So, who's impressed with the next gen of CPU's?

[AGTDenton]

I'm still enjoying my 5950X / 3080Ti and so far for 2 years everything is stable.

Ideally I want to get as much use out of it as possible and I'm not seeing any real world benefits of upgrading. I go through bursts of gaming at the moment so I don't use it enough to need to watch the watt usage and my monitor is only 120hz capable which the majority of titles have no issues with.
As games recycle the same engine for 5 or so years with minor tweaks I hope to utilise another era of GPUs before abandoning AM4.
I've only upgraded the memory fairly early on in its life as I wanted to get lower CAS whilst DDR4 Performance RAM was still widely available.

I'll probably just wait for AM6 at this rate.

[Hoonigan]

I've only upgraded the memory fairly early on in its life as I wanted to get lower CAS whilst DDR4 Performance RAM was still widely available.

What speed and latency did you end up going for?

[AGTDenton]

What speed and latency did you end up going for?

G.Skill - F4-3600C16D-16GTZNC - DDR4-3600 CL16-19-19-39 1.35V

I really wanted to get C14, but at the time stock was all over the place, not to mention price was double.

[Saracen999]

On the AI thing....it looks unbelievably like the dot com bubble. Do remember that everything is actually a dot com now. It's just that some muppets saw some interesting tech that clearly had a place in the future and hyped it far beyond its actual capabilities. In the very late 90's anyone could come up with an "idea" and attach it to some kind of dot com way of selling it and they would get money thrown at them. The exact same things are happening now. I was at a Q and A with a serial entrepreneur that has successfully founded and grown handful of companies, each one sold for a lot more than the last and is now worth in excess of $10 billion. His company endlessly brings up AI in executive conversations and their marketing materials. He was directly asked "what do you think of the current interest in AI" - his answer: It's hype. We put AI in our marketing because we keep getting asked "what are you doing with AI"

Just remember, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent! (i.e. never bet on when a bubble will burst) - The fastest gains in the dot com boom came closest to the pop.

While I don't disagree with that, it wasn't quite my concern, which wasn't what the Ai software/tools being constantly promoted to us are (or aren't) but what tge 'neural processor' capabilities of recent geerations of CPU enable OS makers to do, that we don't know about. Ii mean, by defniion, most commercial OS's (excluding many Linux variants) are closed systems. It's VERY hard to know what te OS does, under the hood/bonnet, as it were, but Apple's M-chips and their "client-side scanning", the the Recall faciity, and what the A i does behind the scenes, are a seriou concern for me. If MS can scan all system activity, screen-cap at silly rates and "scan" those, for instance, for image-to-text summaries, or to describe image contents (neded for the A/i search capabilities) then you can, for instance, kiss goodbye to end-to-end encryption in messaging apps becuse that OS-AI gets to it before the app ever encrypts for sending. At that point, we're down to truting the likes of MS and Apple as to what they do, or don't do, with the data because they're closed systems.

My point was I want a processor that doesn't have that neural processing capability at all, so can't use it for such background tasks as Apple CSC or MS Co-Pilot+ (note the "+" bit), and Recall.

[Iota]

Yes, "efficiency" is up. So, for a given performance level (on both AMD and Intel) your leccy bill will go down a bit, which is no bad thing. But performance looks to not be going up very much, maybe percentage gains in single figures??

Single figure gains for not just a pretty expensive new CPU, but a whole new platform (at least, for Intell) to go with it? It's going to put savings on the leccy bill a bit in the shade, innit?

Well I'm still using my 9900KF, which was a drop in upgrade for the 9700K. The only other things I upgraded was the FE 2080 RTX for a FE 3090 RTX card and added some more NVMe storage. The efficiency is looking good on the AMD side of things, the new Intel CPU? How much of that reduction in power usage is from losing Hyperthreading? How much is that hurting performance? So no real gains there from what I'm seeing.

It's interesting you point out the part about electricity usage, sure you'll probably save something on that side of it, but I'll lay a wager that the cost of the new system with far outweigh those savings for quite a few years.

Anyway, with DLSS I've got more than enough performance to be able to run games, and everything else I do on this PC can be done by hand if I needed to. Seeing no real reason to upgrade aside from "oooh shiny". I think I'm more interested in using my disposable income on other hobbies for now.

[cptwhite_uk]

I'm on recent high end hardware - 7800X3D / RTX 4080 / 32Gb DDR5 6400 C30 / 4Tb NVME

I didn't really need to upgrade, I had a 5800X3D /RTX 3090 / 32Gb DDR4 prior to that, and my enthusiasm for upgrading / building systems is at a 5 year low. I'm not following prices or considering building. The market seems pretty boring right now I feel.

[DanceswithUnix]

My latest CPU is an ESP32 dev board with built in WiFi and a tiny OLED display which I am programming via the Arduino IDE. The 5900X based PC I'm running the IDE on is a boring tool these days compared to this fun little target. Amazing what you can get for about £16.

[Saracen999]

....

It's interesting you point out the part about electricity usage, sure you'll probably save something on that side of it, but I'll lay a wager that the cost of the new system with far outweigh those savings for quite a few years.

....

It wasn't so much me pointg bout that power saving, but more like me pointing out that Intel were pointing it out. And I utterly agree with you - buying a new system for that reason, given the substantial hardware cost (CPU, mobo and very possibly, depending on your existing hardware, RAM) is rather spending a shedload to save chump change. It's no argument at all, IMHO.


I'm finding it quite hard to see the rationale for these new CPUs, unless it's for the neural/AI stuff (which, personally, I flat out don't want, but each to his/her own, I guess). Even for someone like me, looking at a probably 'end game' PC spec, and not really that much bothered about the cost (provided the marginal gain justifies the marginal cost) .... I'm looking at existing generations, not next-gen. I'm struggling to see who really wants it, except either those AI fans, or those that just want the latest 'whatever', regardless. And I gave up doing that latter round about Q6600 era.

[Hoonigan]

I'm on recent high end hardware - 7800X3D / RTX 4080 / 32Gb DDR5 6400 C30 / 4Tb NVME

I didn't really need to upgrade, I had a 5800X3D /RTX 3090 / 32Gb DDR4 prior to that, and my enthusiasm for upgrading / building systems is at a 5 year low. I'm not following prices or considering building. The market seems pretty boring right now I feel.

What was the reason behind upgrading to the 7800X3D from the 5800X3D, if you don't mind me asking?

And I gave up doing that latter round about Q6600 era.

And what an era that was, I absolutely adored my Q6600, had it overclocked to 3.6GHz for about 9 years and it never missed a beat, it was definitely needing to be replaced by then but it wasn't holding me back in games anywhere near as much as you might think.

[Saracen999]

....

And what an era that was, I absolutely adored my Q6600, had it overclocked to 3.6GHz for about 9 years and it never missed a beat, it was definitely needing to be replaced by then but it wasn't holding me back in games anywhere near as much as you might think.

In some ways, a Golden Era. Yeah, today's CPUs/GPU's are WAY more powerful, and yes, that enables some stunning gaming effects, and it also puts video editing (at prety decent resolutins) into the hands of relatively modest hardware. But for us techies, as pretty much every regular here is, to one extent or another, the Q6600 era was kinda maximum gain in bang for buck. I mean, GPU scalping etc, and to some but a lesser extent, CPU pricing, kinda 'pooped' on several of recent years.

At the risk of repeating my earlie point, I now see current generations of hardware (i.e. without the AI neural accelerators) as being the next golden era, because it's pre-AI. And for clarity, I don't mean AI aspects of editing apps or text-writing ... though there's a direct connection. I mean the OS-embedded AI stuff from Apple, MS and Google.

Because it seems to me if you object to that, pretty much the only way forward is a de-Googled phone, and PC's running exclusively Linux .... or very, VERY careful and selective use of Windows fr stuff you dont care about if it gets snooped on by Apple, MS etc.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up with machnes that have an internet connect running Linux, and those running Windows (whichever version) with no intenet access at all. That'll be an old machine or two running legacy stuff, aqnd maybe a new-ish machine running games and beggar-all else.

Certainly, long gone now are those techie "golden era" years of Q6600 etc .... though one of my 'legacy' machines still runs a Q-seres chip, if one a little bit faster than the 6600 (Q8250, or something similar, rings a bell, same family, slightly faster clock IIRC, and a lower thermal profile).

[cptwhite_uk]

What was the reason behind upgrading to the 7800X3D from the 5800X3D, if you don't mind me asking?

Honestly, there wasn't a reason, I had the disposable income and I could. I actually bought it after the 9000 series reviews just came out and since it's primarily for gaming I went for that as it performs better. It cost me £275 from CEX, I picked up locally a brand new Asus TUF B650-Plus Wifi for £100 which was a steal, they were going for about £185 new, and a Fractal North new from the same seller for about £50 if I remember correctly. Basically the case and motherboard were near half price.

32Gb DDR5 6400 cost me about £100, and a new 240mm AIO was £45ish. New parts were £570 total, and I sold the old parts (5800X3D, MSI B550 Gaming Plus, 32Gb DDR4 3600, Deepcool AK620 and Fractal Torrent case for about £330 total). So the upgrade cost me about £240 all in.

Wasn't necessary and wasn't really needed, but I'm in enthusiast, I could afford it, and if I can't treat myself on my hobby in my mid 40's then what am I working 40 hours a week for?