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Comment by mothsonasloth | Hacker News Reader

Its funny how about 4 years ago when I was building my last gaming rig people were saying don't bother with AMD unless you're getting a GPU.

Oh how the tables have turned.

Speaking of which, time for a new gaming rig...

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A 4 year old gaming CPU should still be plenty today. It's great that we're getting more cores, but they aren't much faster than the old ones, and many games haven't figured out how to use more than about 4.

GPUs? I have a few hundred old unplayed games on Steam that I'm working through. See you next gen!

I would hope games know how to use more than 4 cores seeing as the current crop of consoles all have 8-core APUs, even if one or two of those cores are reserved for the OS/network stack.

XB1 and PS4 have been out with their 8-core APUs for 5 years now, hasn't changed the importance of single-threaded performance. Amdahl's law still applies.

Just because it uses more cores it doesn't mean the game is interesting to play.

I'm still running an i7-4790K I got around when it came out (5 years ago)... getting kind of anxious to build a new PC, not because I need anything faster. Upgraded to NVME drive and GTX 1080 a couple years ago.

Will probably do a new system in the spring with my income tax return. Leaning towards R7, maybe Threadripper, currently. They're finally getting faster enough to justify the cost.

aside: switched to hackintosh for my OS last year, been very happy. Hoping the osx-amd support isn't too difficult when I upgrade.

I am running an i5-2500k from 2011 as my desktop. Just dropped an rx580 in as my graphics card, and it's running great for my light gaming purposes (overwatch, 1080x60 screen). I think I could get away using it for 1440 or 1080x120 pretty comfortably.

> but they aren't much faster than the old ones

Each year the new CPU it's about 20% faster then the old one. After 4 years, it adds up. A top Intel CPU will now deliver twice the same single-thread performance than a 5 year old one of same price.

That's demonstrably not true. A 4 year old 4790K stands literally right next to 8-th gen CPUs in terms of both single and multiple core performance. A rather large leap happened when the architecture moved to DDR4, but CPU "performance" has hugely stagnated. I don't know where you're getting the 20% from but its definitely not the case in the last 5 years.

As a 4790K owner, I couldn't agree more. I just got around to doing a mild overclock and honestly the chip isn't holding me back even gaming 4k@60fps.

Same here. I'm going to wait for Zen2 before moving on. 8c/16t at 4.5+ GHz will be a compelling upgrade.

4k@60 is GPU bottlenecked, not CPU bottlenecked. It's pushing for 144fps where you'll start to be cpu bottlenecked in eg. Battlefield multiplayer or Assassins Creed. (also having a 4core/8thread cpu helps quite a bit vs 4core/4thread now that games have started pushing CPU limits again, especially with the 1% and 0.1% lows that cause stutter).

I've literally just upgraded from 4670K(4c/4t) to the 4790K(4c/8t) because Forza Horizon 4 was stuttering every now and then, the CPU was basically at 100% load all the time. Switching to a CPU within the same architecture but higher thread support has fixed all issues completely .

> the new CPU it's about 20% faster then the old one

Source? I suspect you're being shown a few choice benchmarks which demonstrate some improvement, perhaps where something became newly vectorizable...but realistic and consistent benchmarking doesn't show nearly that level of improvement.

One area in which you may benefit is in peripherals - an M.2 SSD and DDR4 RAM will help, and those aren't available on 5 year old motherboards. Also, power savings may be found with newer systems if you're in a laptop form factor where that matters.

But let's not pretend that single-threaded performance has doubled in 5 years. Here's one article that goes back quite a ways....and 2012 SPECint comes in at about 60,000 while 2017 comes in at 83,600.

https://www.karlrupp.net/2018/02/42-years-of-microprocessor-...

I doubt that number, too. Our CPU-bound workload runs "only" 20% faster on an i7-6xxx than it did on an i7-920 (calculated for equal clocks; due to the higher clock it was actually about 60% faster, which caused me to do the math because I feared a regression). That's far away from 20% per generation.

But in one thing you err: After a small custom BIOS mod, my home PC now boots from nvme - with a Z68 board (Sandy Bridge era), the module sitting in a PCIe adapter card. Was just a matter of adding some UEFI module.

Yeah, my mb had an nvme m.2 slot, but it was pciex2, so the x4 card (most seem to be) didn't work. Why I went with an adapter.

The main thing lately is when I'm running a lot of containers/vms for workloads it tends to box down a little. Outside of that and 4k 3d, don't notice it ever. But the new stuff is only just starting to get better enough that I may upgrade next year sometime.

M2 SSD is available on Haswell (Xeons at least) via a PCIe Board. Thats more than 4 years old.

I'm using a PCIe x4 card adapter for my NVME drive, runs great.

Speaking of which, time for a new gaming rig...

I had the same thought coming into this thread-what a great time to be in the market for a new machine. I welcome this competition, I want AMD to get better in the CPU game, but will gladly scavenge the spoils of this.

How do you want them to get better? Single core freq at the top end is the only advantage I believe Intel has at this point. AMD is cheaper, more IO, more cores at roughly equivalent speeds. If you are building a 10k gaming rig, I understand, but in general I don't see why you wouldn't go with AMD unless you need it to be have a better TDP. To that point, I expect Intel to continue to rule the laptop market.

Edit: clarified that I don't see Intel not ruling laptop market.

They could look to beat the i5-8400 in gaming perf. Don't really care though since gaming is an afterthought for the ryzen/threadripper plan to own the server market.

Gaming is the only space where intel is has an advantage over ryzen. It's better or as good in the rest of the workflows already

What's holding AMD back on TDP? I'm in the market for a new PC fairly soon - probably SFF desktop rather than laptop, but I'd still prefer to keep fan noise, heat and electricity usage down.

TDP is quite high on ryzen chips, and they auto overclock. The 2nd gen will go as high as it can with safe voltages, provided thermals and power are in check

I understand that it's high, I'm asking why. Are they not interested in the laptop market? Does Intel have some secret sauce they can't replicate?

Bigger transistors and more cores. https://youtu.be/ucMQermB9wQ describes this in more detail.

Likely. AMD uses Global Foundries to fab their CPUs. GF's fabs aren't as advanced as Intels, and ramping up clocks (thus more TDP) is the only way AMD can stay competitive on single thread performance.

If you had a top of the line Intel CPU from 4 years ago, today it'd still be competitive with AMD's top CPUs, at least for gaming.

If you had a top of the line AMD CPU from 4 years ago, you'd have a nice toaster.

AMD fans have gotten louder than ever (and quieter, heh), but the fact remains, AMD can barely compete at the top end as far as gaming goes.

For a short while, AMD had finally met up with Intel at the top end of gaming CPUs (i7 8700k vs Ryzen 7 2700x).

Now the i9 9900K clobbers that comparison.

And yes, some people will immediately yell no fair because the 9900k will cost up to 200$ more, but if you're building a PC to last years, who cares?

My gaming PC has a 4790k that's been running at 4.9 Ghz for over 4 years now. I upgraded the GPU to a newer card, Vega 64 (would have been a 1080ti but all the 38" ultrawides only support Freesync), and that 4 year old CPU isn't a bottleneck yet.

Saving 200$ back then would have been the difference between needing a new motherboard, CPU and RAM today, easily a justified investment.

I know where you're coming from, I did the same just two gens earlier (i7-2600, r9 290, WQHD) and am quite happy with that. But: That's back then... Today the situation is different, since the two can actually compete.

In what way does the 2700x compete with the 9900k?

My whole comment is about how if you’re trying to build a PC that lasts, you’re easily justifying the only drawback, the 200$ increase

I game on my FX-8350 with latest titles with no problems.

I mean, technically?

I remember a recent review stating whether you could still use an FX chip for modern games and the answer was essentially, technically, if you only play at 1080p, have a very beefy GPU (which will then be gimped by the FX) and are careful with settings.

The 7700k was getting almost double the FPS in the same rig...

Meanwhile benchmark videos show the 4790k at most 10 FPS of the 7700k in almost every single game tested, and never the difference between playable and never struggling to exceed 60 FPS, even at higher resolutions.

Do most gamers need the latest hardware or care that much about framerates, or do they care more about actually playing games? I'd suggest the latter.

Why the false dichotomy? I’m sure it sounds pretty to you but it’s pretty silly...

Do most gamers who shelled out dollars for the top of the line gaming CPUs of their day care about framerates? Yes.

Does that mean they don’t care “actually playing games”? Apparently you think so...

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