The cost is about the same, and comparing a potential video card selection of an RTX 2070 or AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, the specs seem to be fairly close. The I7 has the advantage of the higher single core clock but the AMD offerings sure are tempting.
I’ve just been looking at an AMD build too on a website! Thinking of going with a Ryzen 5 3600X, beats a last gen Ryzen 7 2700X and cheaper too, get a buffy cooler on it and overclock it to hell, with a fast SSD and memory and I ought to be set.
Well my GPU is a bit old for this system so that’s still on the table.
Anyway, AMD has been looking really really good recently and putting the fire to Nvidia and Intel.
I am a bit concerned with the new MB chipset having a fan. Those small fans can be loud. Probably would be fine, but it does seem like a step backwards.
Price wise they are pretty close for equivalent processors and MBs. AMD has more threads, Intel higher single core clock. For sims, honestly the higher clock will have a bigger benefit, but I do other stuff, like audio and graphics on this rig. I wish the price difference made it a more no-brainer.
It’s been a few years since I’ve done a new build. WTH is going on with componenet design? Shopping for an Asus motherboard everything has this god awful “gamer” aesthetic with weird angular shapes and LEDs. I mean, it doesn’t matter much because it will be hidden in a case, but my experience is that “gamer” means an upcharge and less quality. Everything gamer I’ve bought (mice / keyboards) have been junk and broken after only a few months.
The only regular looking Asus MB I found was at a premium for $380!
You can’t compare clock by clock. Different architectures usually means different amount of work being done per clock cycle. Benchmarking yields much more comparable results.
That’s a good point. Is AMD faster per cycle now? I know it is more efficient, with less power.
I did look at some benchmarks, but it seemed inconclusive. Everything around the same price-range is neck and neck for games. Maybe I’ll dig into the DCS forums and see if anybody has done a comparison.
Keep in mind that, at least in the past, Intel was the only chip architecture that was considered good for simming. AMD chips may have had comparible speeds, but the architecture was holding it back. Again, it may be a different story with the new generation, but if I were to upgrade, I would put all of my effort in researching flight simming performance.
I have been an Intel man my entire life, with Nvidia covering the graphics. The only catch to that was my first desktop tower, which after being relegated secondary to a Toshiba Qosmio X300 had to be brought back under “emergency measures” when the Qosmio’s Nvidia GPU called quits (replacements were extortionate and I could only find the Euro model, which wasn’t the same).
This was back in the days of AGP slots (which were deprecated and no new cards made for them). The only card I could get that would let me play FSX was a Radeon, as it was dual height with a fan and had 1GB of VRAM. It was a royal PITA, as I researched the chips had a fault that caused them to bugger up 2D renderings - the 2D panels in FSX would all have a diagonal cut in them with the two halves offset along the slice by a half dozen pixels.
I can stomach a chip reaching EOL and failing, but a design fault like that - no. To date I have had 3 Nvidias go out, laptop included and one other “premature” but that was a secondary card I played with SLI with. It’s warranty replacement is alive and well (and so is the original 560ti from my last build, in my dad’s PC). The third was a 660ti replaced last summer, having earned its retirement.
No Intel CPU has ever let me, or my family down (for those outdated CPUs that get handed down).
I would be interested to see if anyone has a similar story from the “other side”. My systems are long-term builds, each one goes for 5+ years before a full replacement, so Intel’s reliability is what keeps them getting my dollars.
This is why I’ve stuck with intel. Seems like AMD has good numbers, but Intel/nvidia stuff seems to always outperform it for gaming. I used to run AMD stuff until a few years ago. I loved rooting for the underdog.
@Fridge Its time for a showdown. Throw down for the best AMD has and compare it to @BeachAV8R’s new rig in a 1v1 Hell in a Cell match!
Oh yeah. That is very true. I am taking a look at the various tech site reviews and benchmarks but all lot of them seem to mention the GHz has a good indicator to single core speed. I need some DCS benchmarks - I would be tempted to do it myself but I don’t have the attention span for it.
Yup. This has been valid for as long as I can remember. I had an AMD setup years ago and it lagged behind the Intel products substantially. This gen, it is getting closer and more of the benchmarks seem to bear that out - close to Intel, but Intel still has the lead. Where they seem to differ is in the multi-core/multi-thread arena where AMD pulls a little ahead. So with Simple Radio, video capture, Discord, etc … that can all be handled, it seems to me, better by the AMD setup … but Intel would best serve DCS when considered in isolation. It’s a close call, which is why I am intrigued but AMD this round.
That is a good point to. Intel has never let me down.
Not a chance. That man has the patience to out-perform me pretty much all the time. He seems to love tinkering whereas I just want it to work
Ya, that’s the Intel route.
Don’t get me wrong, I know lots of people OC and tinker with Intel CPUs - but when I have heard of people that do that as their hobby and go more in-depth, they are usually speaking to AMD. Seems to be the customizing & tinkering playground is on the AMD side. If you do like to play around a lot, AMD sounds like the better route.
I run my PCs like servers (setup once & forget, 24x7 until failure or out of date) - and those always seem to be Intel powered.
It’s hard to judge already, but since the Ryzen gen, AMD seems to be popular with simple-minded gamers on a budget too.
Their CPUs from 5-10 years ago ran (too) hot, which is why it was mostly “tinkerers” using them, but I think the new Ryzen chips are very comparable to Intel, except from what I recall they are slightly better for multi-thread and slightly worse for single-thread from what I recall reading a few years ago.
Re “rooting for the underdog”, I also sympathize with AMD, but not because they were the underdog.
I mainly like them over their GPU competition because they tend to do things the way they are best for everyone, not just their wallet. Doing “open” instead of proprietary stuff like Nvidia.
Freesync vs GSync : AMD works with open DisplayPort standard, required hardware is included on the GPU, whereas Nvidia chooses to sell the required hardware to display manufacturers at a high profit margin cost, which causes those displays to be more expensive and only work with their cards.
HBM2, similar story, AMD developed it, made it an open standard.
And then I’m not even mentioning Nvidia’s CUDA, CuDNN (with which they monopolized Deep Learning and tied all the software to their hardware exclusively), hairworks, Gameworks etc.
Really hoping AMD is a viable option again for GPU soon, and glad to see their CPUs doing well. Hope they will also have a medium tier single-thread performance chip for us simmers soon!
3rd reply in a row, but it looks like what I recalled is NOT true for the newest Ryzen 5 3600X: it has great single thread performance! In fact, it is at the top of the list in this benchmark: the first I found when googling “intel vs amd single thread benchmark”
Simmers rejoice! We would need a test in a flight sim to be absolutely sure, but single thread performance has (at least for DCS) almost always been the determining factor for performance
I’d consider that marginal at best over the 9900k (so it wouldn’t sway me at all if I didn’t have a 9900k build already) - but a win is a win, so congrats to them!
Of course, but the thing is: an Intel i9 9900k costs about 200% of what the Ryzen 5 3600X costs!
So the Ryzen is marginally better but TWICE as cheap. This is quite a significant achievement I would say
The other caveats I see are:
AMD: 12 logical core
Intel: 16 logical core
(Multitasking only benefit)
AMD: Sample size = 6, no clock speed listed (on the results).
Intel: Sample size = 2700+, listed clock speed (limits the results to that clock speed).
Not that these would create a massive change, but the accuracy could be better. Hopefully more Ryzen users add to the sample set.
