatively (not to mention higher cooling & mobo reqs etc)? Because buying a 3950x is easily >2x the cost of a 3700x so it's also gonna be 3700x for Y amount of time + what the price difference can buy you afterwards & how will used market look like (Eg for 4000 series etc). So there's a lot of thinking that goes into it that I don't make explicit just because I get a headache trying to piece it all together but suffices to say, 3700x is a smart and simple buy.

Good post Ponero. Would you say then a 3900x-3950x would be a waste for a pure gaming build that wanted to last as long as possible with just the odd gpu upgrade. Theres people still on 2500k (overclocked) with good gpus and gaming at pretty reasonable settings. I would like to be in that position with my cpu and buy whatever the top 4000 ryzen cpu is for that reason.

Short answer: Yes, but it's complicated. And I say that because it's a question of expectations as well. How much you push resolution, how much you care about certain effects more than others (eg LOD streaming bothers me immensely & that's a particularly CPU intensive setting to max usually), how high a refresh rate you target, how sensitive you are to frametime variance, what games you play and on and on it goes.

I think in the case of 2500k/2600k owners it's mostly been a general 60hz target and with some mid-tier upgrades in terms of GPU from time to time, so that's why it worked well, and they got used to the shakier frametimes too. Plus with console CPUs being so weak we only ever got limited CPU reqs being pushed & DX12 and Vulkan still are just getting a proper push now after all these years. So it's a big combination of factors to their longevity.

Imo if you wanted to get most bang 4 buck you'd get a 3700x today and a decent mobo, then upgrade to a 4000 series with higher core count years later when (if) those could be put to better use and they'd be much cheaper. But even then it's only in case you wanted to push max FPS as hard as possible, in which case you'd have to do a much more target investigation on the games in particular and probably would go Intel, and only if it's >144hz because even Ryzen 2000s can usually get to the 140s in most games. And for AAA it's usually 99% of the time a GPU bottleneck (or a software bottleneck) way before it's CPU, so even getting to the point where the CPU is a problem is very difficult.

Basically, there's too many variables needed to really make something above a 3700x shine. Unless there's a particular scenario you have in mind & know for sure what you need, then you're not really gonna get more from a 3900/3950x than a 3700x for gaming. In the situation today, I would ALWAYS buy a 3700x and then pocket the money for a future upgrade rather than spend in on a better CPU. Hell, I'd even do that with a 3600 but that requires even more disclaimers and scenarios, so I'll stick to 3700x for simplicity.

And I should point out, I wrote all above thinking you'd have the best GPU available, so you'd only be GPU bound in terms of 'there's no better GPU available & the game can take more'. So unless you buy a 2080 ti every time a new one comes out, then it's even LESS a concern to go with a bigger CPU.

 

[bakes0310]

Thanks panoros, I plan on staying with the 34401440@60hz and with my typical budget the highest end cards I would go for is the 2080 series, but obviously won't get it and wait for the 3080, as long as it's under a £1000.
I'm also waiting on the last series of Ryzen CPU's so I'm probably better off getting the 4700x if it's the same core count as 3700x. Would you say that is still correct panoros?

 

[Troezar]

Thanks panoros, I plan on staying with the 34401440@60hz and with my typical budget the highest end cards I would go for is the 2080 series, but obviously won't get it and wait for the 3080, as long as it's under a £1000.
I'm also waiting on the last series of Ryzen CPU's so I'm probably better off getting the 4700x if it's the same core count as 3700x. Would you say that is still correct panoros?

Sounds like a good a good plan to me. I'd expect a 4700X would be good for at least 3 generations of GPU.

 

[Poneros]

Thanks panoros, I plan on staying with the 34401440@60hz and with my typical budget the highest end cards I would go for is the 2080 series, but obviously won't get it and wait for the 3080, as long as it's under a £1000.
I'm also waiting on the last series of Ryzen CPU's so I'm probably better off getting the 4700x if it's the same core count as 3700x. Would you say that is still correct panoros?

It depends on the price and what performance turns out to be. Though for 60hz I can confidently say it will make 0 difference in games during the CPU's lifespan.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

We should have the B550 launch tomorrow and hopefully some more information about Zen3 too?? If Zen3 is later this year,it would be worth waiting for. There is a move to an 8 core CCX,which should help with latency and gaming by extension:
https://www.techspot.com/images2/news/bigimage/2019/12/2019-12-28-image-5.jpg

I expect the older games or those based on older engines should get the bigger boost in theory.

 

[C64]

depending what the 3300x price ends up at I might jump from a 2500k
3300x board and 16gb ram for under £250-£300 is tempting

 

[Vertigo]

Writing this on my 2600K which I've owned since new, so over 9 years old. I even paid the price for early adoption and got hit with the infamous SATA bug and had to RMA the mobo for a B3.

Blew that mobo up earlier this year so cannibalised an H67 out of another machine so I can't even overclock the 2600K any more

All being replaced soon, it's served me well.

 

[ianh]

Looking into the recommendations given here a little further (thanks for the replies) so far the 3700x really does look to be the best VFM currently, and seeing the results of the 3300X's "1 CCX" design in reviews released last night makes me think whatever Zen 3 brings will be yet another big step, if my 2600k lasts that long.

I also looked at Intel's and the 10700k looked interesting as a 9900k "refresh" but for far less cash (still £400-ish?) but with it's large increase in power requirements I'd be worried about how hot it runs even with "die thinning". However there aren't any reviews out yet so I'll wait and see how they turn out.

It's been an eye opener to catch up on the recent advances, I think the last time I looked seriously at an upgrade was around 2014-ish and there wasn't any point at all so I stopped keeping up with the CPU side of Tech and only bothered with GPU and the past 3-4 years have been a CPU game-changer which I'd completely missed.