I'm looking to snag the Microcenter Ryzen 7700X bundle the next time I'm in Chicago. Intel dominates stuff like Cinebench but that's not what I use my computer for. The Ryzens are very competitive in gaming at a fraction of the power draw and any of them are leagues ahead of my current i9-9900K in both single and multithreaded performance so I'd get a great uplift without heating up my office.

I find it amusing that my absolute best intel desktop chip you could buy in 2019 would now be considered a low power chip with it's 95W TDP.

MicroCenter also has a deal on and off (mainly keeps switching motherboards) for an Intel 12900k bundle with motherboard and 32 GB of DDR5 RAM for $400. It may not be the absolute best for raw gaming, but damn, that is a pretty good deal.

I don't know how good of a value the 7700X bundle is, but my problem is I always want more cores because I am usually compiling code. I loved the 5950X, a very fast and power efficient CPU, so my likely upgrade path is probably the 7950X or TR or whatever CPU takes the "productivity" crown next. And hopefully, by the time I'm in the market again, MicroCenter will have another unreasonably good deal available.

Personally I'd much rather use a 7700x to not have to deal with asymmetrical cores. They perform close enough otherwise, I think with the 12900k having a minor edge in some tasks, including acting as a space heater.

Also, 7700x buyers can expect CPU upgrades for a generation or two on the same motherboard. Intel's 14000 series (13000 part 2) is the end of the line CPU upgrade for the 12000 buyers.

Yeah, I learned that lesson the hard way buying a 9th gen Intel chip and having literally zero upgrade path on the same board.

My plan is to get the 7700X bundle, which for $400 with board and 32GB DDR5 is a steal, then when AM5 is replaced get a new CPU from the final generation.

Funny aside, we seem to have followed a similar upgrade path. Going back 1 further, mine was: Intel 2500k -> Intel 9700k -> AMD 7700x, with intent to get an AMD 8800X3D or something later, as it becomes available.

I have an Optiplex with an i7-2600 and 1050 Ti in the basement. We use it to Parsec games onto my wife's laptop when she (rarely) gets the itch to join in with our boys playing games.

Was the 9700K -> 7700X upgrade a nice jump? I've been running MSI afterburner and keeping an eye on GPU usage and am often only using ~80% while well under my monitor's FPS limit. It doesn't show any CPU cores pegged but I assume that's my bottleneck.

Also hurts that Intel changes socket every 5 min. I sold everything before a move and I’m looking to get a pc again. I’m looking at the used market to see if I can get a good deal and I’m surprised that the same motherboard generation I sold (Ryzen 3600) supports a 5800 that runs pretty decently today. I guess it was a good buy back in 2018.

I think if I buy new I’ll go ddr5, otherwise I’ll stick with whatever is around. But people in the bay are trying to pay rent with their PCs and want way too much for the age of components they have. Back on the east coast the same pcs go for 200 less at least. Makes negotiation a bit difficult.

Isn't domestic postage in the USA incredibly cheap? Would it be realistic to buy components from the east coast and ship them west?

This is normal in Australia, but that's due to the size of the country and the sparse population in some areas. Our prices are a rip-off equally everywhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Tax

I, too, am currently rocking a 9XXX series chip, and currently debating whether I should spring for a 7800x3d or wait a bit and see what the next gen of Ryzen's will offer.

funny thing is the 9900k was criticized pretty harshly at the time for its power consumption. expectations around power consumption have really changed over the last few years.

Issues that only go away with disabled power efficient cores beg to differ. People assume that if its 3rd in a row generation of hardware released then software support issues were ironed out before.

I don't know what software is problematic since it has yet to bite me, but hell, in that case, you can at least go Ryzen. While it's a bummer that there are basically only two high-end CPU vendors for the desktop, at least we're still spoiled for choice among their lineups, with plenty of different motherboard and CPU options. My main desktop box is Ryzen and it works great.

At least the 11th gen was a different core instead of the Nth skylake rehash, and the only consumer line to have AVX-512.

Latest Ryzen generation has AVX-512 support with some footnotes.

do those footnotes include your software crashing from an unknown opcode when it gets automatically moved to the e-cores while executing vector instructions ?

-vicuna

So far, AMD doesn't do the p-core/e-core thing. All cores will have the same ISA. They have talked about a "compact" core which seems to be a tweaked process that shrinks the core and decreases peak clocks a bit, meant to cram more cores into one chip. If CPU designs were like software, you might think of this a bit like someone choosing compiler flags to optimize for size instead of absolute speed, but still compiling the same sources.

I'm not sure what footnotes the earlier poster meant. One might be that the AMD model numbering is a bit obscure. You need to look closely that you are getting a Zen 4 core in your Ryzen, with the same model line mixing different CPU and GPU architectures in different models. I don't know if there are programmer-visible differences in what AVX-512 means to AMD vs Intel...

> So far, AMD doesn't do the p-core/e-core thing

oh... i missed the fact that they said ryzen. oops. sorry

-vicuna

No, AMD doesn't have E-Cores right now, but even when they do it won't ever crash: they have Zen4 as their P-Core and Zen4c as their E-Core. Both support exactly the same extensions.

> AMD doesn't have E-Cores right now

this is currently their best selling point, this better not ever change

-vicuna