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Comment by MR4D | Hacker News Reader

For AMD reference, it’s almost 10% faster than a Ryzen 9 5950X.

I'm not sure it's fair to say the 5950X is a good point of reference. The 7950X has been out for quite some time at this point and the 7950X3D is announced and expected to be available next month.

And a ton of people are cross-shopping more expensive newer parts with still-available 5000 series CPUs which are much cheaper. There’s an interesting question about whether absolute performance is more important or if you should weight that against cost and/or power.

The GN benchmarks recently have done a good with explaining both the cost perspective and the performance-per-watt.

Edit: for reference, Newegg currently has the 5950x and 7950x at $500 and $600 respectively. And that’s before the higher platform cost for AM5/DDR5.

The 5950x uses DDR4. The 7000 Ryzen series uses DDR5.

How is that different than what I said? To quote myself:

> higher platform cost for AM5/DDR5

If reading a review of the newest vendor's product, it is only fair to give the performance of the competitor's similar generation release. If there are strong availability/price concerns (eg generation N+1 is triple the cost of generation N) those should be noted as to why not performing the most appropriate apples-to-apples comparison.

Calculating performance / dollar is an entirely different exercise (though valuable, and rare is it the newest generation that hits the sweet spot).

That’s one definition of fair, sure. I use a different one; how does this option compare to my other options, sans artificial constraints.

As another example of this, there’s a great mkbhd video comparing new cheap smartphones with old flagship smartphones. He does that every couple years, and it always gets a ton of “I never thought of that” comments.

The 7950X3D is not going to be faster in non-game benchmarks. Most likely it will be a bit slower in most synthetic tests and non-game workloads (rendering, encoding, FEA etc.)

It's a fair point of reference for those of us with a 5950X, which was a top performer a couple years ago and is still a damn lot of CPU no matter how you slice it.

Living in a place where electricity costs are very high, such as California, the AMDs have much better price to performance when compared to the Intel CPUs over a period of 3-5 years (which is how long I normally wait before upgrading CPUs).

Also to mention, 5950X has long been out of stock in many places.

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