My thoughts on the CPUs of 2017

Hey all. I’ve been fiending for discussion about the CPU market as it stands right now, and I’ve not been granted any satisfaction. In wake of the level1 video regarding the CPU launches this year, I thought it would be interesting to share my thoughts on here. I think the CPU market is incredibly interesting right now. Both manufactures have interesting options for many different uses at different price points, something for everything seems to be exploiting some hold in the others pricing, and all that makes it hard to compare the chips without getting crazy specific. So with this I tried to cover the overall performance and placement of the chips. I’d love to get feedback and friendly discussion with other members! If you dont agree with me that’s great! I’m genuinely interested in the thoughts of others and I’d love to discuss, bear in mind these are my thoughts and my opinions! Apologies in advance for the wall of text.
Disclaimer: this was written in part for the forum, in part for a post on another site.

2017 has been a fantastic year in terms of CPU launches, for not only AMD and Intel but consumers as well. With the advent of some seriously powerful CPU choices across all price ranges, as well as the return to a competitive market there are now more good choices than there have been in years. With different platforms offering similar performance in similar price ranges, as well as different core counts, PCI-e connectivity, and other differences there are plenty of options that should fit many needs, and beyond that there are some interesting places where each company has found a “hole” in the other’s pricing scheme and found a way to exploit that hole. The long and the short of it is that now, with all CPU launches for desktop finished for the year, consumers can take a look at the market and size up each chip and where it stands in the grand scheme of things.

With all of that, this isn’t going to be a super structured analysis of each chip, or a guide based on usage or price range or some black magic tea leaves reading. This is just going to be me looking at the general market and the different levels of performance. No strict rules, more of a comparison of the chips and how they seem to be structured against the competition. I feel that this will allow for good discussion regarding price and performance, as well as other factors. I’ll also consider other facets, such as platform life, upgradability, features, connectivity options, etc. This is more of a “overall best” rather than specific best kind of opinion piece. So let’s dig in!

We’re gonna start at the low end, because frankly it’s easier. At the lowest end of them all, the so called “poverty” tier, we’ve not got many options, really the Pentium G4560 and the AMD Athlon X4 950. As far as performance goes this is a no brainer, the Pentium slaughters the AMD offering. This Athlon, despite featuring the new AM4 socket, is still using bulldozer cores, and that REALLY limits the performance. Really, the only redeeming quality of the Athlon is the upgrade path, since it actually you know, has one. Best you can do with the pentium platform is upgrade to a 7700k, but that’s it. LGA 1151 as a socket is still a thing, but to upgrade to a Coffee Lake offering you need a z370 board. There’s even talk that to upgrade past a 8700k you’ll need ANOTHER new chipset, which is just absurd. With the Athlon, you can upgrade to a 8 core ryzen as of now, and the socket itself will be supported through 2020. You might get some new features on the newer chipset offerings from AMD, but at least you can upgrade. The value of the pentium is diminished a bit considering that you have to go with a z-series motherboard if you want to overclock, which are a bit more expensive than B350. Even with all that considered though, I’ve gotta give it to the Pentium. Team blue scores an early lead.

Moving up the food chain we get into the i3/R3 lineups, and boy oh boy is there plenty of performance to be gained. Really, going from the previous tier to this will more than likely offer a more noticeable and meaningful upgrade than any other upward movement. Other higher tiers will offer better price/performance and just flat out better performance, but the move from 2 cores to 4 (or 2c/4t) is a big jump. All that aside there’s some good competition here. We’ve got the R3 1200 and 1300x from AMD and the i3 7100, 7350k, i3-8100, and 8350k. To start with, we’re throwing the i3-7100 out. You can’t overclock it, it’s got 2 less cores than the AMD offerings, and with similar clock speed and the similar IPC between the chips, as well as the lack of an upgrade path it’s out of here. We’re gonna throw out the 1300x too, because it’s really just an overclocked 1200, and given the OC cap on all Ryzen chips any higher binning most likely won’t matter, we’re talking like 200mhz max. Next, we’re gonna throw out both of the unlocked i3s. Fact of the matter is for the asking price, you can spend another $5 dollars and go with another Intel chip or an AMD offering (i5-8400 and R5 1600 respectively). That leaves us with the i3-8100 and R3 1200. This generation, Intel has graced the consumers with the first ever 4c/4t i3, meaning that the performance is going to be much closer to the R3 1200 than earlier offerings. The Intel chip is around $20 more, and is a locked chip. Even though you won’t be overclocking this thing, you do have to get a z-series motherboard, which will drive the total cost up compared the AMD option. However, there is some pretty good performance to be had in this little chip, especially for gaming. With a healthy OC on the R3, it still lags behind in a number productivity tasks, winning some others. In gaming though, the i3 really shines and leaves the R3 in the dust. For less than a 20% price increase user should see somewhere between a 5-20% increase in performance, depending on game and GPU, which I feel needs to be considered here. No one buying a R3 or i3 is going to pair that with a high end GPU, or at least I hope. That performance stat from earlier is based off the wonderful results from Techspot*, where they tested with a Vega 64. Realistically that isn’t a great pairing, and one I’ll wager you don’t see often in the wild. Further, these were done on titles that are primarily CPU heavy, so this is more of a best case scenario. So, even though at first this looks like a huge advantage, the low clock speed of the i3 really limits it in gaming, and prevents it from totally dominating the 1200. I managed to find a video** comparing just this scenario, a R3 1200 at 3.9ghz and a i3-8100, both with 2400mhz DDR4. In GTA V the chips are within 3fps of each other for the 1%, and .1% measures, and the i3 squeezes out a 6fps lead on average… CS:GO shows AMD with a 6 fps lead over intel, but for 1% and .1% the R3 is much lower, 128 to 165 and 83 to 99 respectively. The last title tested is Witcher 3, which shows the i3 pulling ahead again: 72-62 average, 50-40 1%, and 34-26 at the .1% lows. All games considered, this puts the average fps of the r3 at 97% of the performance of the 8100, at least for those 3 games. Bear in mind as well, this is with memory speeds at 2400. While both chips will benefit from faster memory, the Ryzen architecture gains far more with the move up in memory speed, which could potentially eliminate the already marginal 3% lead. So, for gaming, the chips are even, and in productivity the i3 seems to lead by an average of 10%, give or take depending on the task. Realistically, while the productivity tasks matter in some cases, neither of these is a video editing or CAD powerhouse, and with the performance usually pretty close, in real life this is more of a draw. I will go ahead and give the advantage to the i3. Now that we’ve looked at everything, its decision time. And really, I’ve gotta give it to the R3. This segment of the market is all about value, and the R3 delivers in spades, once platform cost is considered. With the ability to get a B350 motherboard for a little more than half of a z370, it really drives that value proposition through the roof. The added ability to upgrade on that socket for the next 3 years is fantastic, and there are plenty of good offerings from the Ryzen lineup to upgrade to even now. Score: RED-1:BLUE-1

Moving into the R5/i5 lineup this is where the real beauty of this year of chips lies. I said before Ryzen even launched that the 1600 (well, the 6 core chip) was going to be the star of the show. And lo and behold it truly is a great chip, and a contender for best price/performance of this generation. In the ring we’ve got the R5 1400, R5 1500x, R5 1600, and R5 1600x from AMD. Intel is fielding the i5-8400 and the i5-8600k. We’re gonna throw the 1600x out from AMD, for the same reasons we threw the 1300x out earlier, other than that everything else stays. Things start to get interesting here, with different chips having subtle differences and the use case starting to matter more. Looking first at the AMD options, the 1400 and 1500x are very similar, both have 4c/8t, however they differ in the amount of cache, 1500x sports a 16mb cache and the 1400 is packing 8mb. At the surface this seems like a small difference, but it amounts to roughly a 7% increase in performance for the 1500x when both are at the same clock speed. Given the prices of these chips and the Intel offerings, we can’t really disqualify either for that difference alone. The 1400 is a better bargain, but the 1500x does offer an interesting stopgap between that and the 1600. For the money though, money spent towards a 1500x would be better spent towards a 1600, so we’re gonna have to chuck it out, leaving us the other 4. Looking again at the 1400, again I think we’re going ot have to let this one go. Fact of the matter is that it offers marginal performance benefits over the similarly priced (but not included) i3-8350k, and compared to the i5-8400 or the R5 1600 it just doesn’t stand up. The only positive it has seems to be price, where it does offer a really solid offering between the R3 1200 and R5 1600. But for this segment, it’s just a bit anemic. Next on the chopping block is the i5-8600k. Frankly, it costs too much. At that point you can up to a R7 offering which will beat out the i5 in productivity, albeit lose in gaming. On the flip side, for a almost $100 dollar increase you get marginally better gaming performance over the i5-8400, which can be cooled with a simple $20-$30 air cooler, where the i5-8600k will require some serious cooling if you overclock it to take advantage of higher clock speeds and performance. All of that makes it a horrible value, so it’s gotta go. With two finalists this is where specificity starts to play a role in our comparison. The Intel chip will be faster for gaming, no two ways of looking at it. For productivity, even though the i5 puts up a honestly impressive effort, the R5 still pulls ahead, and by a fairly large margin in most cases, especially with overclocking. The extra 6 threads on the R5 really help it out in this use case. Given that the earlier mentioned problem with the z-series motherboards is still here, and that the R5 offers good, albeit not great, performance in gaming, stellar productivity performance, and a upgradeability that Intel just doesn’t match, this is another win for AMD. Score: RED-2:BLUE-1

Moving out of the college teams and into the minor leagues! These guys offer top notch performance for the mainstream market and, if I’m being honest here I still can believe the kind of performance we’re able to get for the money now. You can build a whole R7 1700 system for what a 6900k cost this time last year, and get similar if not better performance, which is mind blowing. That’s not to say that the Intel offerings aren’t similarly impressive, they offer excellent performance as well. In this round we’ve got the AMD R7 1700, 1700x, and 1800x, as well as the Intel i7-8700 and i7-8700k. We’re going to throw the 1800x and 1700x out for the very same reason we pitched the 1300x and ultimately the 1500x, they cost more for the same chip. The one note I’ll slide in is that if you aren’t the gambling type and can get it for a slight price increase (read: $20ish more) than the 1700x is a solid chip and might help you hit that sweet 4ghz/3200mhz just a bit easier, but you can get a lemon there too! Leaving us with the R7 1700, i7-8700 and i7-8700k. So things get interesting here, the R7 has the most cores and threads, but a lower single core performance. The i7-8700 is a great balance of performance and low(er) price, and the i7-8700k reigns supreme for single core performance, but does lack 2c/4t compared to the R7, and isn’t necessarily the king of the hill. Use case starts to matter more here, just as we saw before with the R5 vs. i5. As far as productivity is concerned, a overclocked R7 1700 is going to win most of the time. Certain apps will of course favor the higher clock speed of the i7s, but overall this swings in AMD’s favor. For gaming though, jesus christ. It’s an absolute slaughter of team red over here, at least at 1080p. At this price range we can comfortably assume there are going to be a good number of 1440p players as well as some 4k, and in those areas the difference is still there, although far less pronounced. Gaming is 100% a win for Intel though, and productivity is an AMD advantage, but close enough I won’t call it a win. The extra cores for AMD might make a difference for work with virtual machines or other cases, but again that’s dependent on circumstance. Really, it comes down to what you want to do on your computer. If you’re going to do a majority of productivity tasks and some gaming, go with AMD. If you’re going to mostly game and do some productivity, go Intel. For streaming I’d opt towards the AMD offering, as the extra cores will help with balancing the load, but performance is close between the two. So with performance so close in multitasking and an absolute landslide win for intel in gaming, and assuming a pretty even mix of work and play, the last thing we can really look at is price. The i7-8700k has a MSRP of 359.99, but due to shortage of supply and high demand, the lowest price I could find on PCPartpicker as of writing was a whopping 409.99!! The 8600, should you be able to find it in stock is a much tamer 339.99. The R7 1700 carries a MSRP of 315.99, but PCPartpicker shows the lowest asking price as of writing to be a very tame 289.78. The R7 can take advantage of some B350 boards, but not necessarily as cheap as the previous Ryzen chips due to power delivery. With that in mind, the motherboard advantage AMD has enjoyed is still there, although not as pronounced. We’re going to assume best cases for all of these chips, so the below MSRP for the R7 and the MSRP for the i7, and in that case the value award has to go to the R7. The superior productivity performance and the flexibility of more cores, as well as above average gaming performance all put it into a good spot. For best overall performance, that’s got to go to the i7-8700k. The staggering performance in gaming and competitiveness in productivity helps it claw to the top. As for the winner, well, I’m inclined to give that to the i7-8700. It offers better gaming performance than the R7 1700, while remaining close to the i7-8700k and R7 1700 in productivity at a much more appealing price. In that same way though, it’s the average of the two, not a winner in either category, so it’s less appealing than either of the others in their zone of expertise. It does offer a significant advantage over the i7-8700k, however, something we really haven’t talked about up until now, and that’s in terms of cooling. The i7-8700k is a hot sonovabitch. You’re looking to spend a minimum of $120 or so on cooling to keep in under control. Even with a delid, you’re still looking at at least $80 for a cooler. Both the R7 and and lock i7 can be cooled with a substantial overclock on a $50 air cooler, lowering the price/performance argument for the i7-8700k. All of that really pushes the i7-8700k out of whack in regard to these other parts. A example R7 build would cost around $400 for CPU, mobo, and cooler, or the price of the i7 as of writing. Things are a lot better with the locked i7, resulting in a much tamer $460 price tag. Assuming MSRP for the i7-8700k, a sample system would run roughly $550, and that’s assuming you’re using the cheapest z370 board and allocating $80 for the cooler, which would mean you would also have to delid your CPU. That’s a lot of compromise, but it’s definitely doable. Based on pricing the 1700 is the no brainer decision, but I keep coming back to the performance of the i7-8700k. I’ve got to hand it to Intel, they built a monster in this chip. This is a hard one for me, but I think I’ve got to give it to AMD. The fact of the matter is even though Intel blows it out of the water in gaming, that’s in a way “wasted performance”. It doesn’t matter if the Intel is getting 180fps average and the AMD is “only” getting 160, both of which are more than enough for 144hz, and WAY more than needed for the average 60fps panel. On productivity, however, there is never the same “wasted potential” an extra 30 seconds here or 10 seconds there matters, and it adds up. This is probably the hardest decision I’ve had, but given the cooling hassle with the i7-8700k, the higher price, and the lack of a clear upgrade path (rumors of z390, LGA1151 being on it’s third rendition) it’s hard to recommend as a overall best. If you intend to do high refresh competitive gaming (and you don’t suck) then this is the best. But really, if you’re looking for top gaming performance, why not go with the 8600k? You’d save $100 bucks or so, and get 95% of what this monster offers. As it stands, even though this is really a wicked fast CPU, I just can’t recommend it over the much better price/performance and productivity performance of the 1700. Score: RED-3:BLUE-1

Stepping up into the big leagues! We’re out of mainstream and into enthusiast grade now, that said there are a lot of goddamn chips from here and up, so we’re gonna be splitting this up into 2 more categories. For this first one, I want to look at the i7-7640x, i7-7740x, i7-7800x, i7-7820x from Intel, and the R9 1900x and R9 1920x from AMD. We’re kicking out the i7-7640x and i7-7740x right out the gate, there is no reason for those chips to exist, period. The next to fall is the i7-7800x. It’s been outclassed in nearly every way by its bigger and badder little brother the i7-8700k. That leaves us with a much needed smaller list, but we’re not done yet! The 1900x is horrible in terms of price/performance. Effectively a $550 dollar R7 1700, we’re throwing this thing right out. The few redeeming qualities of this chip is the fact that it supports up to 128gb of ECC RAM, and that it sports the absolutely monstrous 64 PCI-e lanes that it’s bigger Threadripper kin also feature. Maybe a solid choice for a homeserve build, depending on your needs, but not enough to redeem it here. That leaves us with 2 equally priced options, the i7-7820x and the R9 1920x. And man, compared to the last section this is a no brainer. The R9 advantages include: far greater PCI-e connectivity (64 vs. 28 lanes), a massive performance advantage in multithreaded workloads (read punching a cpu above its price range) support for bootable RAID-0 with NVME drives without paying extra, 4 more cores and 8 more threads, more reasonable power draw, and that sweet ass socket. The i7-7820x does have its (few) advantages, markedly higher single core performance, support for faster memory, cheaper motherboards. Up until recently I really had a soft spot for the i7-7820x. I treated it as kind of the ultimate gaming CPU. 8 blisteringly fast cores, more support for mGPU setups, and other nice enthusiast features like dual NICs, quad channel memory, etc. Assuming you could cool the beast 5.0 was not out of the question, perhaps even higher with a no bullshit cooling system (read phase change, TEC chiller, real hardcore stuff) But with the i7-8700k stepping in all of that is gone, sorry. And at this point, when you’re buying 8 cores and up, single core performance does matter, but not as much as before. If you need fast cores, you can’t also have a lot of them, and right not the single thread champ is undoubtedly the i7-8700k. This goes to the 1920x, hands down. Score: RED-4:BLUE-1

And now we’re into the upper eschelon, the super heavyweights. This is the best of the best category, all bets are off. These are the monsters that many dream of yet few will ever tame. We’re going to be looking at the R9 1950x from AMD, and from team blue we’ve got the i9-7900x,
I9-7920x, i9-7940x, i9-7960x and the behemoth that is the i9-7980xe. We’re gonna start by throwing out half of these bad boys! The i9-7980xe, i9-7960x, i9-7940x are all out of here. Fact of the matter is that they just cost too much, and near the upper end are just some horrible bastard version of a xeon with NOS shoved into every orifice possible. They just don’t make sense at those prices. Looking at the remaining chips, we’ve got 2 entries from the extreme series and 1 from Threadripper. Looking at performance, we see the 1950x ripping through the Intel offerings, and i mean it. Rip and tear assing past the equally expensive 7900x, the 1950x manages to squeeze out roughly 1000 more points in cinebench R15, or roughly 50% faster, no small feat. Hell, on average it manages to score somewhere around 40% better. Threadripper offers more PCI-e connectivity, far more performance, and does it in a package that draws less power, although all of these monsters drink electricity like there’s no tomorrow. Numbers on the i9-7920x are incredibly difficult to find as of this writing, and as such we’re going to just take a quick and dirty estimate and assume the i9-7920x is 20% faster than it’s little brother. Even with that in mind, we’re talking about a score of 2900-3000 with a fat overclock, which would take a monster cooling setup to manage, or a harrowing delidding experience and still require a no nonsense cooling option. Even then, the performance lags comparative to the monster than is the 1950x, and that’s before we consider the earlier mentioned shortcomings in other areas, all of which still apply to this larger chip. The lone 2 advantages the i9-7920x enjoys is support for faster memory and single core performance. But if you’re looking to buy 10-16 cores and notion of single thread performance mattering is gone. As for the memory speeds, that is a fringe case if ever there was one, so we’re gonna throw that out. Beyond all of this, we’ve now got a new problem from team blue, mainly that there are relatively few motherboards on market with a competent enough VRM design and cooling to handle this kind of overclocking on this kind of chip. You’re going to have to do something about that as well. In terms of performance, yes, Intel has managed to know Threadripper off the throne, but for a minimum of 45% more asking price, and realistically more than that once you factor in the price of a competent motherboard and the cooling for these things. Value is always subjective, and sometimes performance needs to be weighed a bit more heavily. But no matter what the Intel i9 lineup is ALWAYS standing in the looming shadow of the 1950x and the absolutely crushing value it provides. There’s no other way to put it, the 1950x is a threadripping monster, it has no peers, and certainly no equals at the price, features, and absolutely massive performance it offers. Out of all of the categories, to me this is the clearest example of a no contest knockout. AMD came to win, Intel just managed to show up. Think of it like this, AMD is that big mean sonovabitch biker at the bar that no one wants to even look at, and Intel is the sweater-tied-around-their-neck, 90s looking yupie that walks into the bar, orders a strawberry daiquiri and loudly starts talking about how no one there could afford their bike, and how it’s faster than that “glued together POS” our front. That yupie never stood a chance, and neither did the 7900x or 7920x for that matter.
FINAL SCORE: RED-5:BLUE-1

I just want to take a moment now that we’re at the end of this long ass delve into the CPU of modern era and say that I really didn’t expect it to go this way, and a lot of it has to do with the prices that Intel insists on driving. If there was a $50 dollar cut across the mainstream, a $100 drop in the lower end HEDT parts and a $500+ drop on the upper end this would be a completely different discussion. I almost went with the 8700k as well, and for what it’s worth I really do like that CPU, a lot. Same with the 8400. Both are incredible offerings from Intel and as soon as locked, cheaper motherboards are available from Intel the i5-8400 is going to be the new pick for that section. If the temperatures were a bit more manageable and the price came down about $50 on the i7-8700k, then it too would be the no brainer choice. As it stands though, the value proposition not only from AMD’s CPU but from their platforms in general speaks volumes, and the performance is there for everything but gaming. Again, I want to iterate that this is MY list, and my OVERALL list, NOT a specific list. I’ll probably make some of those too, but this is just the overall. And I think it paints an interesting picture. This year AMD came out of the cage biting and clawing, and Intel was caught with its pants down. Next year with Ice Lake and Zen2 is when the real fight is going to happen, and I can’t wait.

Tl;dr (I don’t blame you)
Poverty tier - Pentium G4560
i3/R3 - R3 1200
i5/R5 - R5 1600
i7/R7 - R7 1700 (with the 8700k in a VERY close second)
i7/R9 - R9 1920x
i9/R9 - R9 1950x

6 Likes

Very interesting read and brings up a lot of good points. It really has been a great year for CPUs and you have to hand it to AMD for shaking up the market. I would’ve liked Intel to have been more competitive with their lineup in terms of pricing. They have some really beastly chips but the value proposition just isn’t there yet in many cases.

3 Likes

Let Intel fuck themselves over. More money for AMD. They need it really bad to make Zen 2 even better :smiley:

2 Likes

Damn right they do. I’m really excited to see what AMD bring to the table next. If the current lineup is any indication Zen 2 could be EPYC :smiley:

1 Like

I’m looking forward to AMD’s mobile chips in M-atx/itx format at the low low end. For my upcoming pfsense build I’d like a real low power CPU, talking less than 10W, preferably 6W, with AES and 4 PCI 2.0 lanes or equivalent is all I ask. Rigth now, if I want it to be low cost, only an ASRock board with the A4-5000 will do it, albeit at 15W. All available intel boards at that price point only have x1 or x2 PCI lanes.

Edit: Only 15W TDP chips announced, however with variable TDP modes from 9W to 25W (affecting turbo speeds only) Anandtech article

4 Likes

Why my 8320e has job security for another year :slight_smile:

4 Likes

very interesting read.
I myself rebuilt my pc this year based on a n1600x and a gtx 1080. I also hooked myself up with a htpc based on the 1500x and an rx460. I hope the cpus will give me a few years and the 1080 will go into the htpc once I get an 1180 or whatever comes next for the main rig.
Couldn’t really be happier with ryzen. For cores and threads it is very difficult to look beyond them at the prices they are. Yes memory speeds are still an issue on both of my rigs but time will sort that I’m sure.

1 Like

Amazing write up, thanks for taking the time. My own view varies just slightly… I have answered each in turn in my normal long winded and highly negative fashion, so just a heads up I do agree with 90% of everything you’ve said, and think you’ve articulated and supported it very well, I’m just focusing on the differences in opinion as they may lead to interesting discussion later.

Firstly as a current Pentium owner, the first categories inclusion makes me smile. But honestly unlike the unlocked anniversary I got for $70, the current tier makes ZERO sense because it doesn’t keep up in single threaded performance, the i3’s now have twice the cores (not merely hyperthreading that at the time didn’t help much in games) and the pentiums lost its biggest asset, the upgrade path to any of the intel consumer socket parts. The idea of buying a $70 chip now, and having a complete PC you could drop a $400 i7 into if you needed and boot right away without changing any other parts was amazing (even if few people actually have… haswell refresh held its used value to well). So ultimately these days I advise anyone who can to disregard this tier, for the current generation you literally better to buy used, beg old parts from friends or raid bins in office areas than waste money on a Pentium for gaming IMO. That said if you want a Facebook machine that will do your office needs or homework, run minecraft or dota2, and the reliability of new is needed, its perfectly fine… but the i3 with twice the cores, newer integrated graphics and higher clockspeed still makes more sense and has the upgrade path likely all the way into next generation (ice lake) to boot.

Something I feel very worth mentioning about the r3 1200 is it lacks integrated graphics. As gamers we overlook this, but for a very large number of people having to add even a display card like the GT1030 easily closes the price range caused by the need to buy a Z series board. Integrated graphics have also come a surprising way on the Intel side, my haswells IGPU is pretty meh, it’d do mine-craft but no real gaming… with coffee lakes UHD630 its still not great, but it will handle many semi-modern games at 720p well enough you’ll happily get involved in social multiplayer or finish the campaign. For example Metro: Last Light and GTA5 are both averaging mid 50’s lowest settings, fallout 4 stays very playable at consistently over 30fps@720p, while doom, overwatch or any of the Esports sit happily over the 60fps at better resolutions and settings. Sadly you can’t overclock the IGPU on the locked chip, and the i3 K series is priced way too high, because you can easily get as much as 30% more on the intel older intel IGPU’s with overclocking. This means for a great many people the i3 is a no brainer over the r3, either because it has all the graphics they will need, or because they can make do for a little while till they can upgrade. Even when pairing with graphics from the start, the i3 is also the best bet for people who aren’t going to overclock, as its price premium gets considerably eroded if you opt for the r3 1300x. Also ironically the i3 is also likely more upgradable, thanks to intel only launching the Z series chipset boards initially for some reason. Yet if you do wish to have dedicated graphics, can’t raise more money by deferring buying it for a bit, aren’t about to upgrade to a higher wattage chip while coffee or ice lake is current and are tech savy enough to OC (which did require a bios update on some of the cheapest boards) then spending the bit extra on graphics makes the r3 1200 still the winner at this price level… no really that highly specific sounding list is probably most people reading this due to the nature of this as a tech forum, even if we are only a small niche of total gamers.

I agree hands down about the R5 1600 for now, but as you noted, once the H&B boards drop this may be worth looking at again.

The i7 vs R7 is more debatable, I personally think the non-k intel has some strong merits, but its so darn close that AMD including a much more reasonable cooler may have won the day… if you already own a 120mm tower cooler, getting the cheapest of the Asus Z370 boards, turning MCE on thus all 6 cores turbo to 4.6ghz not 4.3ghz)and sticking the 8700 on is your best bet, as the temperatures and noise will be fine (unlike a stock cooler) and the extra 300mhz (7%) actually will sneak a win out over the 1700 in a few more areas.

If you need more than the 8700k, but have concerns about the cost, I agree thread ripper is the wise choice. However I honestly I don’t know if I recommend the 1920x over the 1950x for many people who have already justified the jump to the more expensive platform over the 8 core consumer socket ryzens already. One third more cores (16 vs 12) at the same boost clock (4ghz) for only 17.3% more money ($130usd, on both newegg and amazon right now, $750 vs $880), it just seems like something you’d regret cheaping out on, especially later down the track and when its feeling a bit dated and your debating upgrading. So if you can afford it I’d say 1950x, if you come up short and really can’t just buy something else later (like defer buying that SSD for another month), the 1920x is still a good enough deal when considered on its own merit, rather than vs its big brother.

I’m also not really sure how you can throw out the top 3 intel i9’s as too expensive in the most expensive category… if you want performance, and they are in your budget, then they are the kings and do beat out threadripper, while still worth a small fortune less than a EPIC or multiple xeon system that’d actually compete performance wise… so in my mind its almost an entire category above other than that AMD doesn’t currently have anything in that market sector. Also for a hypothetical professions animator wanting a system the cost of the 7980XE doesn’t seem anything like 50% over the 1950X, by the time you include all the stuff needed that doesn’t change in price like Storage, RAM, case, PSU, ect. Rather its an extra $1000 on a already $5000 machine for a >20% (24.3% in passmark) all thread the performance gain and better single thread performance (17.6% in passmark) and no compromises on PCIe lanes ect… now granted, few people are buying at this level to begin with, and many of those still will never get the $1000 back on wait times. Indeed I’d actually highly recommend anyone considering the i9’s to honestly ask if they can spread there load between multiple systems (a xeon or ryzen 1700 render box working 24/7 while you edit on another PC for example). But for some of them they will ultimatly come back to the fact they want top teir single socket performance, and currently the i9 7980XE is exactly that, as good value as the 1950X is at half the price, its not a real competitor of the XE and its all core turbo of 3.4ghz (3.9ghz on 12 cores or less) that it will reach and maintain on a decent AIO. Likewise while I’m going to throw out the near 5ghz performance some reviewers got as golden samples, everybody how has great cooling has said the XE is a solid overclocker if you have the cooler and power supply, so its not like its a xeon pushed to its limites in stock trim, there is plenty of headroom in Intels halo product for those who like to tweak.

TL:DR version:
Lowest: A used PC. No? Fine, it has to be the Pentium.
Low: r3 1200
Sweet spot: R5 1600
High: Tie between R7 1700 & i7 8700
Very high: TR4 1950X
Extreme: i9 7980XE

1 Like

While this was not a bad year for CPUs in terms of competition being added, in terms for performance and value at everything but the highest levels, it wasn’t a particularly good year. A modern 8700 that is currently selling for $340 and MSRP at $303 still performs worse than a 6 and a half year old 2600k in a lot of ways which launched at $317. I still get the feeling that any generation now can be a huge leap in performance, and i would regret upgrading now. We’re still stuck on 14nm, the performance increase between a 8700k and 2600k is not very impressive, and PCIE 4.0 still hasn’t been released yet. And before people argue about how PCIe 4.0 isn’t important because videocards aren’t currently bottlenecked; when CPUs and motherboards can now realistically last an enthusiast over 7 years, that argument is moot. Do i really want to be stuck on 14nm, with pcie 3.0, and a cpu barely better than what was available nearly 7 years ago for the next 5-10 years? Do i really want to spend like $800 to do that?

The CPUs cheaper than the R7/I7 7 are over segmented and over priced for what they are. I don’t think you can call anything there a value. You’re better off getting any used i7 k series CPU made since 2011.

1 Like

Even ignoring the fact that including inflation still makes the new i7 cheaper on the prices you listed, if you want to talk at the not highest levels, look at the i3 8100, its an i3 that keeps pace with every non-k i5 that came before. Next up the ryzen 1600, beats last gens i7’s for i5 prices. Above the consumer socket the improvements have also been stellar, instead of the low clock speeds of old, we now see factory turbos of 4ghz+ on both Intel and AMD’s platform. So it seems at both the low and high end, we have seen great improvements, even only talking about gaming (and the 8700 will destroy the 2600k in productivity, including daily tasks like decompressing files, which makes game load screens shorter, its just not as commonly bench-marked). All in all the last 6 months have seen more performance gain than the 3 years proir.

Also relevant, HWCanuks on this exact topic: https://youtu.be/gMFd0aVhVKU

1 Like

HWCanuks is comparing the 8700k to the 2600k, not the 8700 and they also bottleneck the gaming results by using a 1070, gamersnexus does a better comparison between the 2600k and 7700k. The point is not that a 2600k is clearly better than a 8700; it isn’t. The point is where does a $320 CPU from 6 and a half year old CPU fit into today’s modern CPU lineup? And the answer is damn near where it fit in when it launched.

Budget CPUs of this generation outperforming budget CPUs of previous generations is mainly just a testament to just how overly segmented and overpriced the budget segment is. Oh this generation’s budget segment outperforms last? ok cool. What clearly outperforms the performance CPU from 6 and a half years ago? The flagship and nothing else.

The non-overclocked i7-8700k is the same 4.3ghz all 6 core turbo as it non-k brother, the i7-8700, and only 100mhz (~2%) faster if using 3 or less cores, so performance numbers are likely very close. As for the bottleneck on the video card, it would matter, but honestly the 2600k is still not really limiting the average FPS much when your at a range your actually able to display, so the minimum numbers are the more interesting.

I think the part of the video you need to consider is the start, benchmarks of everything but games show the modern CPU with a massive lead. The 2600k doesn’t compete with the modern i7 outside games, it doesn’t even compete with the modern i5 outside games, its actually closer to the current i3 8100 when its at stock speeds and fails to OC enough to catch the non-k i5. The issue isn’t that modern CPU’s aren’t faster, its that many current game engines don’t benefit much from a faster CPU with current level of graphics. This will change, but keep in mind the average gamer on steam’s hardware survey only got 4 cores as of 6 months ago, and 2 cores still makes up 36% today. The number with more than 4 cores? 3.9%, hence why games are not yet optimized well for using them. Seeing as even the i5 level is now more than that, and new AAA games will be biased towards newer systems in terms of playerbase due to both purchasing power of this group and the face most duel core owner have accepted they can’t play the latest in greatest, I’d say the games currently in development will at have options that will take advantage of the extra CPU horsepower.

8 threads has been common since sandy bridge and the ps4 and xbox one both have 8 core CPUs on the x86 architecture. The 2600k also clearly outperforms the 2500k in quite a few games. I think quite a few game engines take advantage of at least 8 threads and I doubt we’ll see many game engines take advantage of many more threads until there are game consoles that have more than 8 threads.

What benchmarks are showing you that the 2600k doesn’t compete with i5s in games? In the gamers nexus revisit of the 2600k, an overclocked 2600k was neck and neck with an overclocked 7600k, which means it clearly beats a non overclocked 7600k or a 7600.

up to 8 threads is important in modern gaming and clock speed is important in gaming. How modern CPUs are segmented is drastic decreases to thread count and/or clock speed, making budget CPUs commonly inferior to a 6 and a half year CPU.

considering the whole controversy over the benchmarks of the 8700k and automatic overclocking some motherboards were doing, I’m not going to assume benchmarks of a non overclocked 8700k is equal to that or close to equal to that of a 8700.

The consoles games are packed quite differently due to shared APU resources, and have MUCH lower clock speeds so don’t t have much CPU power total, thus its not that comparable optimization wise and certainly not going to encourage dev practices that will show the improvement of a 8700 over a 2600K.

The wording was “outside of games”.

The 7600k and 6600k’s scores in games vs the 7700k and 6700k at the same OC would disagree about 8 threads being important. Segmentation wise all the modern intel CPU’s have more cores than the parts they replaced, and equal or greater all core turbo (the i5 8400 is the one debatable exception with its 6 cores and 3.8ghz all core turbo, vs the i5 7600’s 3.9ghz… however the IPC gain more than offsets this AND the 8400 can 4 core turbo to 3.9ghz, so no situation is it slower), the base clocks are just a bit misleading as the delta between turbo and base has grown a lot.

There is no automatic OCing happening as as such, just Multi-Core-Enhancement (MCE), which is auto on Asus only and allowed the all core turbo to go to the single core max. BTW this works on the non-K CPU’s as well, so you get 4.6ghz all core on the 8700. and 4.7ghz on the 8700k… still the ~2% before mentioned, and actually a reasonable free gain for anyone with a non-k CPU but not the stock cooler.

you said it doesn’t compete with i7s outside of games. you said it doesn’t compete with i5s in games.

1 Like

fail, edited

I threw out the top three because to me it doesnt make sense to spend that kind of money on a system where you’re going to be limited on RAM, PCI-e connectivity, and expansion when you could spend a bit more and get comparable performance from a xeon setup and have much more room to grow or perhaps even better performance. I agree with your list though, I think the difference between you and I is that you went ahead and included those higher end chips, otherwise our list looks much the same. I wanted to give a tie to the R7/i7, but I didnt want to issue ties in this one, but I agree, either one is an amazing chip for general use, if you’re going to be gaming primarily though I have to give it to the intel.

Something really interesting I hadn’t considered was the iGPU issues on the lower end system, and thats something that I really think needs to be mentioned. That could be a huge difference I’m really glad you pointed that out! :slight_smile:

1 Like

I’m not sure about that. For the sake of discussion we wont count used hardware (even though I really love going that route). I had been trying to figure out a way to upgrade to a x99 setup with something like a 5820k for months, if not over a year around the time that Ryzen was launched. What I saw in Ryzen was x99 for the masses. I could get 5820k performance for half the cost of the motherboard and the CPU by going b350 and a 1600, same for the 6900k and a 1700. To me, that’s a tremendous increase in value, and the prices reflect that. paying $300 for a level of performance that would have run you $1000 at the start of the year seems like an increase in value to me, but again, I’ve not crunched numbers or looked at anything like that or the articles that your guys have been talking about :slight_smile: On the intel side, given that they haven’t really dropped prices on their mainstream stuff it does seem like a bit of a drag, but what do you expect? It’s intel!

1 Like

Yeah, certainly for some use cases, there is a lot of value in something like the 1700 especially. IDK, i guess it depends on just how common the different use cases are. When i think of the desktop market, i think primarily gaming, with the occasional professional user or content creator, but maybe gaming isn’t as large a percentage as i imagine.

If it wasn’t for gamers, all these great consumer CPU’s wouldn’t exist.

For anyone building a new system right now I recommend the R5 1600, once the B360 boards come out the i5 8400 is a bit better for gaming.

1 Like