AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D Review: 3D V-Cache Gaming Performance for Less | Hacker News Reader

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D Review: 3D V-Cache Gaming Performance for Less

hothardware.com

44 pointsrbanffy49 comments

Already down to $280 https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/1uz0grn/cpu_...

Honestly (apart from the general hardware parts pricing crisis) the problem is that you can get the 7800X3D for almost the same price or just slightly more. Especially if you have a Micro Center nearby you.

But it's not bad if you can find a good combo deal with a mobo and RAM, https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=4812%204019%204020%204021&Srch...

> Especially if you have a Micro Center nearby you

Do they have stores in every state? Even assuming they have, seems fair to assume maybe just 3-4% of people actually have a Micro Center close enough to visit, oddly specific tip :p

I assumed a 2 hour drive and used an app that told me population within each zip in a 2 hour drive (the furthest I've driven for one, I drove it 3 times, and every time it felt worth it due to the savings on full builds), and excluded overlaps as best I could. I started at the top, and got through 10 of them before I hit 30% of the US population. There are many to go. MC knows where to put their stores. If you feel this is a worthy debate point, define your criteria better, and I will complete the test with those criteria. But I think this why MC is cited so often. They tend to be where those who want them are. Or close enough.

> If you feel this is a worthy debate point, define your criteria better

Not really, was just curious to see a very US-specific tip when most of the population doesn't even live in the US, hence the "at best 3-4%" figure :)

The US is the third largest country by population and disproportionately represented here on hackernews (given it's where ycombinator is based), so it doesn't seem that weird to me.

That said, I am jealous of the micro-center deals as a Canadian!

Other countries have computer shops too.

The one where I bought the components for my current desktop has those CPUs listed, the 7800X3D is only £5 more than the 7700X3D.

It’s standard practice on the internet when talking about building PCs to mention Micro Center. Either “it’s cheaper if you have a microcenter nearby” or “this same bundle is $50 cheaper at micro center”.

> It’s standard practice on the internet when talking about building PCs to mention Micro Center.

Yeah, I see that all the time in US-specific discussions, but never in more international discussion boards, as Micro Center only has stores in the US.

It’s a shame Windows is still so far ahead for game compatibility. Feels a shame to pair such a nice CPU with such a bloated OS.

"Far ahead"? DRM'ed spyware, yes.

Everything else? Not so much, thanks to the monumental effort of Wine and Proton projects.

If you play AAA games with kernel anti-cheat then Wine and Proton are basically non-starters. Cant sidestep that a vast majority of people want to play those games.

It's primarily only the AAA multiplayer games that have that, not just AAA games in general.

Just browse the Deck Verified page for example: https://www.steamdeck.com/en/verified & https://store.steampowered.com/greatondeck/

Forza Horizon 6 and Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resync'd are both listed, and both are very recent, major AAA game launches. With top-tier Linux compatibility.

It is staggering how different the situation is now as compared to just a couple years ago. Steam Deck (and associated investments by Valve) are damn near a revolution. It's a perfect storm of the incumbent turning to shit at the same time the underdog really got its act together.

If you or your friend group is really into a game that doesn't have Linux support yeah that's a bummer, especially when it's just because of the kernel level anticheat that's horrifying in its own right (triply so when it's for a PVE game, cough cough, helldivers 2, cough cough). But I don't think that's most people anymore. The more casual and indie game scene these days is huge, and of course single player games in general continue to be super popular.

> If you play AAA games with kernel anti-cheat then Wine and Proton are basically non-starters.

Kernel-level spyware, and Wine/Proton are the non-starters?

I don't think you and the person you replied to will reach an agreement.

"Kernel anti-cheat" and "spyware" is exactly what i mean. Thry do have millions of players. But that's like 20-30 games out of 1000s that run just fine.

But that is what people play... The quantity does not matter, the quality does.

What people? Very few top games on Steam require kernel-level anti-cheat -- https://steamdb.info/charts/

Valorant

CoD

Unsure of Blizzard games

> But that is what people play

Lots of people don't play them. It's not like we don't have a choice.

Let's rephrase that statement. My game probably works fine on linux and if it doesn't there is an active community read to support it BUT the person, I purchased this game from said no.

A lot of games no longer run properly in Windows, and the only way to keep playing them is with Wine/Proton.

Windows performance is also often worse than Wine/Proton's.

As a linux gamer and enjoyer of windows v linux benchmarks you cant say windows is often worse thats just a straight out lie. Rarely is proton "better" than windows. Proton is usually about 10% less avg fps than windows. Its is closer in 1% lows and wins more often there.

What GPU? Its usually Nvidia owners that complain about lackluster Wine/Proton performance.

AMD, Nvida and intel I watch benchmarks for all GPUs. AMDs are the closest to their windows counterpart but its still around 10% roughly speaking. Keep in mind this is without ray tracing. If thats enabled linux is like 30% worse.

Nvidia is getting better I think they merged something recently that will help their vulkan pref match windows.

Win10 iot ent runs on even 3rd gen i3s very well...

Not sure whether games will run well on it.

Consider the 7600x3d also if you're in the market for something like this. It has a slightly higher base and boost clock, and half the TDP. It's 6 cores instead of of 8 but if you're building a gaming machine that may not make a big difference. If you're putting it in a small form factor the lower TDP might be helpful.

A shame the x3d cache parts lack integrated GPUs. The extra cache could be handy for inference with smaller models.

Newer models do have both the x3d cache and integrated GPU. For example AMD Ryzen™ 7 9800X3D

The 9800X3D iGPU is definitely handy in some situations, but I tried using it with a 4K wayland desktop for a little while and the performance is really not good enough just for that, unless you're OK with some sub-60hz redraw. I was hoping that the driver situation would be better than Nvidia (lots of issues failing to come back from sleep/unlock). The driver was more reliable but I couldn't live with the occasional choppy redraw. It's really not the kind of CPU that you'd buy and expect to use without a high-end GPU anyway.

Caches take die space. GPU takes die space.

People buying gaming CPUs tend to not really want iGPU taking away thermals, so it makes kinda sense?

X3D cache doesn't take die space in traditional sense: it is a separate silicon packaged by stacking.

I wonder what perf. this cpu can get in bit/ternary inference, and whether the 512AVX units(or whats it's called on AMD), get throttled.

I’ve heard that AMD chips generate a ton of heat with AVX512 operations, overclockers turn off the instruction set for more stability.

Any CPU generates more heat when it does more work, e.g. when more cores are active, or when using vector instructions.

Using the AVX-512 operations is much more efficient, i.e. the same amount of work can be done by consuming less energy. For instance, if you have a program running an AVX computation on 4 cores, you could double the throughput either by using AVX-512 or by using 8 cores, but the former variant will produce less heat.

For an overclocked system, where the normal power limits of the CPU are disabled, so it can consume a power great enough to exceed the capability of the cooler, it may make sense to disable AVX-512, for fear that one could run accidentally some program that is aware of AVX-512 and which would achieve a greater speed by using it, while also exceeding the power consumption that can be handled by the existing cooler.

On the other hand, on a non-overclocked system or in an overclocked system with a very capable cooler, disabling AVX-512 is always a mistake, which can only increase the average power consumption.

It feels like the people doing the benchmarks are stuck in time. POV-Ray benchmarks but not AI? Most people today, including enthusiasts, don't even know what POV-Ray is.

It's a gaming chip, literally a lower-cost downgrade of an AI chip meant for gamers instead of AI.

Why would it benchmarked for AI in these circumstances?

Beside, the second page look like those unnecessary AI benchmark to me. I wouldn't recognise such for certain or be aible to estimate their quality, but it's what their summary say.

Why would they benchmark it in POV-Ray if gaming is all that matters?

People who buy computers may have a primary use for them but it's useful to know performance in their secondary workloads.

Actually it would be very interesting to know how it performs for AI and whether it has a better value.

I understand where you are coming from.

But as a gamer who hasn't been able to make a significant upgrade to my rig in 6 years due to memory price and redirected processor engineering funding (all of it due to AI), it really bother me.

Weren’t the prices normal until about a year ago?

It's not a gaming chip, it's a desktop CPU chip.

Imagine thinking that all people use PCs for is games...

I assume they meant that gaming is the main market segment it serves, which from my understanding is correct. The X3D chips have great performance in games, which are generally constrained by memory latency. It's, of course, still a general purpose CPU that can do many things.

X3D is marketed as a gaming feature and benchmarks bear that out. Productivity workloads (video editing, compiling code, etc) benefit very little from the extra cache. You're better off buying a chip without it and a higher core count.

It is indeed a desktop CPU chip, but the 3dV cache is real good for gaming, thus it's also marked in that region.

From the official AMD website:

> Whatever the setting or resolution, lead your team to victory with elite gaming performance from a powerful 8‑core AMD gaming processor featuring AMD 3D V‑Cache™ technology.

I'm usually one to say the same thing, but unless you're doing something that specifically hits instruction cache hard, for most productivity workloads (compiling, video editing, etc) you're better off foregoing the cache and getting a CPU with more threads.

True, I suppose it is also useful for video editing and other uses.

The article describe it as a gaming chip, though. Might be because of the site's target audience? I don't know them.

> Might be because of the site's target audience?

Yes, but also because of official AMD marketing:

https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/desktops/ryzen/70...

> with elite gaming performance from a powerful 8‑core AMD gaming processor

I would also call it a gaming CPU, because it is what it excels at. ¯\(ツ)/¯

What kind of AI benchmarks would you like to see?

I don't know because I'm not a specialist in benchmarks. The article authors are supposedly specialists, so I'd expect them to identify appropriate benchmarks to make statements such as "while this is a good value for games and general purpose use, it fails for local AI as these benchmarks show", for example.

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