3900x to 5900x for X4

[BigBANGtheory]

Add to this, a 3080Ti Founders edition can readily be had at RRP at the moment. However, with the 4000 series supposedly just around the corner and the fact that my 1070 is still doing OK (with more and more settings turned down though) I can wait without too much pain.

What you have to appreciate is the scale at which Nvidia and board partners are ripping off consumers.

3080, 3080 (12GB), 3080Ti, 3090, 3090Ti all use variants of the 102 die BUT only one of them has an MSRP of £650.

I appreciate that GPU shortages have caused all manner of price inflation issues and that gamers wanting or needing these parts had to make some unpalatable choices, just remember these companies use all the tricks in the trade to make their high margin products look normal value. There is no good reason right now a 3080Ti shouldn't or couldn't be well under £800, but instead its closer to £1200 for what 10% performance gains or better yet why not pay £1800 for a 3090 for a further 5%

Nvidia right now are going to do everything in their power to keep these prices as high as possible even if it means sacrificing sales for one reason only... They want to overcharge for the 4000 series coming in Q3 and to make matters worse AMD use Nvidia pricing to benchmark their own products so in effect you get choice but zero competition atm not until AMD decides it wants market share

Rant aside, just be aware and don't be persuaded by the marketing.

[Scoob]

Oh I'm 100% with you there, prices are nuts and they've reset the bar to milk customers that are willing to pay the inflated prices. Throughout this, I've refused to pay the rip off prices, even though I could do so with little pain. NV aren't going to be selling any 3080's for RRP when they can sell what's essentially the same die (the 102) for £1,050 in the form of a 3080Ti. The Ti this time isn't the same as the 1080Ti was to the 1080, it's not that much better. However, when you need a GPU and one is available at RRP - albeit at £1,050 - and the "better value" (3080 varients) product isn't much cheaper, then the 3080Ti has more "value"...as much as using that word makes me choke a little lol.

I'll likely not buy, I do like to feel I'm getting good value - just like my current 1070 which I bought the week of launch for £380 (cheapest one available) and it's a really good one. I do still ponder upgrades though, particularly CPU at the moment as I didn't want Zen 2, I was waiting for Zen 3, but my current (at the time) CPU was getting flaky. Of course, it's working 100% fine now...darn thing lol.

At the end of the day though, there will come a point when I'll need a new GPU rather than it just being a nice to have. Numerous other titles I play already have settings turn down to maintain a solid minimum FPS (I'm happy with 60, even though input responsiveness isn't the best) and I'm only playing at 1920x1200 and wanted to get at least a 1440p monitor along with the GPU upgrade. So, I expect I will be paying inflated prices regardless, though I'd hope to not pay over RRP on top of that. So RRP is a bit of a rip, but RRP + "low supply" tax is worse.

I will continue to wait and watch. While the 1070 is pushed in numerous titles, it's still fine and I don't feel like I'm slumming it at all.

[xant]

They want to overcharge for the 4000 series coming in Q3 and to make matters worse AMD use Nvidia pricing to benchmark their own products so in effect you get choice but zero competition atm not until AMD decides it wants market share

You'd be right, if it weren't for Intel to enter the market this year. That changes everything.

Usually, when you try to enter an established market that is dominated by one or two very strong corporations, you have to secure a foothold by severely underpricing your own product. Otherwise consumers would stick to what they know is reliable performance. That means Intel would have to sell at a loss to gain a good portion of the market. And it hurts the newcomer even more, since the established sellers already possess the knowhow and efficiency of being in the market for 20+ years. Basically, Intel will have to produce at a higher cost and will deliver an inferior product (when compared to Nvidia/AMD). And have to sell at a lower price than the competition to get customers.

If the profit margin for the established products is already very thin, it leaves little room to underbid them, so you'd be looking at a huge loss in the forseeable future. You need huge cash reserves and the willingness to burn through some serious money by selling at a huge loss. Kind of what Microsoft did with the XBox 1 and XBox 360, it was very hard and expensive to establish their position on the console market that was previously dominated by Sony and Nintendo. Took a long time to get everything working, to build up the logistics and to make a good console that can turn a profit. And even then it wasn't only possible because MS had billions to spare, but also by Sony messing up with the PS3 by making it way too expensive.

If AMD/Nvidia set their prices too high, they would allow Intel to sell at a smaller loss, maybe even at a profit, while still underbidding AMD/Nvidia prices. That would make Intel a serious (or the only) alternative to get a good enough graphics card at a budget price. Did you know that it is ten times more expensive to gain a new customer than to maintain an existing one?

Should they set their prices too high, Intel will have an easy time selling their cards and getting new customers. And if they do a decent job and customers are happy, they'll build up loyalty with them. It will be hard, if not impossible, to get those people back.

That's why I think that Intel entering the market is what'll ultimately save us from AMD/Nvidia setting the princes too high. The Nvidia/AMD flagships will be more expensive than ever, that much is sure, but they can't afford to lose the lower brackets to Intel. And they will if they overprice their budget cards.

[BigBANGtheory]

They want to overcharge for the 4000 series coming in Q3 and to make matters worse AMD use Nvidia pricing to benchmark their own products so in effect you get choice but zero competition atm not until AMD decides it wants market share

You'd be right, if it weren't for Intel to enter the market this year. That changes everything....

I'll quote you on that later in the year. Won't change anything besides the odd laptop imho.

We'll see though I'd love to be wrong and Navi 31 being priced less than a used car in 6months time.

[xant]

Intel is its own provider for semiconductors and is steadily increasing their manufacturing capacity. Also, if we count integrated graphics, Intel is already the biggest manufacturer/seller of GPUs. They're a giant compared to AMD/Nvidia. To give you some numbers: Intel has more than three times the employees that AMD and Nvidia have combined, with a revenue that is almost three times as much as AMD and Nvidia, again combined.

AMD and Nvidia are in no position to underestimate the threat that Intel poses for them long-term. It would be madness - for both - to jeopardize their market shares and loyal customer base for short-term profit. Not that it would be impossible, of course. Many good corporations saw their end through some dumb decision making. Still, I give them enough credit to see the situation for what it is and act in accordance to that. Intel invested heavily here and prepared for years. And they have the money to eat the expected losses for the first few years.

It won't be easy for AMD/Nvidia. Their flagships, the RTX 4090 and RX 7900 XT, won't have any competition from Intel, at least this and maybe next year. So both can set the price as high as they want for their own high-end flagships (which they will) in this bracket. But below that? From what we know so far, the performance of the Ark Alchemist desktop GPU (Intel's high-end flagship) should be somewhere around that of a 3070/Ti. Nowhere near the new AMD/Nvidia cards, yes, but overall not too bad. The 3070 Ti has a MSRP of 600$/€, and it's doubtful the 4000/7000 series will be much cheaper or widely available in the forseeable future (as unlike Intel, both AMD and Nvidia depend on external semiconductor manufacturers).

Should Intel decide to sell competetive graphics cards at a lower price than AMD/Nvidia, and they drop their products earlier while maintaining a higher availability? Then AMD/Nvidia can't afford high prices. I mean, they can try, but the market will shift accordingly (meaning not to their advantage). Having better performance doesn't mean much for the majority, if the price is too high. Many will settle for something lower, but affordable.

That's all assuming that Intel doesn't mess up somehow. I hope they won't. Anyway, you can come back to my posts at the end of the year, we'll be wiser by then!

[BigBANGtheory]

Intel sell competitively, what like their CPUs? Can I just point out an i9-12900k is close to double the price of an AMD 5900X right now.

Intel Arc GPUs are looking pretty weak on the performance front too not even close to a 3070Ti right now not to mention 6months late.

In 6-8months time Intel Arc will be competing against Navi 33 with perf levels around a 6900XT way above 3070 lvls....

Intel would have to give away a discrete desktop Arc GPU at this point.

I wish it wasn't so, really I do but that is the reality we are dealing with the best you can possibly hope for is competition at the low end next gen IF and only if Intel price it very low otherwise its DOA bar laptops. Myself I'm not in the market for low-mid tier so they just don't even factor into things unfortunately.

[xant]

They're already established on the CPU market, and they have only one competitor there, a competitor that wasn't better until recently and repeatedly ran into availability problems. You're right, they could give us better prices, but it doesn't matter if they don't. At least for the 12000 generation. In terms of performance they lost the race here and there's nothing they do about that. People still bought their CPUs because they were the only ones in stock at times.

The 13000 series should be more interesting, as it's up against Zen 4. If Intel can't win with performance, they'll have to gain territory with a good price. Otherwise they take a heavy beating and that's not something their shareholders want to see. This time around availability shouldn't drag AMD down, so Intel will lose their only current-gen advantage.

But it's a different matter on the GPU market. Right now you can't get a 3060 under 400$/€, assuming it's available in the first place. You have to be very lucky to get it at MSRP.

If the next gen runs into similar pricing problems and availability remains low? Then Intel has a clear advantage. If they can offer similar or slightly better performance in the low to mid-tier for half the current scalping price, and actually manage to have things in stock, most people will give in and take the deal. If you haven't noticed, even GT730 go for 100+$/€ right now.

For people like you it won't be easy, as there is no competition in the high-end bracket. Intel will need another generation or two to even remotely come close. Until then AMD/Nvidia will hit you with their high prices and nobody can do anything about it. But low to mid-tier? There many gamers have good chances to see competetive pricing from all three companies thanks to Intel entering the market.

[Wheem]

If you're primarily going to use the machine for gaming, and are sticking with AMD over Intel, I'd probably look at the 5600X instead of a 5900X (setting aside the 5800X3D for the moment, since I'm not sure if the cache would matter for X4 or not). The 5600X and 5900X have the same base clocks, with only an extra 200MHz on the 5900X's boost. Otherwise, the only real difference is core/thread count, and the 5900X consuming more power and presumably running hotter. Those extra cores won't really matter in any current games that I can think of (including X4), and would only be beneficial in some non-gaming tasks. Going by typical pricing in the USA, you could buy a 5600X + a very solid motherboard for the cost of a 5900X alone.

Take a look at this testing done by Hardware Unboxed on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqmRvTz0kbA). While they didn't use X4 in their testing (no one ever does ), the only time there was even the appearance of a meaningful difference between the 5600X and 5900X was when they ran Cyberpunk 2077 on medium settings at 1080p with an RTX 3090...which is obviously an "artificial" scenario. Stepping down to a "lowly" RTX 3070 saw the average framerate difference between the two CPUs drop down to a single, solitary FPS.

I recently upgraded from an i5-6600k to an i5-12600k, and the difference in X4 is certainly noticeable. Many other games ran perfectly fine on the older i5, but X4 definitely suffered from some frame drops and stuttering at times, which has thus far been remedied. I'm not an Intel fanboy by any means, and have owned CPUs from both "teams" over the years, but I think the 12th gen lineup is definitely worth a look if you're going to be buying a new motherboard anyway.

[Imperial Good]

and the 5900X consuming more power and presumably running hotter

This might not be the case. Due to better binning (to run faster) it might actually use less power under the same workload and so run cooler.

What is different is the maximum power it can use without overclocking (power limit). Under a sufficiently heavy workload it will use more power and so run hotter but you are also getting appropriately more performance for that power. Both should idle about the same power usage, possibly with the 5900X slightly more due to an extra CCD.

They're already established on the CPU market, and they have only one competitor there, a competitor that wasn't better until recently and repeatedly ran into availability problems. You're right, they could give us better prices, but it doesn't matter if they don't. At least for the 12000 generation. In terms of performance they lost the race here and there's nothing they do about that. People still bought their CPUs because they were the only ones in stock at times.

Intel has 2 competitors. Although only 1 of them is serious in the west. There is an x86 processor developer in China which is technically a competitor (genuine x86 licence and all) but is still many years behind before they can bring a competitive consumer CPU that is not an overpriced joke.

But it's a different matter on the GPU market. Right now you can't get a 3060 under 400$/€, assuming it's available in the first place. You have to be very lucky to get it at MSRP.

Eventually Intel should push a gaming focused discrete GPU to the market which should increase supply availability of GPUs in general. Secheduled for release in Q1 2022... which has come and gone... Apparently it has been pushed back to later this year so they could be playing another "10nm" with availability coming anywhere in the next decade.

Intel sell competitively, what like their CPUs? Can I just point out an i9-12900k is close to double the price of an AMD 5900X right now.

Yes but the 12900k is a 16 core CPU so its only reasonable competitor is the 5950X. They might be 8 efficiency cores but they are still 8 additional cores. It also has an unreasonable power consumption so you would need to be rich to not only buy it but also run it, at least near full usage.

Where Intel is mostly competitive is near the bottom of the stack. They offer you top range gaming performance at around the same price as the 5600X. This alone should be forcing considerable price drops from AMD given that such processor can even beat the 5950X is many games.

In 6-8months time Intel Arc will be competing against Navi 33 with perf levels around a 6900XT way above 3070 lvls....

And probably with matching price tag way above the 3070... Even if Intel Arc is not high end, all it has to do is provide a modern feature set with good value proposition.

[vadiolive]

to be true i more interersing 5800x 3D - for X4 itslf that release in fews day....
I realy interresing see benchmarks for heavly cpu games ( not main AAA titles like most regular media going do)

[Scoob]

It's funny, if it wasn't for X4 being heavily reliant on one or two dominant threads I'd not even remotely be considering changing the CPU. Other games I play, that have an awful lot going on, barely tax the CPU as they load it pretty evenly over multiple Cores. Only with X4 do I see my CPU both under-utilised and pushed at the same time. Oh, and Forged Alliance, but that's ancient. Don't get me wrong, X4's performance is HUGELY improved vs. launch but it still has that hard limitation of the capabilities of just one or two Cores / Threads.

With the 5900X being just £360 here currently, I'd hope the 5800X3D comes in at less than this. However, as a "special edition" type chip, I expect it'll be a little over-priced. Hope to be proven wrong. £300 would be nice.

If I'd bought say a 3700X rather than the 3900X back in 2019, I suspect things would be simpler for me lol. However, at the time, the 3900X did appear to offer the best of both worlds. Gaming performance second only to the 5950X - though it still beat it in many titles* - as well as the extra Cores for other stuff. I admit, it's been under-utilised vs. what I thought I'd be doing in regards to that second part.

* Reportedly due to it having more L3 Cache per CPU with three Cores sharing the same cache as four cores on the 5950X, despite the latter's slight Mhz advantage.

For every other title I play, almost without exception, it's definitely GPU power I'm lacking. Now the weather is warming up a bit, my 1070 is getting noisy. That's in part my fault, as I run an aggressive fan curve (GPU stays under 60c while gaming in a warm room) plus the fact that the case was bought for water-cooling. CPU is water-cooled, GPU isn't as I was waiting to upgrade, then 20 series was a rip-off and 30 series, well, they didn't have any then it became a rip-off.

£1,050 for a 3080TI Founder's Edition is still over-priced, even if it is technically RRP. However, as 3080's (either variant) don't exist at anywhere near RRP, it makes the 3080Ti the more attractive option at this time. IF it weren't for 40 series just around the corner. Summer will fly by - it always does - and I'll be gaming less, so it makes sense to wait for the 30-series cards (or AMD's offering).

Note: I had considered picking up a 3070 but they're still like 50% over priced. Plus I got the 1070 while waiting for the 1080Ti to be announced and released as my pair of 680's (which bench near identical to a single 1070 in many synthetics oddly enough) were simply running out of VRAM (just 2GB) in several titles. So, I don't really want to "settle" for a lower-end card again this time...though it depends how the various cards compare across the range for price / performance. The 1070 turned out to be one of the best cards I ever had when it comes to longevity and overclocking. Plus it looks plain cheap considering it was under £400 the week of launch.

[BigBANGtheory]

to be true i more interersing 5800x 3D - for X4 itslf that release in fews day....
I realy interresing see benchmarks for heavly cpu games ( not main AAA titles like most regular media going do)

What would be useful is to measure the L3 cache misses when running X4 as that would indicate the potential gains on offer from the new v-cache, I don't know how feasible that is.

[Diroc]

if Process Explorer (3rd party task manager replacement) is to be believed. Indeed, whenever I get fps limited, it's always a CPU thing, with these threads maxed out and the GPU just waiting, under-utilised.

Process Hacker (From Sourceforge) is a nice 3rd party task manager as well.
https://processhacker.sourceforge.io/

Another program you may be interested in is Quick CPU
It allows you to adjust core parking and boost.
https://coderbag.com/product/quickcpu

Same TDP over less cores can allow for higher clock and boost.

[Imperial Good]

Same TDP over less cores can allow for higher clock and boost.

This only applies to CPUs that can hit their power limits. Lower core count ones such as 6 cores from AMD like the R5 3600 usually do not hit power limits.

[Diroc]

There are sliders for boost as well.

If you are having thermal throttling issues, you may want to adjust # of cores.
Not saying that is the case with OP.

It was a general suggestion more than anything for others that may be reading the thread.
I can run a little cooler with my FX-8150 only using 4 of the 8 supposed cores.

[Imperial Good]

I can run a little cooler with my FX-8150 only using 4 of the 8 supposed cores.

The FX-8150 is not really comparable to the processors of today, in a bad way. Although it is "8 core" it has core pairs which share a floating point unit so for any application that involves floating point units, such as most games, it effectively only has 4 cores. This means that if you disable 4 cores that make up 2/4 pairs you are likely forcing X4 to run on a dual core processor which will impact performance significantly. If you disable 1 core from each pair then performance should not really change at all, but neither should power consumption unless those cores could not idle efficiently. There was a reason these processors nearly bankrupted AMD...

For more modern AMD processors I would generally recommend adjusting the power limit if you are concerned about thermals. This would give applications access to full boost speed and all cores as they want while letting the processor governor manage balancing the power draw. Idle cores use very little power and in power limited situations, such as all core workloads, the cores will boost to a lower, more energy efficient, frequency. The only time disabling the cores could give better performance is if the application has very bad scaling with core count to the point that the gains from all the extra parallelism it is using are less than the gains from slightly higher core clocks.

With modern AMD and Intel CPUs you should not even need to worry about thermal throttling since they are designed to deal with it for extended periods. As long as the cooling solution is reasonable (good contact, removes some fraction of the heat, fans not obstructed by a solid sheet of glass) they should just work and automatically drop their power usage to match what the cooling solution can remove. How good this is for processor longevity is another matter, one I do not know a definite answer for, which is why some people might prefer to lower the power limit.

[Scoob]

Looks like the 5800X3D is £410 in the uk - that's £50 more than the 5900X is currently sold for. Not as good a price as I'd hoped, but not really a surprise. Will have a ponder about what to do. Really though, in titles other than X4, I'm more GPU-limited. I can turn a few settings down to get my desired minimum FPS (60), I'm fine with that. However, the 1070 does seem to be working quite hard these days.

[Action_Parsnip]

I am extremely interested in seeing what a 5800x3d can do in this game! The UK pricing is more than a 5900x but if you're mainly gaming than I don't see a better choice?

Also re: new GPUs, the pricing situation seems very fluid right now, Ethereum pricing is solidly on the low end and GPU prices are dropping week by week. I'd say give it a month and things might be dropping through the floor.

[Scoob]

Same, I'd love to see what results people get. 5800X3D current pre-order only at Scan, they sold the initial stock quite quickly it seems. It does irk that the excellent 5900X is £50 cheaper though. If the 5800x3D had been the same price as the 5900X (£360) I'd have been fine with that. It's just that it's ONLY X4 that needs the extra CPU (especially single threaded) as other taxing games I have multi-thread really well. X4 does not.

I was tempted by the 3080Ti Founder's Edition at £1,049 - lower than any other 3080Ti bar the KFA - but it sold out quickly. With summer almost here - had some stunning weather already in the UK - I know I'll be using the PC less, so it makes sense to wait if I can as the 40-series (and AMD's products) are due 2H / Q3/4 and look to be quite a jump.

[BigBANGtheory]

Apparently if you have an MSI MEG X570 series motherboard they've enabled overclocking for the new 5800X3D

This is very useful because the clock speed has been reduced compared to the 5800X and will potentially help its performance in more scenarios, assuming of course you can squeeze more speed out of it.

I like AMD products but I'm saddened by their pricing decisions and of course those of its competitors, I guess the morale of the story is when demand is high there simply is no real competition just alternatives and then all parties have a vested interest to keep their margins high.