What do you guys think would be the best cpu for my use case? I want to have a gpu passthrough vm running windows 10 that excels at running games (I always have other programs open when gaming at the least I will have chrome open) and the occasional Photoshop. On my host I plan to do some software development.
EDIT: (I don’t really want to pay more than $550)
$550 for CPU or whole system?
If just CPU ryzen 2700x should get the job done.
If whole computer you might want to save up for a bit longer.
just the cpu lol, I got $3000 saved up for the whole system.
If gaming without compromise is the primary motive I think Intel is still the leader. Of course that’s not to say you would not be pleased with Ryzen.
I think it will boil down to what combinations of mobo, cpu, memory, GPU etc are available to you. One other advantage of an Intel CPU like the i7 8700k is that you can use its graphics for the host, with Ryzen you’ll have to buy a second GPU.
I was already getting a gpu for the host so having no igpu isnt an issue
I was thinking about the 8086k but im not sure if higher clock less cores is better in this situation. (nvm just did a little research on this thing not worth it imo)
On certain mixtures of workloads, Intel requires manual adjustment of process priority (live streaming and gaming can cause that).
That said, the 8700k is good for single threaded applications but also having cores to spare, the 2700x is ideal for multithreading that is not at Threadripper-levels of insane. Both will game fine and not bottleneck at normal graphics settings.
Toss a coin?
Im probably going to go with the 2700x I also hear the am4 socket will support future ryzen processors (untill 2020) so that kinda does it for me.
R7 2700X
It’s about as fast as an 8700K in the real world on games (In recent tests it is much more competitive than 1800X was especially on newer titles) and has more cores than an 8700k to dedicate to specific things via core affinity for virtual machines. i.e., you can dedicate 4 cores (or 8 threads, or even 6 threads) to a gaming VM and still have 4 full cores left over for the host.
8700K? You’d only have 2 full cores left for the host. Or only 2 cores for the VM. So whilst per core performance may be slightly better on 8700K (and there’s much less in it than there was with 7700k/8700k vs 1800x), the granularity you have for resource splitting is much worse.
It is well within budget, the motherboards can be obtained cheaper, etc.
Plus you have socket AM4 being supported until 2020 at least.