Hoping you fine folks can help me make a couple of decisions on my new build. Been reading some here, and also watching lots of Steve/GN and Jay, for those who know who they are.
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Start with hopefully the easier question. Am I going to see better performance in WoW (and other games) from 3600Mhz/16CL or 3200Mhz/14CL DDR4? Whichever I get, I will likely do some light OC’ing/XMP with. Thoughts?
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I’m torn on the CPU. I’m leaning 10600k because of its greater gaming performance in general, overclock ceiling, and because of how CPU heavy WoW in particular can be. At the same time, a 3600X is appealing for the future-proofing AMD presently offers as regards PCIe 4.0 and RTX IO. I’ve read that Intel z490 MBs are actually 4.0 capable, at least in the x16 slot, but apparently the NVMe slot is not? I’m not sure how much all of this will even matter for the next 3-5 years anyway. So it may not be something worth worrying about until then? I’ve been feeling a little paralyzed about committing to the “wrong” motherboard/ecosystem. I’m unlikely to buy another CPU chip until it’s time to build a whole new machine, unless something just absolutely ridiculous is released, but don’t want to hamstring myself in case I actually do end up wanting to upgrade mid-cycle.
3200/14 has slightly lower latency than 3600/16, but some apps like frequency more than latency. (like 8.75ns vs 8.89ns).
They’ll be pretty comparable, but from the benchmarks i’ve seen in gaming frequency gets better results (so long as latency isn’t terrible).
CL14 memory is usually the better Samsung or Micron stuff, and the CL16 stuff is usually SK Hynix. The Samsung and Micron OC bettter.
Tech Jesus and Mr. Two Cents have pretty good data, so listening to either of them won’t really steer you wrong.
I personally would not buy a 10600k because I think 6/12 is kind of the minimum these days, and most people aren’t just strictly gaming. Many people tend to multitask or stream or do some kind of general computing work that more cores helps.
I would not bank on PCIE3 for the future, if RTX/IO type tech becomes the norm, which I think it will because of the consoles heavily utilizing this tech, but I would also be hesitant to recommend buying into a 3000 series AMD which is essentially EOL as 4000 series launches within a few months.
What do you have right now?
1 - Are you doing nothing but running benchmarks because that is the only way you will see a difference to the naked eye. From the few professional benchmarks I have seen, the 3200 14CL DDR4 can be up to 5% faster in certain games. Personally, I would get the cheaper of the two.
2- The 10600k is the better gaming CPU (especially when OC) so that would make it the better “future proof” part., not that the 3600x is a bad CPU but it’s really not that much better in gaming performance then the Ryzen 3600.
If I were doing much else other than gaming, I’d definitely be leaning AMD. But honestly I don’t. I don’t stream myself. My job doesn’t require anything more than email and G-suite. Sometimes I have netflix/hulu/baseball going on a secondary monitor at the same time as WoW, but only when I’m casually playing. If I’m doing M+'s or raids then all that’s on the second monitor is Discord. The prospect of more cores & threads via AMD is enticing, but I’m not sure how much I’d actually be able to put them to worthwhile use.
My current chip is a 4690K (which is a 3.5 Ghz quad core) that runs stable OC’d at 4.1 under load, and 4.3 at light use. Right now for instance I have about 60 tabs open (I know) and some other misc lightweight programs, and the CPU isn’t breaking a sweat. Sitting around 8% load as I type, occasional spikes to ~25% (I am at about 70% load on my RAM and 50% on my SSD though. I should probably close some tabs…). All of that to say, it handles my current non-gaming needs more than adequately.
At any rate, my wife is going to be using this machine going forward, her current one is a boat anchor. All she’ll be doing on it is browsing and WoW. We decided to build the new one for me since I play other games in addition.
I’m right there with you on RTX/IO becoming standard rather quickly, since the consoles will already be using it. And it’s my biggest sticking point in favor of AMD for my use case.
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Yeah, the only reason for the 3600X over the base 3600 is that it’s $15 more for a higher boost ceiling. Probably wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference, but for the price it’d be silly not to (for me).
Well given a decently OC’d 10600k performs the same mostly as a 10900k in games with a 2080 ti…
there’s also this to consider:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/ilhao8/nvidia_rtx_30series_you_asked_we_answered/
PCIE Gen4
**Will customers find a performance degradation on PCIE 3.0?**
> *System performance is impacted by many factors and the impact varies between applications. The impact is typically less than a few percent going from a x16 PCIE 4.0 to x16 PCIE 3.0. CPU selection often has a larger impact on performance.We look forward to new platforms that can fully take advantage of Gen4 capabilities for potential performance increases.*
And also the fact nvidia did their presentation/testing on an i9.
This REALLY makes me feel good about my 8700k purchase 3 years ago.
Oh, wow. Dunno how I missed this. Definitely encouraging for Intel based builds. Gah. I just need to take the plunge, unlikely I’ll be disappointed in either.
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Could be evidence that Intel is still faster despite PCIE3 limitation.
Could also be Nvidia didn’t want to use their competitor’s CPU, despite any potential PCIE4 benfits.
But from that we know the deficit (if any) for the Intel system isn’t SO bad that it ruins performance that is currently advertised.