CPU/Motherboard recommendations?

The CPU fan on my Laptop has died (a month after the warranty expired) so I am currently using my old desktop while I am waiting for a new fan to arrive from China. I am toying with the idea of upgrading the desktop if there are any good Boxing week sales on. It currently has an old i5-3570K and a Radeon R9 390 video card. I am not looking to upgrade my video card at this time. My laptop has the i7-6700HQ and Nvidia 1070 video card.

I mostly use my computer for VR application/game development and related activities. The desktop also gets used as a Plex server. Does anyone have recommendations for what to upgrade the processor and motherboard to? To be worthwhile it would need to be significantly faster than the processor in my laptop but still not terribly expensive (i.e. good value for the money). Thanks in advance.

 

I recommend an Intel i7-8700k for current desktop builds.

 

That's definitely the processor to choose if you have programs that are more dependent on single-core processing speeds than multi-threading. For tasks that are heavily dependent on threads though I recommend a Ryzen 7 1700 (or an 1800X if you don't want to overclock).

 

I'm on a Ryzen 1800x. 8 cores is nice. But I would buy a Threadripper 1950x if I bought a computer today.

 

Unity development differs from regular gaming in that for Unity development more cores is far better than fewer but faster cores. For just playing games the opposite is generally true.

After that, put your project on an SSD, get a decent amount of RAM, and a better than average video card.

I'm pretty happy with my desktop I built a year and a half ago. 6 core i7, 16GB of RAM, 512GB Intel SSD, NVidia 980. I would be looking at any 8 core or higher CPU if I was building a new computer today.

 

About SSD, m.2 is the way togo. I'm very happy with my Samsung 960 PRO

 

Just a quick note on M.2 drives. You need to verify that you're getting an NMVe model as the non-NVMe M.2 drives are identical to SATA III in performance. The Samsung 960 series, for example, are NVMe drives but the 850 series is not.

 

Intel 286 with 640k of RAM.

 

Recently upgraded to Ryzen 7 1700 with GIGABYTE GA-AB350-Gaming 3. This combination was one of the best values I could find and has been great so far. I use this computer as both work and play.

 

What's good with the Zen is that the single core perf is so bad so if you get the game to run smooth on it you know it will work with any current or last gen Intel

 

You have a strange definition of "bad". AMD Zen's single core performance is at best only about 10% behind Intel while having more cores at a more affordable price. Going forward I expect games to slowly lose most of their dependency on single core performance and the fact that Intel scrambled to assemble an answer to Zen is good proof of that.

Besides it isn't like you need current generation hardware for most games. Up until recently I was playing some of the more demanding/less optimized games out there on a processor equivalent to a second generation Intel i5. We're now up to 8th generation Intel.

 

I agree that the Zen single core performance is only slightly behind Intel per clock. The Zen cores are not bad. The big advantage of going with the Intel i7-8700K is the extra clock speed. Unless a game is fully utilizing all of the cores evenly, then the extra clock speed and slight performance advantage per clock add up to more overall performance than 2 additional cores can provide.

The Intel i7-8700K has 6 cores at 3.7GHz with a 4.7GHz turbo. The AMD Ryzen 7 1700 has 8 cores at 3.0GHz with a 3.7GHz turbo. The AMD Ryzen 7 1800X has 8 cores at 3.6GHz with a 4.0GHz turbo. If somebody is running an application that completely uses all of the cores and uses them evenly, then the AMD Ryzen will run better overall thanks to the two additional cores.

However, nearly nothing falls into that perfect use case. In most applications and most games, the CPU usage is not split completely evenly across all of the cores. Often times there will be one core getting significantly more workload and that can create a bottleneck. When that happens, the single threaded performance becomes more important.

I am not currently aware of any game that plays better on the Ryzen 7 than on an Intel i7-8700K. The performance of the Ryzen systems is good enough to warrant serious consideration, especially for users that have applications that do scale really well with additional cores.

 

inb4 arowx shows up and starts talking about Ashes of the Singularity benchmarks.

 

Last time I looked, the old i7-7700K outperformed the Ryzen 7 in Ashes of the Singularity. Unless something has changed, I would expect the i7-8700K to do even better in Ashes of the Singularity.

 

He'd tell you to wait for the next great technology from AMD. Currently that's the Ryzen refresh happening in Q1 2018.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd-ryzen-2-launch

Only confirmed information to my knowledge is that it'll be shrunk from 14nm to 12nm.

 

You could wait for round 2 of the Intel / AMD competition or take advantage of the reduced prices round 1 has produced?

Bigger factors to consider are probably socket lifetime and GPU and Memory speed and price.

 

Thanks everyone for the replies. I did not know that about the m.2 drives but I had already purchased a 500GB Sata ssd. My desktop has a 128GB ssd which is nearly full so the first thing that I did was order a new ssd. It arrives today from Amazon.

 

There is a performance difference with the NVMe M.2s but I'm still on SATA III SSDs because the price difference between the two is the same as the price difference between 512GB and 1TB. I'd much rather have the capacity myself.

 

It's more than 10 procent more like 15 or even 20. Even my old 3770k@4.5 ghz slightly outperformed my 1800x@3.95 ghz. I have a magic wall at 3.95 if I go behond that I have to increase the voltage behond safe levels. Anyway I'm still happy with my Amd, it's so much faster than a 4 core as a workststion and the soldered lid makes the CPU very efficiently cooled with my custom loop. I really hope Intel stops gluing their lids now.

Can't wait for zen2, the 12nm zen+ isn't worth it for me since it's the same core amount. I understand why they kept it at 8 cores, they don't want to compete with their own Threadripper. Let's hope zen2 (AM4 compatible btw) will come with atleast 16 cores

 

AMD's Threadripper was a side project by the engineering staff. Eight cores was always the goal for desktop.

http://www.pcgamer.com/amd-engineers-built-ryzen-threadripper-in-their-spare-time/

 

AMD have not announced the max number of cores for Zen2 yet

 

That's irrelevant to the part of your post I was quoting. You said you "understand why they kept it at 8 cores" but what you seemed to be unaware of was that Threadripper was never part of AMD's plans until some engineers took the time to prove it was viable without extensive changes.

Regardless I wouldn't expect to see 16 cores from the next major release of Zen. Increasing cores beyond four made sense because there are apps and games both currently available and incoming that could use more, but there are very few that can truly go beyond eight.

 

Yeah, I agree that 8 core is most likely for the next gen AMD Zen2 CPUs. I would expect an increase in clock speed, though.

 

But it would be retarted not to up the cores for Zen 2. Since Intel has 12. I among many others would go Intel again

edit: also dotn mix up Zen+ (12nm) with Zen 2 (7nm). Zen+ is confirmed not to have more than 8 cores

 

Last I heard Global Foundaries, the manufacturer for Zen parts, was promising 5 GHz for their 7nm fabrication.

Workstation users will always go the way that gives them the power they need to perform their task, but your average desktop user doesn't need anything remotely close to the high end core counts that are actually feasible from both manufacturers. Plus Intel's high core counts are exceedingly expensive compared to AMD's.

I'm not mixing them up at all, but I'm also not stupid enough to believe AMD would blindly increase core count non-stop with every major generation when that's exactly the problem they had with AMD FX. They increased core count only to discover most apps and games still demanded high individual core speed. The result almost bankrupted them.

 

Its not that big price difference between a 1800x when it was released and a skylake-x 10 or 12 cores. Atleast not here in Sweden. Plus workstations are tax free. I can tell you off the bat AMD will lose me as a costumer if they don't have atleast 12 cores for zen 2, I can't be alone. I could stay on 8 if they can perform kaby lake single core perf on it, but I doubt that will happen

 

For the United States, the Ryzen 7 1800X had a price at launch of $500 with the 1700 selling for $350. The ten core count Skylake-X part was thus twice the price of an 1800X and triple the 1700. Most people have had no troubles overclocking the 1700 so that's the model generally recommended and purchased.

Once again workstation users will go where the performance is, but not everyone needs the power of a high end workstation either. There certainly aren't very many people recommending high end systems in most of these threads.

 

Crazy here in Sweden the 12 core skylake-x is 11 000 SEK (1 340 USD). The Ryzen 1800x was about 7000 SEK if I recall correctly. So only 4k difference. And that's included tax. Since this is taxfree the absolute difference will be much smaller. So in the end its more about the absolute number of cores than cores / dollar

 

If you wanted the absolute highest number of cores you could always buy Intel's highest Skylake-X part, but then you start encountering the real problem Intel currently has with high core count processors. Their processors quickly drop in clock rate as you increase in core count. A mere 2.6 GHz on the high end.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16819117836

 

Yeah they need to stop gluing their lids F***ing idiots

 

Here in the USA, the Intel Core i9-7900X Skylake-X 10-Core 3.3 GHz is currently about $950, which is about the same price point as the AMD RYZEN Threadripper 1950X 16-Core 3.4 GHz (currently $900). The 8 core AMD Ryzen 7 CPUs are currently $300-$350, which places them in competition with the Intel Core i7-8700K 6-Core 3.7 GHz (currently $390). Unless Intel makes some significant lineup changes next generation, I doubt Intel will offer more cores at either price point.

 

It is not just that. The other issue is simply that a bunch of cores running at high clock speed will give off a bunch of heat. If there is too much heat per socket, it can be a serious issue in densely packed server rooms (with regards to high end Xeons). Soldering the lids can help overclockers with one fast CPU per computer, but it won't help as much in large server farms.

 

Especially for an architecture that was never designed to scale that dramatically that soon. Only two years ago the highest core count processors from Intel were 18 cores (with a rather paltry 32 PCIe lanes I might add).

https://ark.intel.com/products/84685/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E7-8890-v3-45M-Cache-2_50-GHz

Suddenly AMD shows up the very same year as the above processor is launched announcing they're releasing a 32 core chip (with 128 PCIe lanes) and Intel is suddenly under pressure to do the very same with their chips.

https://ark.intel.com/products/120498/Intel-Xeon-Platinum-8180M-Processor-38_5M-Cache-2_50-GHz

Unfortunately for Intel their processor series doesn't scale very well with heat. Where AMD's Threadripper and Epyc both tie in terms of TDP (180W), Intel's 28 core jumps up to 205W from the 18-core's 165W. That's while having fewer cores, way fewer PCIe lanes, fewer memory channels, much higher cost, and so on.

http://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-epyc-7601

 

My 14 core Xeon runs at 3.0 GHZ when under full load (2.6GHZ standard, 3.4GHZ turbo), unless you want to OC them I still think Xeon's are the best way to go.. Also they seem to be (oddly) cheaper in a lot of respects due to silly discounts, or they can be bought second hand from the platitudes of dumped servers after refreshes.

Mine is a V3 which is older gen, but still manages to get a 22K passmark score..

 

This makes Vega seem all the more ironic.

 

Does anyone know if these are good prices? Both the Ryzen 7 1700 and 1700x are selling for $379cdn. The gigabyte motherboard is $119cdn (GIGABYTE GA-AB350-Gaming 3 AMD RYZEN AM4 B350 RGB Fusion Smart Fan 5 HDMI1.4 M.2 SATA 6Gbps USB 3.1 Type-A ATX DDR4 Motherboard) and this memory: Corsair CMU16GX4M2A2666C16 Vengeance Memory 16GB (2x8GB) 2666 (PC4-21300) C16 for DDR4 Systems, is $204cdn. The AMD processors appear to have the largest discounts right now.

 

I ordered the Ryzen 7 1700x, gigabyte motherboard and ddr4 3200MHz memory this morning using Amazon Prime. It is guaranteed to arrive by 9pm today. I ordered my laptop fan over a week ago and who knows where it is now.

 

There is a vulnerability bug in Intel CPU's and the patch will reduce performance...

https://www.extremetech.com/computi...g-leaves-kernel-vulnerable-reduce-performance

Note you should keep an eye on this news as it appears to be new and lacks details e.g. patch/cpu's affected.

It does mention that between 7% and 23% slowdowns have been recorded on patched systems.

 

Additionally there is a possibility it'll happen with AMD too.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7nqwoe/apparently_amds_request_to_be_excluded_from_the/

 

AMD official update: https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution

Quick summary there are 3 types of issue

1. Rogue Data Cache Load: Cannot affect AMD due to architecture differences.
2. Branch Target Injection: Not expected to be a problem and has not be shown by tests to affect AMD chips.
3. Bounds Check Bypass: Can be fixed with an OS patch.

 

Apparently this or a similar exploit can be used via web browser -> https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/01/03/mitigations-landing-new-class-timing-attack/

Is this big enough to have it's own thread or is it not really game related even thought it has massive IT global security impacts?

 

It has its own thread now:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/possible-impact-to-game-development-with-unity.511121/

 

Just a few initial observations now that I have it up and running.

• I really need to read descriptions more closely. I bought the 1700x after reading that the 1700 came with a cooler, not knowing that the 1700x and 1800x did not. So ironically, the upgrades that I bought because my laptop's CPU fan was not working, did not have a CPU fan.
  
• I need to clean my case more frequently. I was reading the manual for my case and was reminded that I had LED lights in the fans. I turned them on but could barely see them. Turns out they were completely caked in dust as was much of my PC.
• Version control is great except that I need to commit and push more frequently. I had to boot up my laptop and commit and push my most current changes. Luckily the thermals on the MSI laptop are very good and it did not heat up too much while doing this.
  
• Gigabyte software sucks. The LED software for the motherboard was chewing up CPU cycles, heating up the CPU, hurting performance, and making the computer louder because of the cooler being more active.
• Lightroom is so much faster than even my laptop which surprised me because I didn't think it was optimized for multiple cores.
• The new processor fixed some slowdowns that I was getting when playing my VR application through the editor (on my desktop). This is great because it means that I won't need to upgrade my video card just yet.
• The Plex server appears to be much happier with the new processor. I'm not sure why that is since my old processor should be fast enough for a single stream.

This is all based on my current install of windows. I will probably perform a clean install when the fan for my laptop arrives from China.