darry wrote on 2020-07-17, 23:36:

I agree and will add that the last few generations of top of the line GPUs have been both much too expensive compared to the slightly lower end one the scale and, IMHO, thermally unmanageable . A TDP of 250 watts is too extreme for my taste and, if rumours are true, the next generation from Nvidia will be 300W+ . If things keep going in that direction, PCs will need to come with refrigeration units !

My strategy, at this point, is usually to wait until a game is a few years old so that the upper mid-range card I usually choose to buy will be able to handle these older games perfectly .

My personal limit for a GPU is a about 175W-180W TDP for a GPU, anything above that is quite unlikely to be considered .

We think pretty similarly on this topic. I just finished watching a few YT videos that focus on the i7-47xx in 2020, which seems to be a bandwagon topic lately. The basic conclusion (one I could've told them before they started) is the i7 Haswell is perfectly capable of running 2020 games with a good GPU at 60+ fps (thus not worth an upgrade to 10th gen Intel if you're just gaming). And a good GPU doesn't have to be super expensive or power hungry. I found the perfect bang-for-your-buck one in the RTX 2060 KO. It cost $300, has a TDP of ~180W (couldn't find specific TDP numbers for the KO, so guessing), and has a hard time getting below 60 fps in any game at 1080p with high/ultra details.

2020: Ryzen 9 3950x
2010: Core 2 Duo E6400
2000: Pentium II 300
1990: 386sx20

Instead of the 10 year CPU challenge, I'll just go ahead and tell the whole story (because, who doesn't like nerdy computer stories? 😀 )

1990 - the first time I ever saw a PC at my aunt's workplace. She showed me Prince of Persia and I was forever in love with computers 😀 In the following years, I was lucky enough that my best friend's dad was working as an IT engineer and he would frequently replace PCs (he basically had a different PC each month): he probably had most versions of 386, 486, Pentium, etc. So between 1990 and 1997, as you can imagine, I was constantly at my friend's house, spending weekends (and sometimes weeks) playing hundreds of games. Still, I would not have my own PC until the Summer of 1998, which brings me to....

1998 - Pentium MMX 166 MHz / 32 MB RAM / 2 MB S3 Virge DX (no Diamond Monster 3D, unfortunately 🙁 ). Boy, when I got my first PC, I was ecstatic... I can remember that day like it was yesterday. For the next few months, until school started in Fall, I barely got out of the house. 😁

2000 - AMD K6-2 500 MHz / 64 MB RAM / ATI Rage II 8 MB - one of the worst "3D" cards that ever existed. Fortunately, I quickly replaced it with an nVIDIA Riva TNT2 after a few months (probably one of the greatest video card upgrades of my entire life). Because of the ATI Rage II, I basically avoided ATI like the plague and always went the nVidia route for my "daily driver" PCs.

2002 - AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1333 MHz / 256 MB RAM / GeForce 3 Ti 200 (the performance uplift that I felt when going from a K6-2 to a Thunderbird is something that I never experienced since with any other CPU upgrade, and probably never will. The video card upgrade was also substantial, however still not comparable to upgrading from ATI Rage IIC to Riva TNT2)

2004 - AMD Athlon XP 2600+ "Barton" core / 1 GB RAM / kept the GeForce 3 Ti 200 card for a year and in 2005 upgraded to a GeForce 6600 GT

2006 - AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ / 2 GB RAM / GeForce 7600 GT - my then girlfriend, whom I had been dating for 8 months (and currently wife of 10 years), bought a new PC (that I actually put together for her) and seeing how enthusiastic I was about it, she gave it to me ❤️

2008 - First Intel CPU after a decade - Core 2 Quad Q8300 / 4 GB RAM / GeForce 8800 GT - kept this PC for 9 years (after 2010, family life became the no. 1 priority, so I kinda lost interest in computer upgrades - even though I was actually working as an IT professional since 2005). I did replace the GeForce 8800 GT video card in 2013, though, with a GeForce GTX 760 (I was still a casual gamer, playing a few titles per year - mostly sequels of childhood favorites).

2017 (before Ryzen launched) - Core i5 7600K / 16 GB RAM / kept the GeForce GTX 760 video card (well, after 9 years with the Core 2 Quad Q8300, even though I didn't really have an actual need to upgrade, I figured I might as well just do it. And, boy, this one is probably one of my worst timed PC upgrades of all time. I actually knew about Ryzen and had heard rumors that it would be good, but I never actually imagined that it would be THAT good and certainly I did not think that in a matter of just a few months, 6 core CPUs would become mainstream.

2020 - Back to AMD after 12 years, and loving it - AMD Ryzen 5 3600X / 32 GB RAM / GeForce RTX 2060 (also keeping the Core i5 7600K as sort of a backup PC - at least this is what I tell my wife, as an excuse for my PC hoarding disorder 😁 )

@bloodem - how do you justify the upgrade from the i5-7600K to Ryzen 5 3600X? At least here, they look to perform very similarly:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-C … 600X/3885vs4041
What do you do that takes advantage of the extra cores and threads?

1996: Pentium 120
2000: Athlon Slot A 650
2004: Athlon XP 2600
2008: Core 2 Duo E8500
2013: Core i5 4670K OC 4.3GHZ
2020: Ryzen 7 3700X

clueless1 wrote on 2020-07-19, 16:21:

@bloodem - how do you justify the upgrade from the i5-7600K to Ryzen 5 3600X? At least here, they look to perform very similarly:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-C … 600X/3885vs4041
What do you do that takes advantage of the extra cores and threads?

Haha, well, let's just say userbenchmark is not exactly a trustworthy source of information regarding... anything, because what those guys do is simply despicable (look it up on Google, you will see what I mean - even Intel banned them from their subreddit group).
Getting back to your question, there's just no comparison between a 7600K and a Ryzen 5 3600(X).
In most productivity workloads, the performance is more than double (video encoding, code compiling, 3D rendering). I can even see a noticeable improvement in the poorly optimized Adobe Photoshop. Mind you, these are all things that I do on a daily basis (some as part of my daily work, others for my freelancer work, others just as a hobby).
For gaming, the story is a bit different: in newer, demanding titles (especially those that are very well optimized), there's a night and day difference - this is the case in games such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Battlefield 5, Red Dead Redemption 2. For older/poorly optimized/video card bottlenecked games, the performance can be almost identical.

bloodem wrote on 2020-07-19, 17:46:

In most productivity workloads, the performance is more than double (video encoding, code compiling, 3D rendering). I can even see a noticeable improvement in the poorly optimized Adobe Photoshop. Mind you, these are all things that I do on a daily basis (some as part of my daily work, others for my freelancer work, others just as a hobby).

Okay, that makes sense. Not a lot of people encode and render for a living, so I can see how this upgrade would make sense for you. But even in gaming, I guess if you have a 144Hz monitor and want to maintain 144 fps, then it would make sense. But if you're just shooting for 60 fps, a Haswell i7 still does the trick with a $300 graphics card.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6RsDyMn2gY

I think the Haswell i7 (thanks to its hyperthreading) might actually be a bit better than the 7600K in some of the very demanding titles (it's just a supposition, though).
However, yeah, I completely agree. If it were only for gaming, I, for one, could definitely get by even with a Sandy Bridge 2500k. I'm not looking for constant 60+ FPS anyway. When I was a kid, I finished countless games on 15 FPS or so 😀. And even though 15 FPS would drive me crazy nowadays (I'm not as calm or as patient as I used to be 😁 ), I certainly don't mind 30 - 40 FPS, although, whenever possible, I do enjoy 75 FPS (which is my monitor's refresh rate).

Seeing so many Ryzen systems makes me feel all warm inside..

2000: K6-2 450
2010: Athlon X2 4400+
2020: Ryzen 3900X

In 2010 I used both a laptop (Dell Vostro 1400, Core 2 Duo T7500, 4GB RAM, 128MB nVidia video card) and a desktop (Dell Inspiron 531, AMD Athlon X2 5600+, 4GB RAM, 256MB nVidia video card). Stupidly, gave away the laptop about 4 years ago, the desktop is still with me (with a different video card, a non-spectacular 1GB ATi 4350HD).

Today in 2020 it's still the 3570K that somewhat soon will have to make room for a nice Ryzen.
In 2010 I think I was already on my E8400 (which is still sitting around here, waiting to be used for some benches)

5 years would actually be more interesting (adding a Intel heater in 2005, and the same 3570K in 2015 that is still running here, but all the interesting stuff happened inbetween)

I just so happen to have a nice comp history.txt I've been keeping up with since 2006. Here is my current 10 year challenge including everything else, with side notes of the time of purchase.

05/05/10
Intel E5200 775 w/ Arctic Freezer 7 Pro (O/C 3.9ghz) [E5200 42.98 shipped!!! Black Friday]
Abit IP35-E socket 775 (P35)
Patriot Viper II 2x 2gb DDR2 PC2-8500 5-5-5-15 (PV224G8500ELKB) [64.99 shipped, nice]
MSI N260GTX-T2D896 OC GeForce GTX 260 896MB [$184 shipped so sweet!]
onboard sound (Realtek ALC888)
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s [500 died]
Western Digital WD1600JB 160GB 8MB PATA (backup)
Samsung Black 20X DVD SH-S203N [$30]
Rosewill RX630-S-B 630W power supply [$60 shipped -great deal]
Antec Nine Hundred case [$85]
Dell Ultrasharp U2410 24" LCD monitor [$525]
Win7

03/15/20
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/30460159
Intel i5 8600K[$235]
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus [$25]
ASRock Z370 Extream4 [$165]
G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3600 [$239]
MSI GeForce RTX 2080 DirectX 12 RTX 2080 VENTUS 8G 8GB [$690]
Onboard Sound (Realtek ALC1220)
HP EX920 M.2 1TB PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 3D TLC NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) 2YY47AA#ABC [$165]
Western Digital WD BLACK SN750 NVMe M.2 2280 1TB WDS100T3X0C [$125 nice deal & free T]
OCZ TRION 150 2.5" SSD 480GB SATA III TLC TRN150-25SAT3-480G [$100]
WD Black Series WD1003FZEX 1TB 64MB HDD SATA 6.0Gb/s [$75] [Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB died]
Pioneer Black 16X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 12X BD-ROM 4MB Cache SATA Blu-ray Burner BDR-209DBK [$65]
Corsair Enthusiast Series 750-Watt CMPSU-750TXV2 [$105]
Antec Nine Hundred case [$85]
Dell Ultrasharp U2410 24" LCD monitor [$525]
2x Dell Ultrasharp U2410 24" LCD monitors [used $100 shipped each]
Win10 home retail [$120] [6/14/18]

That intel E5200 was a great bang for the buck when overclocked. Handed down to the kids and they used it for a couple more years.

I've had the 8600K, mobo and RAM for over 2 years now. RAM shortages caused crazy prices at the time, more than my CPU...

Still using the same case 🤣. Same with the monitor, I added a couple more though for nVidia surround. So worth it.