Re:Intel Core I7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
by M277 on Saturday March 06, 2021 @02:58PM
(#26370042)
Just a small correction, most of the AM4 motherboards released in 2016 and 2017 do _not_ run Zen 3. Only few vendors (I think ASRock is the only one?) added support for Zen 3 on B350 / X370 / A320. The rest only added support on B450 (2018) / X470 (2018) / B550 / X570 / A520. If you were one of the original Zen buyers in 2017, you are unfortunately limited to Zen 2 CPUs, unless if you had an ASRock motherboard.
> Of course, Intel's CPUs have [...] lessor upgrade path
One big + for AMD is their socket system, and keeping it the same for multiple generations via a roadmap so people can plan. Contrast that with intel, who comes up with a new socket every generation forcing you to buy a new motherboard and likely new ram if you want to upgrade. AMD's Socket AM4 was released in 2016 and works with Zen+, Zen 2, Zen 3 and Excavator microarchitectures. If you upgraded every 2 years, that's 3 motherboards and memory sets you would have had to purchase if you went with Intel vs a single motherboard/memory and upgrading only the cpu with AMD. That's quite a premium.