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Comment by zapnuk | Hacker News Reader

As much as I like the new generation I'm not quite sure about those prices.

Right now I can buy:

  - Ryzen 9 3900X (12C / 24T) 3.8GHz - 4.6GHz => 389€ 
  - Ryzen 7 3700X (8C / 16T) 3.9GHZ - 4.5GHz => 299€.

It seems to me that the current Ryzen 9 3900X has an insane value compared to the new generation. Sure, it's single core performance is lower by a meaningful amount. But I'd assume that the multi core performance is WAY better with its 12 cores compared to the 6/8 cores of the 5600X/5800X.

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If you compare MSRP at launch to retail a year later, you're going to notice a big difference.

In the US, the Ryzen 9 3900X MSRP was $499 but is $70 less now. (Initially, supply was low, and it was selling over MSRP as high as ~$570.)

But they came with coolers... I have a Ryzen 2700X that I got for $230, and I still use the stock cooler. To jump to a Ryzen 5800X plus a cooler would be a huge expense. I will definitely be on the sidelines for the next six months, but then I'll revisit the pricing situation (once motherboard manufacturers release updated 400-series firmware.)

They don't ship with coolers?

Man the lack of a 5700x is really making it hard for me to not justify getting a 3700x on sale

The rumor is that any cpus with TDPs of 65W or below will ship with coolers, and ones with above that will ship without.

The thing to watch is then going to be the "5700X", i.e. the Zen3 version of the 3700X, which, if the analogy matches, should have 8 cores and a 65W TDP. It isn't in the initial slate but they left room for it in the numbering.

Well I hope they release the 5700X soon. I was excited for Zen 3, but their price bump and lack of a middle ground option left me conflicted whether I should shell out more money for a 5800X or get a last gen CPU.

> Man the lack of a 5700x is really making it hard for me to not justify getting a 3700x on sale

Sounds like a win-win for AMD. Either they sell to customers that demand the best absolute performance, or they sell to customers that demand the best value. Since they offer products to meet both demands, they don't really care which type of customer you are.

Zen 2 is still a fantastic processor, and it will certainly be more affordable than Zen 3 for the immediate future.

I got a 2700 for slightly less than $170. It is amazingly cheap.

Anecdotally, all of the PC gamers I know put aftermarket coolers on their CPUs. The box cooler is still in the box taking up space in their closet. The AMD parts especially benefit from additional cooling (higher turbo clocks). I think it makes sense to not include box coolers on parts so high up the performance chart that using a box cooler would just hamstring it.

Seems to be a mix. My two friends that game built systems with Zen+/Zen 2 systems and stuck with the stock cooler, as have I (though I do not game as much... I do hear it ramp up a bit during compilation.) My clocks are typically 4.2-4.3 Ghz on a Ryzen 7 2700X, so I don't think I'd benefit much from additional cooling.

My main problem with the AMD stock cooler isn't that they don't perform well, but that they are really noisy compared to most decent aftermarket coolers.

FWIW I just upgraded from an Intel 4790K to an AMD 3900X and while I had a big Hyper212 cooler on the Intel at the moment I'm running the bundled stock cooler on the AMD.

I understand why they're doing it and I don't disagree with the logic that most of the DIY market at that level is going to use an aftermarket cooler one way or another, but it was nice to not have to worry about it off the bat.

Sure, the prices of the new generation will fall over time.

But I still don't quite see how the multi core performance per $ of the new generation will be competitive compared to their previous generation. At least at the lower end, simply because you can buy more cores/threads for roughly the same money - although with a lower clock speed and single core performance.

However, I guess we will know more when meaningful benchmarks are released and this ends anyways when the remaining supply of 3900X is sold out.

>But I still don't quite see how the multi core performance per $ of the new generation will be competitive compared to their previous generation

AFAIK that was the case during the 3000 series launch. The newest generation always has worse bang/buck.

The difference is that the 3000 series introduced 12 Core CPUs that weren't available before AND provided increased gaming performance.

This time around the major reason seems for upgrades to be single core performance - which I guess as they didn't really go into multi core performance. But we'll know more when the benchmarks come out, and discussion beforehand is pretty pointless.

The stock cooler on the 3900x is basically the same as the one on the 2700x. It reviewed well on the 2700x but the 3900x was too much for it if you cared about noise levels. So I wouldn't count the box cooler as a huge plus for the 3900x though a revised more capable version could have been for the 5900x

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