Did you hold off upgrading until Ryzen was released?

I have been advising people who have asked on the forum to look at holding off upgrading until the AMD Ryzen cpu was launched...

It's launched now with the high end Ryzen CPU R7 1800X priced at the $499 mark, and it matches the performance of the equivalent top end i7 @ $1000.

Intel will have to respond with massive price cuts soon.

So did you hold off or if not could you have bought a cheaper or more powerful system now?

More Info Anandtech -> http://www.anandtech.com/show/11143...or-under-330-preorder-today-on-sale-march-2nd

 

I have and will continue to hold off. I don't have the finances to pay Intel for their high end processors and I don't know enough about Ryzen and the chipsets yet to make a purchase. I need AMD-Vi (IOMMU) support and they haven't mentioned anything about that yet.

I have started building up parts for my new computer though. Ordered a new case (Fractal Design Define R5) and a new power supply (Corsair RM1000i). I'll likely end up ordering the CPU, MB, and RAM at the same time just because one of those can always be defective and I need all three to test.

 

The latest AMD Ryzen news is very exciting (both for AMD users and Intel users hoping for price cuts). There have been people saying for a couple years to hold have on upgrades until after the new AMD CPU is available, but a lot of people needed newer systems (and benefited from getting new systems) instead of waiting. Obviously anybody planning to build a new PC this month should hold off until after March 2. I expect Intel will need to drop some prices to remain competitive, so even people planning to build a new Intel based system would be wise to wait a few weeks at this point.

I built two new Intel based PCs since the original AMD Zen announcement back in 2015, and I am really glad I did not wait. I got a lot of use out of those systems, and still use both systems every day. I could have saved hundreds of dollars by waiting until 2017 for the new AMD CPU, but the productivity gains more than offset the potential savings of waiting.

I am hoping the AMD Ryzen release will spur a lot of PC users to upgrade. There are still lots of old PCs out there. I personally know quite a few people who have older PCs that have largely ignored PC games in recent years because their PCs have been a bit too slow to play the latest titles well. Maybe the release of Ryzen will bring a lot of PC gamers back into the fold.

 

I am thinking about 1700(x). My PC has now 8320e and it still enough for me.

I dislike Intel because of their extremely overpriced CPU. No Intel for my PC

 

We use two R4s. Fractal Design makes great cases.

 

I used a Fractal Design case for a PC that I built for my wife. She wanted a really quiet system. The case is quiet and very solid. My only complaint about the case was there was some chemical odor in the case for the first month or so, which I assume was from the sound deadening material inside the case. Did your Fractal Design cases have any initial smell?

 

I actually just built my first pc last month. At the moment with a 7700k and gtx 1080 im good. If the new intels come in a much cheaper price and nearly dbl the performance maybe I'll take a look.

 

I tend to upgrade when I need it, regardless of what the market is doing. It might be slightly more expensive that way. But power now is often better then maybe power later.

 

Not that I can recall, no. Are you sure it was coming from the case itself and not one of the components you installed?

 

How long have you been giving this advice?

 

Long enough that most peoples upgrade cycles have long come and gone.

 

Yes. Both the one I'm currently using and the one for my new computer rig had an initial odor.

 

It was definitely the case in that build, because it had the smell before I installed other components.

 

Considering that very, very little of what I do is CPU-bound, I see no reason to wait until it is released. I got an i7-6700k last year and I doubt I've once used its full capabilities.

 

my pc is still going strong on a i7 3770k, just popped a better gpu in and 32gb's a ram, and its still more than good enough.

 

I've had a quad channel CPU for ages, and only put RAM in the last two channels last week. And that wasn't even for the extra bandwidth, it was because I needed the extra memory itself.

Faster stuff is a no brainer if you can afford it and if it will make you more productive. If both of those things are true then I can't see any sense in waiting for something better to come along, because you're losing productivity while you do that.

 

I decided to splurge and get the Ryzen 1800X. Probably still dev on my fairly recent Intel/Nvidia rig but it will be nice to test on AMD as well to check performance and if there are any differences.

 

Hmmm, no idea, then. I haven't experience that. Here is a thread where people are talking about a weird smell from Fractal Design R2 case, but apparently it was fixed. Maybe not. Who knows? A Google search turns up a few other links about smell, having to do with the air filters, etc. Anyway, I love their cases and haven't smelled anything strange with them.

 

Well I am waiting to see pricing of the Ryzen PC intended for average consumers and not gamers as I already know of Quad Core 7th Gen i5 PCs that are complete except for a monitor. I don't need light baking to be that fast to pay a $500 premium for a Ryzen but if some manufacturer passes along a large economy of scale savings to the Ryzen powered PC then I'll probably try it.At anyrate, I'll be adding a Pascal architecture GPU and upgrading whatever to 32GB RAM.

 

We've not been told the prices but we've been shown the Cinebench nT scores. The 1600X scored 69% higher than the i5-7600K which is to be expected since the 1600X is a 6-core/12-thread processor while the i5-7600K is just a 4-core/4-thread processor. The 1600X is clocked at 3.6GHz base and 4.0GHz boost.

Currently the i5-7600K is priced at $239. I'd be surprised if it were much higher than that.

 

Most of the chip line up are already out for pre-order with pricing information, try Amazon AMD Ryzen or your favourite large PC components online shop.

 

We've only been told prices for the 1700 and higher. If he's interested in an i5 he's likely interested in the 1600X or lower.

 

Ryzen for UE editor is really slow ever compared to cheaper inter cpus, i don't think it will different for unity.

 

Nowadays is there any difference in terms of what features amd/intel cpus support, or is it just clock speed, cores, thermal efficiency vs pricepoint? I used to buy all AMD 15ish years ago, then at some point switched to all Intel and stuck with them since then. I'm not looking to upgrade any time soon, but I'm interested in general.
For GPUs I've encountered things like Blender only supporting GPU rendering (or some special features of it) on Nvidia cards, so I've stuck with Nvidia and probably always will, because in my experience very clearly it's less likely for me to hit a "can't do that with your hardware"-situation with an nvidia card in my actual usecases. That's the thing I care more about than price efficiency. Is this a concern at all in the CPU world nowadays? I really don't know because I pretty much ignored AMD completely for years.
In case it matters, I have 64gig Ram and wouldn't want to go back to having less.

 

There are, but it's pretty rare for anything to use them in a way that's significant. Emulation and virtualization are the only two places I've ever seen much of a deal made out of them. Every now and then a game will have issues at launch, but it's not terribly common (and it's usually because they aimed for bleeding edge tech anyway).

 

On the contrary Unity runs great on a Ryzen processor. Just finished the first of my upgrades last night by replacing the processor, memory, and motherboard in my system (the previous motherboard had ceased to POST properly in spite of my efforts to keep it running). My own tests showed significant increases in performance.

Ryzen 5 1600X
16GB DDR4-2666 Crucial Vengeance LPX
NH-U12S Noctua cooler (this thing is SILENT even under load)
512GB Samsung 850 EVO
960 GTX EVGA SSC

By the way, there are a couple quick possibilities for why Ryzen is running poorly, with the most obvious being that apps are heavily optimized for Intel because that's the only processor that was on the market for ages but there is also the fact that Ryzen's internal buses are locked to memory clock speeds. If you have slow memory the processor will actually slow down.

If you have a system that is poorly performance I recommend posting the hardware and software specs just so that we can determine if the culprit truly is UE's lack of Ryzen optimizations or if there is something potentially wrong with the hardware itself.

AMD's goal with the release of these processors was to shake up the CPU market. Their high-end consumer part is only slightly behind the equivalent Broadwell E processor it was matched against in benchmarks but was only a fraction of the cost. Likewise it was same for their high-end workstation part.

Almost immediately after they released Intel massively slashed their prices. Regardless of whether the processors perform well for their tasks they have definitely brought competition back to the market and will continue to do so.

AMD's Socket AM4 processors (Ryzen) support 64GB. AMD's Socket TR4 processors (Threadripper) support 128GB.

 

Maybe we are speaking different languages... I am not saying that your unity games will be slow but building lights, exporting and everything is really slow on ryzen compare to intel at least on UE4. If you have some benchmark on unity and ryzen put something, i don't think anyone is interested to read how beautiful their cpus are... Developing professionally a game( or everything else) using overclocked memory, cpu is never a good idea.

The "crucial vengeance lpx" doesn't exist, maybe it was a Corsair.

 

No, but we likely have a distinctly different understanding of how things work under the hood. Hardware is not the only factor you have to take into account. You also have to factor in whether the engine and the tools made for working with the engine were developed for the platform in question. I'm not talking about playing games made with it here.

If Ryzen weren't being shown as being a very good processor and within 10 to 15% of the competition on a per-clock basis in most benchmarks (especially non-synthetic) I wouldn't question whether UE4 were specifically optimized for Intel. That UE4 is the exception rather than the rule proves to me that there is something up with UE4 itself and not the fault of Ryzen.

Puget Systems is reasonably well known for their workstations. While Ryzen may not win any records when compared to Intel's processors, it's shown to have good performance for the price point and any differences are likely the results of the engine's toolset being built for primarily for Intel.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...-Kaby-Lake-X-Broadwell-E-Skylake-Ryzen-7-984/

Yet you most likely have done so without realizing it. Intel's Turbo Boost, for example, is overclocking. Before you start typing a post to justify that it is operating within manufacturer specs and warrantied, consider that any memory with a rated speed past the normal JEDEC standard is the exact same way.

That said if you're concerned about problems that may not appear except under very specific circumstances then you should be stress testing your hardware prior to making use of it regardless of whether it's overclocked because parts operating under standardized speeds are not immune to problems.

Right. I meant Corsair. It's easy to confuse names when you don't pay more than slight attention to the company.

 

Is C++ compile multithreaded? You guys are lucky (hint: mono compile multithreaded please )

I second that!
My previous mobo (a 8 year old z58 with a i7 920 !) used to have 12 gigs, which is enough. Not POSTing anymore, I'm trying out a DELL 1700x with the same amount of RAM and it's swapping furiously : when building a project, unity spawns as many shader compile processes as thread, each one eating up 600 megs, 16 x 0.6 = OS + editor = ouch

 

I've got a temp Ryzen 5 1600 until I can afford a thread ripper.
But I'm loving the Ryzen 5 1600 right now, literally my PC Boots up (with a 10 year old HD), in literally the matter of 3-5 seconds... Amazingly fast lol.

 

I'm moving from 1800x to a 1950x in the coming week. Baking light in unity will be sweet!

 

Just in time for them to switch to a GPU-based lightmapper.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/octane-lightmapping-in-unity-takes-seconds-not-hours.499751/

 

Do not hold your breath