GPUs? I have a few hundred old unplayed games on Steam that I'm working through. See you next gen!

Will probably do a new system in the spring with my income tax return. Leaning towards R7, maybe Threadripper, currently. They're finally getting faster enough to justify the cost.

aside: switched to hackintosh for my OS last year, been very happy. Hoping the osx-amd support isn't too difficult when I upgrade.

Each year the new CPU it's about 20% faster then the old one. After 4 years, it adds up. A top Intel CPU will now deliver twice the same single-thread performance than a 5 year old one of same price.

Source? I suspect you're being shown a few choice benchmarks which demonstrate some improvement, perhaps where something became newly vectorizable...but realistic and consistent benchmarking doesn't show nearly that level of improvement.

One area in which you may benefit is in peripherals - an M.2 SSD and DDR4 RAM will help, and those aren't available on 5 year old motherboards. Also, power savings may be found with newer systems if you're in a laptop form factor where that matters.

But let's not pretend that single-threaded performance has doubled in 5 years. Here's one article that goes back quite a ways....and 2012 SPECint comes in at about 60,000 while 2017 comes in at 83,600.

https://www.karlrupp.net/2018/02/42-years-of-microprocessor-...

But in one thing you err: After a small custom BIOS mod, my home PC now boots from nvme - with a Z68 board (Sandy Bridge era), the module sitting in a PCIe adapter card. Was just a matter of adding some UEFI module.

The main thing lately is when I'm running a lot of containers/vms for workloads it tends to box down a little. Outside of that and 4k 3d, don't notice it ever. But the new stuff is only just starting to get better enough that I may upgrade next year sometime.

I had the same thought coming into this thread-what a great time to be in the market for a new machine. I welcome this competition, I want AMD to get better in the CPU game, but will gladly scavenge the spoils of this.

Edit: clarified that I don't see Intel not ruling laptop market.

If you had a top of the line AMD CPU from 4 years ago, you'd have a nice toaster.

AMD fans have gotten louder than ever (and quieter, heh), but the fact remains, AMD can barely compete at the top end as far as gaming goes.

For a short while, AMD had finally met up with Intel at the top end of gaming CPUs (i7 8700k vs Ryzen 7 2700x).

Now the i9 9900K clobbers that comparison.

And yes, some people will immediately yell no fair because the 9900k will cost up to 200$ more, but if you're building a PC to last years, who cares?

My gaming PC has a 4790k that's been running at 4.9 Ghz for over 4 years now. I upgraded the GPU to a newer card, Vega 64 (would have been a 1080ti but all the 38" ultrawides only support Freesync), and that 4 year old CPU isn't a bottleneck yet.

Saving 200$ back then would have been the difference between needing a new motherboard, CPU and RAM today, easily a justified investment.

My whole comment is about how if you’re trying to build a PC that lasts, you’re easily justifying the only drawback, the 200$ increase

I remember a recent review stating whether you could still use an FX chip for modern games and the answer was essentially, technically, if you only play at 1080p, have a very beefy GPU (which will then be gimped by the FX) and are careful with settings.

The 7700k was getting almost double the FPS in the same rig...

Meanwhile benchmark videos show the 4790k at most 10 FPS of the 7700k in almost every single game tested, and never the difference between playable and never struggling to exceed 60 FPS, even at higher resolutions.

Do most gamers who shelled out dollars for the top of the line gaming CPUs of their day care about framerates? Yes.

Does that mean they don’t care “actually playing games”? Apparently you think so...