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Comment by teruakohatu | Hacker News Reader

The 5900X has claimed 26% improvement for gaming. This is huge. Intel is going to have to start shipping fridges with their next batch of CPUs.

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You joke, but you really can get phase-change cooling[1]. I'm eagerly awaiting the RDNA2 announcement, as I'm really hoping to complete my current build as my first red box (AMD CPU, AMD GPU).

[1]: http://www.ldcooling.com/shop/14-phase-change

I think it was a reference to Intel's overclocking stunt.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-28-core-processor-5g... (best reference I could find quickly)

Jesus, those prices... yeah they're pretty compact, but if you do it for a desktop, you can do it for 1/2 or even 1/3 of the price by getting a portable air conditioner or a mini fridge (new or used) and modifying it for cooling. Way higher BTU transfer, as well.

There were a few of these DIY projects last time I checked, and they worked well. Downsides: big cooling unit right next to you, loud af unless you mod the fan, as well :D

Linus Tech Tips did it with an aquarium cooler:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMtvEbD2MQo

It looks like quite a straightforward setup actually. But a custom water cooling loop is almost surely a better solution.

Interesting idea!

Though it seems to me a normal PC water cooler would be cheaper nowadays :D

I watched their industrial fan experiment yesterday, that seems even easier... if you could put your PC in a separate room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM2G5vLGcQQ

I'm planning a new house and one of the ideas for the floor plan is precisely to have a small room just behind the study to put the noisy stuff and just have the peripherals in the living space. And once again LTT has done it by running all the PCs in the home from a single rack (even a single EPYC machine with virtualization) and routing fiber over the house to where the peripherals need to be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvzeZCZluJ0

I'd actually worry about erosion with that industrial fan setup.

26% at 1080, which no one buying a $500+ CPU every generation is running. The benefits will be minimal at 2k and 4k, with the same GPU, and a decent processor within the last 5-10 years.

While I agree with the sentiment here... this has been the argument Intel has been using as a "last excuse to buy Intel over AMD" - if you buy a fast enough video card, but play your games at 1080p on a really high refresh rate monitor... the gaming performance was better on Intel.

So AMD focuses on it here to say "look, your very last excuse for choosing Intel over AMD is no longer invalid."

Of course I do more "non-gaming" than gaming, so it wasn't very important to me in the first place, and I don't spend enough on a graphics card for this to matter. But I want a lot of cores for fast compilation and great multi-tasking with containers and virtual machines.

Yes of course, non gaming, dev and media work, these will be beast. I was just confused on why they were so focused on 1080p gaming performance benefits. Buying a whole new setup if you're running any relatively modern CPU would be a waste of money for gaming. At 1080 you're probably already killing it in framerate, and at 2k+ the benefits just aren't there.

Because at 1080p you can actually compare the performance maybe?

At 1080p, with a 2080 Ti (AMD's Testing Rig), the GPU is not a bottleneck so any performance difference = CPU performance difference.

Going higher than 1080p, GPU starts to become a bottleneck so you're no longer comparing CPU-to-CPU, but (CPU+GPU)-to-(CPU+GPU).

Testing game performance at 1080p is a well-known and well-accepted way to compare CPU performance.

The AMD software to control CPU doesn't work with virtualisation enabled. They have been ignoring requests to fix it for years.

What does it control on the CPU? Overclocking? I never needed to control CPU via a software...

What's the difference between 1080p and 2K?

The higher the resolution you run a game at the more likely it is that the GPU becomes the bottleneck for the frame rate.

Nothing, AFAIK

2560x1440 is often called "2k"

2K has no official designation and is sometimes used to describe 1440p.

78% more pixels at 2560x1440, also the performance sweet spot for high end GPUs.

Generally GPU load scales with resolution and graphical fidelity, while CPU load mostly just scales with framerate irrespective of resolution or graphics settings - so you might be CPU bottlenecked at max settings 1080p with an average CPU and a mid-high end GPU, but even with the current highest end GPUs and a mid range CPU you're likely not bottlenecked by the CPU at 1440p or 4k because the GPU isn't pushing out as many frames.

Nearly the same thing, give or take a few percent. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2K_resolution)

It wouldn't be the first time Intel did that.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-28-core-cpu-5ghz,372...

> Unfortunately, it turns out that Intel overclocked the 28-core processor to such an extreme that it required a one-horsepower industrial water chiller.

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