AMD vs Intel

Off-Topic Games, Gaming and Hardware
21

This is part of what I wrote - which is why I say it’s not just about upgrades for me. My husband and I built the same rigs at the same time with the same parts - he has basically been forced to change out GPU’s, RAM, and his CPU while I’ve had a fan go out and upgraded GPU’s (not forced on death). Parts will go out, but I don’t want them to kill my entire rig like they did when I first started building and bought “the best” only to find issues later.

This is what I’m trying to figure out so thanks to you both. It seems detrimental for a company to make home-repair a nightmare to the hobbyists (their target audience I would think) so I wanted to get feedback from other users before I discount Intel in my next build.

My current CPU is AMD, but it is rather old and honestly? It’s only AMD due to compatibility issues with other items in our build, but even those don’t matter anymore.

22

I would say the one thing of highest importance (and likely to be the culprit of destroying components) isn’t and AMD or Intel thing, it’s a power supply thing and an overall build quality thing.

Get yourself a quality unit, get yourself a quality motherboard (either AMD/Intel based), and a good case.

Most damage I find is from bad PSUs, bad airflow/case design, shorting on case design, and low quality motherboards that can’t handle the power delivery.

Brands aren’t everything; you need to look up each individual product. Not all Corsair PSUs are good, not all are bad, etc. etc. Same goes for motherboards.

PC building/tweaking is much easier than it used to be, and I’d say it’s less about making things complex but generally I feel over the past 20 years the “floor” of quality has raised quite a bit.

Although you’re never going to be free of failures and conflicts, it’s much better than it used to be.

Head over to Linus Tech Tips forums and look at the Motherboard and PSU tier lists. Although imperfect, that will get you on the right track.

23

I think it is also a bit of legacy hatred from back when Intel CPU’s were monolithic (if one core died, the chip was essentially bricked), and AMD wasn’t (1 core dies, the others keep chunking). However, this has been all but eliminated in the last couple generations.

24

Luckily for me, I have not experienced any CPUs actually die on me. Mostly motherboards, power supplies, and graphics cards.

Oh and well hard drives. And a few SSDs.

25

I had an intel i3 when I got into the Diablo 3 beta. Something happened that ate core #2… Nothing loaded after that. Ever. Have not bought an Intel since. At first, it was because of that… Now I stick with AMD because I am a multi-tasker… like… like 5 to 7 applications at a time Multi-tasking.

But for pure gaming rig, Intel has the thread punch… For now :stuck_out_tongue:

26

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I had some bias towards Intel, but I try to have an open mind, and be as objective as possible.

Objectively, there’s good reasons for people to want either chip, and if they express their reasoning, I’m not going to go ham on them if they disagree.

For example, a couple days ago someone on LTT asked for the cheapest/fastest single core CPU they could get, because of their use case where 4-6 cores was in excess because their software wasn’t multi-threaded at all.

I came in with $159 9600k, and you betcha as true as the rising sun, people come in preaching Ryzen 3600 “because more threads”

Despite it having worse single threaded performance and…use case not needing threads at all.

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27

Same thing has happened on these same boards when people ask for a WoW build.

FTFY: “MOAR COREZ”

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28

haha well, i have recommended “more than you need” because my angle is the presumption that they’ll abandon WoW at some point because it always seems to disappoint people, and they will want to play other games :rofl:

29

I smiled as I read this, because I’m the same. I prefer Intel - can’t even tell you exactly why. Why do we prefer one car over another when they’ll both get you where you need to go? We all have our biases and preferences - the problem is when people don’t recognize their own bias and believe that their preference is objectively superior for no other reason than it is what they prefer.

Yeah, it’s a little bit more complicated with tech, when you can run tests and show that something is objectively better than something else for a particular use case - but even in this instance the differences are often relatively small. When I’m helping friends or making a business decision and someone asks me if something is better, often the response it “yeah, technically it is, but as a human being you’re not really going to notice it”.

What I’ve found interesting lurking on these forums is how people can become so invested in a particular brand that objectivity vanishes! I’ve seen it with attachments to sports teams and cars, etc. - it’s been fascinating to see it with tech.

So I prefer Intel, but I’m running AMD now (Ryzen 5 3600) because it was on sale and could do everything I needed, and I was buying 2 (one for me and one for my son). I use it for work and for WoW and I keep way too many windows open at the same time. It’s been great - but sometimes, when I think about the 9600k I setup for my brother I think about those few extra FPS I might have left on the cutting room floor… :slightly_smiling_face:

For WoW, and for gaming in general, cost and value issues aside - in my opinion, Intel is the superior solution.

Use-cases, like life, tend to be a bit more nuanced than many people realize.

At the end of the day - if you like it, if it does what you want, if you’re happy, then it’s fine. Leave the splitting hairs to people with too much time on their hands or an unhealthy ego attachment to a brand.

30

I’ve seen this type of feedback before. I’m assuming that it is true and hoping that my future build knocks SL out of the park.

31

General rule is single threaded performance (and presuming sufficiently wide resources) trumps multi threaded performance (when in excess) for gaming, and people tend to look at the benchmarks for this metric.

At this point, AMD chips can mostly match Intel on these benchmarks, so people will look at current Ryzen scores, and think it should be the same. Yet even with equal single threaded scores, Intel chips tend to preform better (and in some cases a LOT better) because of the fact that current consumer Intel chips have very low latency communication between cores vs. the relatively high latency of the communication between different CCXs in the Ryzen die.

Take for example HUBs more recent video regarding deciding which platform to choose to benchmark new Nvidia GPUs.

Here we see that despite similar single threaded performance, the i9-10900k (at stock) beats the 3900x by about 5% at 1080p (not GPU limited) and 2% at 1440p (GPU limited); it’s worth noting that the 10900k has some overclocking headroom whereas the 3900x won’t really improve much from any overclock. Therefore these differences will be even more pronounced. It’s also worth noting the games selected here are likely biased towards omitting the larger performance differences (as much as 20%) in favor of Intel as shown here:

https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3587-intel-core-i9-10900k-cpu-review-benchmarks

They would be doing a disservice to choose the 3900x, which clearly bottlenecks a 2080ti in more current titles, so test new GPUs, at least at 1080p and 1440p. That said, HUB is somewhat AMD biased and believe they’ll choose the Ryzen CPU because they know more people will enjoy it because of recent Ryzen popularity, despite the empirical evidence.

With as much as a 20% difference, they should use the 10900k. We’ll see what they do.

Hopefully, Zen 3 will help close this gap and potentially surpass Intel (see here: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Latest-Zen-3-rumor-further-reiterates-10-15-IPC-gains-per-thread-and-32-MB-of-shared-L3-cache-per-CCX-Zen-4-to-feature-1-MB-L2-cache-and-AVX-512-support.459845.0.html#:~:text=Zen%203%20will%20feature%20up,cache%20and%20AVX%20512%20support. )

Zen 3 will feature up to eight cores per CCX and a 32 MB L3 cache that can potentially improve latency in gaming. Also being confirmed is that Zen 4 will require a new socket and feature a 1 MB L2 cache and AVX 512 support.

As far as PCIE3 vs 4? Well, 2080 ti barely completely saturates PCIE2 (for gaming, anyway), and PCIE3 is double the bandwidth of PCIE2. Given the 3090 is rumored to be between 40-80% faster than the 2080 ti, it’s unlikely the GPU will need MORE than double the bandwidth of PCIE3 (most of which is unused by current 2080 ti).

32

Single thread for most things people use their computer for, tbh. There is tons that just cannot be done in parallel.

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33

True, but trying to highlight how the benchmark number for that metric doesn’t always tell the whole story.

Intel system will crush Ryzen 3000 in some games even with the same ST score on cinebench.

In this test, the 3900x actually beats the 9900k (stock) in ST benchmarks, but is behind considerably against it in gaming in every test.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-10900k/6.html

In some games, especially when not GPU bound (720p, 1080p), there’s a very large gap, and we’re not even considering the OC potent of the 10900k.

Granted, none of that REALLY matters for most people with reasonable GPUs and resolutions, but it’s an interesting result that can help predict what kind of performance to expect from future GPUs.

34

An OC 9600k is a killer gaming CPU is most scenarios compared to the ryzen 3600 (itself a a very good CPU). Most people won’t notice the difference but in game benchmarks the 9600k at 4.9ghz+ all cores pretty much tops every Ryzen CPU in gaming. That does not necessarily make it the better CPU for most people but if people can’t provide pros and cons for hardware they really are just promoting “their” brands rather then giving advice.

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35

It’s mostly funny because they specifically said the software they use wasn’t optimized for multithreading, and they only wanted a fast single core performer.

In both title and body of thread. But…Ryzen 5 3600 was the first answer, then a few 10600k’s, lol

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36

Rumor is that next gen Zen cores will get the threadripper treatment with regard to cpu cache size/speed. That fix a fair amount of the ccx latency. Also, I wish they would do something about baseline RAM -> CPU mating. Having to tune the ram manually on day 1, while fun at times, is less fun when it is mandatory.

The push for core count over thread speed sounds eerily reminiscent of when Apple dropped optical drives as early as they did… Or when they made the early swap to HTML5 exclusively. They were basically looking to the horizon and betting on the next paradigm shift, investing fully in it, and hoping that being the first ones there will give them a development advantage when it becomes the mainstream.

Fact is, even for gaming… The ability to utilize multiple cores/threads concurrently is on the rise. Not mainstream yet, but it will get there. Just as more applications over the last 5yrs have become much friendlier to multi-core optimization.

I think it is only a matter of time before the AMD CCX model becomes the standard bearer, instead of the Torch bearer.

But that is just one mans opinion.

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37

Well Intel themselves are switching from monolithic dies already.

Alder Lake will introduce the “Big Little” design, with a set of cores designated for high performance x86 cores and another set of cores of low-power efficient ARM cores for stuff like OS overhead/wifi etc.

https://wccftech.com/intels-alder-lake-platform-will-introduce-big-and-small-cores-for-x86-desktop-market/

One can assume they’ll face similar latency issues, but perhaps with the division of labor (overhead assigned to ARM/RISC cores) that could “fix” the CCX latency problem that AMD currently faces.

Although, that would depend on good OS utilization, which I’m sure Intel has the money and connections with Microsoft to make happen.