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Comment by wing-_-nuts | Hacker News Reader

Wow this is terrible timing. I was literally planning on building my first pc in 20 years and I had settled on the 7800x3d. This might convince me to hold off for a bit if the 8800x3d is right around the corner. I'm also waiting to confirm whether the 5090 will have a 512 or 384 bit bus as that informs whether it'll be a 24 or 32gb card (need the VRAM for AI / ML).

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Next generation computer hardware releases every ~18 months. No matter what you buy it will be "last gen" in like a year.

Folks who bought a 4090 around release time did make out like bandits though as far as longevity of being the best.

Yeah, but that happens once or twice a lifetime. Last time I recall was the Pentium Pro in the 90s because of the unusually large cache.

The first to third-gen i5s and i7s, for being about as fast as several generations down the line (it wouldn't be until 2017 when AMD would release the first Ryzen processors that Intel would start to clock their processors at their full potential out of the box rather than artificially limiting them). This was most visible in notebooks, where the ultrabook craze would ensure comparable laptops wouldn't reach performance parity until several die shrinks later; this was also true for desktop processors provided you bought the unlocked versions and bumped the multiplier up to the 4-4.5GHz they were all capable of on stock voltages (they'd hit a thermal wall at 4.6-4.7; bumping voltages would cause them to heat to unsustainable levels very quickly).

The same thing is true of the GTX 1080 Ti, a card that 7 years later still has comparable performance to new mainstream GPUs, the upcoming mid-cycle gaming console refreshes, and the Steam Deck.

(This fact isn't lost on nVidia, who would like to have you pay for that next decade of usefulness up front; the reason for identical market prices per quantum of performance of the 3090, 4090, and soon 5090 are that way partially for this reason.)

I bought a 3060 Ti in late 2019 :-D. About as well-timed a purchase as I've ever made.

I upgraded my 10 year old PC to Ryzen 5000 a couple of years back, and have never really looked back. Sure, it wasn't that long until 7000 supplanted it, but my PC is still just fine, and will likely be for the next 7 years or so (the biggest wild card is Windows support).

The only thing I really regret is getting a B450 Motherboard that only supports 1 NVMe SSD (and only PCIE Gen 3 SSDs). I would focus on making sure your motherboard has enough RAM and SSD expansion room, and then buy a big enough power supply for whatever GPU you want to run. You might want to figure out whether Zen 5 will have a new chipset, and if so, will the IO be significantly better. Nothing else is going to make a huge difference.

It greatly frustrates me that many AMD desktops have broken sleep/suspend modes.

I moved & started actually paying my power bill, and I really wouldn't mind my desktop's 100w draw if I could effectively suspend it and wake-on-lan it as needed (for either remote gaming, or to hop back into an existing tmux session). But if I suspend it, it goes down maybe ok, but never wakes up; I literally have to unplug it to get it back.

The various threads about give me the sense that I am far from the only one here with these kinds of issues. I tried windows, I tried turning on every wakeup I could find in the bios, I tried turning on every wakeup I could find in Linux. There's two different sleep modes, tried that. I wouldn't mind having lost like 8 hours of time to this issue, except I feel like I'm nowhere; no suspend, no tools to see what is or isn't happening. And it seems very prevalent on AMD. Frustrating.

Maybe you are having issues with the motherboard drivers/firmware. Most motherboard manufacturers are pretty terrible at this sort of stuff.

Microsoft and Intel has a very overt conspiracy to kill ACPI S3 suspend. They mostly succeeded, so suspend support on recent platforms is now no better than in 2005.

Keep in mind that the 7000 X3D processors lagged the non-X3D processors by ~6months so if that follows for the 8000 series you might still be quite a ways out from those.

The best time to realize a PC build is actually never because there will always be something better around the corner.

I have a 5800X and like building new PCs, but I'm waiting another 9-18 months for that.

You, on the other hand, have been waiting about 15 CPU generations. You can build a PC on the AM5 platform and be content for 5+ years.

Get a B650E or X670E chipset, PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 NVMe drive, 64GB of RAM (why not), 1000W power supply (thanks nvidia).

I’ve had a 5950x for better than 3 years. It really kicks ass.

The current gen hardware is great, you'll be fine.

Based on the release of the x3d chips for the 7000 series, you would be waiting until January of 2025 or so. If you keep waiting until the next chips come out, you'll never build.

By the 7800X3D now, worst case scenario the 9800X3D is so good that you'll have to sell the 7800X3D for half the price on eBay

regardless of 7800 vs 8800, the next-gen launch will also come with USB4 built into at least the higher-end chipsets, and that's worth waiting for if you are an enthusiast who cares about expansion.

that's why I think there's no race on even buying a system now with a placeholder 7800X3D... motherboards should be significantly better next year too (albeit I'm sure more expensive too).

it may make sense to jump on RAM this year though, because most forecasts have RAM prices increasing 50-100% over the course of this year (and they are already up by 10-20% from the bottom) due to large cuts in production and a large rebound in demand. It's gonna be 2017 all over again.

Keep in mind 7800 is first gen AM5, a year later, motherboard firmware and hardware bugs hopefully will be ironed out...

This fall I bought a 7700X with an MSI motherboard through a Microcenter bundle. The board came out in late 2022 and the firmware is still atrocious. I found a single release from August last year that is actually stable, anything newer causes significant problems. Failure to POST level problems.

If Intel can return to competitiveness without just dumping 300 watts* into a CPU I'll be switching back next time.

[*] https://gamersnexus.net/cpus/intels-300w-core-i9-14900k-cpu-...

No issues with Gigabyte boards, across several machines. Are you sure this isn't just an MSI problem?

I have a sample size of one, so I really couldn't say. Problems with long boot times, Expo causing BSOD, context restore not working etc appear very widespread on the AM5 platform by what I'm seeing online.

Are you on AM5? My kids' AM4 board is a Gigabyte, and my friend has two AM4 MSI boards and they're all working fine.

I am on AM5 (Asus TUF B650M PLUS Wifi) and I am rock solid at 6200/CL28 with HYNIX A die 64GB. CPU is 7800X3D and GPU 7900XT.

I was able to enable context restore and cold boot happens in 13-16 seconds straight to the desktop.

AM5, yes. I was happy with an Asus board for the duration of AM4, but given recent events I decided to switch.

Sorry, what recent events? I was under the impression that ASUS was one of the better board / gpu manufacturers?

Not who you asked, but Asus was in the news last year for overvolting the CPUs on their AM5 boards killing both the CPU and motherboard itself.

That's the one. I know it's rare, but I saw a CPU catching fire and noped out of there.

Two recent builds with Asrock MBs, one CPU 7950X, another 7800X3D, both run very stable with GSkill CL30 6000MT/s memory (overclocked to 6200MT/s).

One of the reasons why I stuck to Intel CPU's all these years - they just work out of the box - no memory profile weirdness or chipset issues.

> This fall I bought a 7700X...

I built a 7700X (which is my daily driver) about a year ago: haven't had a single problem. I used an ASUS Prime B650-Plus motherboard:

https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/pr...

It's working so well I didn't even bother looking if there were any new firmware available.

Crossing my fingers for 4 DIMMs with XMP (or at the very least, running at 4800MHz) with the 9000 series

wait wait hold up, is this why AM5 can't seem to run more than 2 dimms without the perf crashing? I'm having to find 32gb sticks right now because 4x 16 would be way worse

Get this [1] and never look back. They are HYNIX A Die, with a good timings (CL30) and with good speed (6000 MT/s), as well as with a spacious room for overclocking.

[1] https://pcpartpicker.com/product/6QcgXL/gskill-flare-x5-64-g...

Get 7800X3D now, upgrade to 8800X3D as soon as prices and stocks will settle. It will be on the same AM5 platform.

Most people don't upgrade every year though.

X3D chips usually arrive later.

Also keep in mind that the 5000 series is likely to have new power connectors

I'm in the same boat, though looking at the 7950X. May wait.

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