QOTW: Has 2nd Gen Ryzen done enough to sway you towards AMD?

[Saracen]

I think if you did need to build a new desktop PC now if one of your old desktops went kaput and you play mostly older games,something like a Ryzen 5 2400G for under £130 would probably do the trick. The IGP is good enough for even some newer games,at lower settings and resolution,and it seems a recent effective 4C/8T CPU for the outlay.

Also TBH,the performance of a Q6600 still is enough even today - that A6 3670K APU I won in a competition on Hexus in 2012,is still fine as a general purpose PC,and that is roughly equivalent to a Q6600.

To be honest, my plan, if I get in that situation, is to drop a certain Moose of my acquaintance a PM saying something like "HELLLP - What chip do I buy?"



However, you're probably right about IGP given my needs. A tiny clarification. I said "Q6600 generation". It's not a 6600. I just can't renember the exact model without looking it up, but it was a 'mobile' chip of that series, very low TDP (about 65W, IIRC, and a slightly higher clock speed). Considerable higher pricetag, too, but that's another story.

Though different chip, I don't see it as different enough (by a country mile) to change your recommendation.

Thanks, Cat.

[Saracen]

Neither have i, looked to closely that is, IIRC it's just a case of not "official" supported on other OS' so were not talking about it not working or anything just it probably being a little more of PITA.

That would've been my expectation. Even I don't expect backwards 'official' support for dead products.

It's the PITA bit that worries me a tad, though.

These days, I am extremely averse to my A getting any Ps. I mean, in days gone by, getting 'this' to work with 'that' was both a challenge, a hobby, and a good chunk of how I made a living. But these days, unless I'm getting paid to do it, I just want to buy things, have them work, first time out of the box, and minimum, or better yet zero, faffing about.

I find, as I get older, my priorities have changed. I've gone from fiddling about getting it working, to life's too short, and I've got too mamy other things I'd rather do and not enough time to do them.

Early onset old-fart syndrome, I expect.

[3dcandy]

For many the problem is any half decent pc from the last decade is fine for many things. But for me, although I'm not cutting edge by any means the "work" I need to do is dependant on many cores to work well. And I'd never go back to a normal hard drive as my boot device either and anybody who still has a hard drive as a boot device needs to wake up to the huge benefits it provides

[EvilCycle]

The 7700k unless overclocked is actually even slower than 1800x in many of the newer games. Again more and more games are utilizing more than 4 cores and even games that do not utilize more cores do tend to benefit from more cores as background stuff can eat up cpu resources needed for the game.

So its to put it bluntly to you really, really stupid to go for a 4 core cpu these days no matter if Intel or AMD, its just a really dumb and ignorant thing to do, period!

That said the 2700x for example is within 0-5% of the I7-8700k IF boost drive is disabled for the 8700k in the bios, boost drive is essentially a cheat for Intel on some mobo's as it automatically overclocks the CPU beyond its specifications!

Considering my CPU is overclocked to 4.8ghz and that even though it has 4 cores, still has 8 threads - I think you will find my choice is perfectly fine for gaming for the foreseeable future, I think the exaggerations in your comment is quite the dumb and ignorant thing to do in all honesty.

[fail_quail]

For many the problem is any half decent pc from the last decade is fine for many things. But for me, although I'm not cutting edge by any means the "work" I need to do is dependant on many cores to work well. And I'd never go back to a normal hard drive as my boot device either and anybody who still has a hard drive as a boot device needs to wake up to the huge benefits it provides

Yep several points in that:
My five year old AMD FX system is still quite overkill for general usage. As is my old 2nd gen i7 thinkpad laptop.

For many cores, that rules out my laptop, but the 8cores on my old FX8120 system still do quite well for multi-core tasks, (ie rendering, encoding)

"And I'd never go back to a normal hard drive as my boot device either and anybody who still has a hard drive as a boot device needs to wake up to the huge benefits it provides"
Cannot emphasise that enough. Even the very cheapest 120GB SSD you can get your hands on for an OS drive will be noticeably better than any HDD.

If you're short of cash: Get a combo of a cheap SSD for the OS and a HDD for everything else.
Even the worst SSD is magnitudes better than a HDD for the OS

[aidanjt]

The CPU itself has, absolutely. But the utter lack of decent mATX motherboards has snuffed out my enthusiasm. I'll be doing a new build next month, if there's no sign of a good AM4 mATX board incoming by then, I'll have to go with Intel.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The CPU itself has, absolutely. But the utter lack of decent mATX motherboards has snuffed out my enthusiasm. I'll be doing a new build next month, if there's no sign of a good AM4 mATX board incoming by then, I'll have to go with Intel.

There is this X370 based one for around £80:

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard...ng-3-rev-1x#kf

[Shirley Dulcey]

I was already all set to buy a first generation Ryzen, but then unexpected expenses came up and so an upgrade wasn't in the cards in 2017. I'd still go Ryzen now; I'm willing to take the slight hit in gaming performance to get better performance for video editing, an application that uses all the cores effectively. Though it remains to be seen whether it will happen in 2018; it might end up waiting for 2019 and Ryzen 2...

[Xlucine]

The CPU itself has, absolutely. But the utter lack of decent mATX motherboards has snuffed out my enthusiasm. I'll be doing a new build next month, if there's no sign of a good AM4 mATX board incoming by then, I'll have to go with Intel.

B350 has a wide range of motherboards, and should perform almost identically* to the X470 motherboards used in the 2000 series reviews. The lack of 400 series MATX motherboards is a bit naff, but AMD still has a competitive MATX platform (and there's always MITX, if you're desperate)

*as PB:O isn't enabled yet, so beyond multi-GPU support (on MATX?) there's not much to differentiate them

[Saracen]

....

"And I'd never go back to a normal hard drive as my boot device either and anybody who still has a hard drive as a boot device needs to wake up to the huge benefits it provides"
Cannot emphasise that enough. Even the very cheapest 120GB SSD you can get your hands on for an OS drive will be noticeably better than any HDD.

If you're short of cash: Get a combo of a cheap SSD for the OS and a HDD for everything else.
Even the worst SSD is magnitudes better than a HDD for the OS

Oh, hogwash. It ALL depends on what you do and how you do it.

I have, and have had SSDs for years, and do I care if I boot from one or not? No.

Why? For a start, my morning routine is :-

- power up PC,
- go make a cuppa,
- check messages.

That takes a good 10 minutes most days, and 6 or 7 if there are no messages. By which time, my HD-based PC has booted in 90-120 seconds, including loading default applications, and been sitting there idle fir 5+ minutes.

So, on to my work routine. Mostly, it's either WP or spreadsheet work, but rarely both together. I don't switch between them much, and when I do it's all but instantaneous.

I might, as a writer, then spend the next several hours typing, or dictating via voice-recog software, and the machine does not struggle to keep up with me. I struggle to keep up with it.



Are SSDs faster? Yes. Will they benefit many users? Yup. Most? Very possibly. But to

anybody who still has a hard drive as a boot device needs to wake up to the huge benefits it provides

.... sweeping statements like that demonstrate a lack of understanding that not everybody will benefit, or at least, not enough to justify the cost.

As I say, I have SSDs. I have alternate OSs and OS configurations on them. I've tested them in my work environment, and would I buy tgem again? No. Because HD performance is perfectly adequate for me and while I do need a relatively high storage capacity, I don't need high performance.

Put it this way. I do need several TB of storage. To do that vua SSD is way too expensive. That means I need HD for storage, and to add SSD just for booting means tgat the performance gains gave to justify the SSD price. I measure performance gains in what it does for my working productivity, my page-count written, or how long I spend on accounting or spreadsheet analysis, and certainly not via benchmarks. And by my productivity measure, SSD make zero difference.

Despite how much faster they are, if it doesn't aid my productivity, it doesn't justify the cost. As HD speed is not a bottleneck, speeding it up makes no difference.

It's all down to the user, and I for one don't need to wake up to SSDs. I'm fully awake to them, and they make no difference to me.

[FromUSA]

When I hear someone built an AMD system it just means they did not have enough $$$ for an Intel....Guess watching all the YouTube tech channels burned that into my mind

[3dcandy]

Oh, hogwash. It ALL depends on what you do and how you do it.

I have, and have had SSDs for years, and do I care if I boot from one or not! No.

Why? For a start, my morning routine is :-

- power up PC,
- go make a cuppa,
- check messages.

That takes a good 10 minutes most days, and 6 or 7 if there are no messages. By which time, my HD-based PC has booted in 90-120 seconds, including loading default applications, and been sitting there idle fir 5+ minutes.

So, on to my work routine. Mostly, it's either WP or spreadsheet work, but rarely both together. I don't switch between them much, and when I do it's all but instantaneous.

I might, as a writer, then spend the next several hours typing, or dictating via voice-reco software, and the machine does not struggle to keep up with me. I struggle to keep up with it.



Are SSDs faster? Yes. Will they benefit many users? Yup. Most? Very possibly. But to .... sweeping statements like that demonstrate a lack of understanding that not everybody will benefit, or at least, not enough to justify the cost.

As I say, I have SSDs. I have alternate OSs and OS configurations on them. I've tested them in my work environment, and would I buy tgem again? No. Because HD performance is perfectly adequate for me and while I do need a relatively high storage capacity, I don't need high performance.

Put it this way. I do need several TB of storage. To do that vua SSD is way too expensive. That means I need HD for storage, and to add SSD just for booting means tgat the performance gains gave to justify the SSD price. I measure performance gains in what it does for my working productivity, my page-count written, or how long I spend on accounting or spreadsheet analysis, and certainly not via benchmarks. And by my productivity measure, SSD make zero difference.

Despite how much faster they are, if it doesn't aid my productivity, it doesn't justify the cost. As HD speed is not a bottleneck, speeding it up makes no difference.

It's all down to the user, and I for one don't need to wake up to SSDs. I'm fully awake to them, and they make no difference to me.

Hey Saracen it is a sweeping statement because for many it is a noticeable difference. I can't really see any conceivable reason how you can say that it doesn't impact your day to day computing because even a slow ssd is a magnitude of times faster than a hard drive. Mind you you're not a Win 10 person and I'd not want to go back to that wait after a sub 10 second boot on my work pc. Hell my work pc boots and I've got all my messages before I can make a coffee these days. But you're an oddity in many ways on a tech site like this. We've said it before, we don't see eye to eye on many things but on this I think you're behind the curve a tad. Also it's a sweeping statement because for a large percentage of users it makes that big a difference...
In my line of work I find the ssd speeds up MY productivity hugely. Heck even editing photos is a magnitude faster as the boot drive and cache works for me. Rendering video out is much quicker. I'm not a big user of office stuff so for me I'd never ever in a million years consider
booting from a hard drive again. Horses for courses....but I still stick by my sweeping statement, that 99.9% of people will find a huge benefit to booting from an ssd. I admit that the one Win 7 machine I have left is so slow compared to Win 10 to boot and generally sluggish even though it has a fairly good spec that perhaps your judgement is based on your OS choices as well. Heck even my Linux box doesn't enjoy as much of a boost as the Win 10 machines. The biggest speed increase however has been on a small itx box that is used for my projector setup at gigs. I use some software (heavym) that is used to projection map and control lights. The transformation has been huge - no lag, no wait just smooth all around. The time to set up a projection mapping scene has dropped hugely. In fact it is probably 5 times as fast to achieve what I need to do now compared to before. All I have changed is the boot device and all it cost me was £30 for a second hand ssd.
But it is horses for courses - and for web work in WP I see no benefits. But I still stand with what I said. My first go to speed booster is an ssd boot drive. But I'd also recommend Win 10 too as I turn off a lot of the nasty stuff.

[aidanjt]

There is this X370 based one for around £80:

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard...ng-3-rev-1x#kf

Yeah I checked that one out as well. Far too many corners cut, even compared to a number of mini-ITX boards.

[aidanjt]

B350 has a wide range of motherboards, and should perform almost identically* to the X470 motherboards used in the 2000 series reviews. The lack of 400 series MATX motherboards is a bit naff, but AMD still has a competitive MATX platform (and there's always MITX, if you're desperate)

*as PB:O isn't enabled yet, so beyond multi-GPU support (on MATX?) there's not much to differentiate them

I'm not too concerned with performance, most of the performance limiting parts are in the CPU, after all. No I'm far more concerned with board quality, features, and component choices. They're all sub-par. ITX is a no-go, I need more than 1 PCIe slot.

[Xlucine]

I'm not too concerned with performance, most of the performance limiting parts are in the CPU, after all. No I'm far more concerned with board quality, features, and component choices. They're all sub-par. ITX is a no-go, I need more than 1 PCIe slot.

Out of curiosity, what do you need on intel MATX boards that you can't find on B350 boards?

[Saracen]

Hey Saracen it is a sweeping statement because for many it is a noticeable difference. I can't really see any conceivable reason how you can say that it doesn't impact your day to day computing because even a slow ssd is a magnitude of times faster than a hard drive. Mind you you're not a Win 10 person and I'd not want to go back to that wait after a sub 10 second boot on my work pc. Hell my work pc boots and I've got all my messages before I can make a coffee these days. But you're an oddity in many ways on a tech site like this. We've said it before, we don't see eye to eye on many things but on this I think you're behind the curve a tad. Also it's a sweeping statement because for a large percentage of users it makes that big a difference...
In my line of work I find the ssd speeds up MY productivity hugely. Heck even editing photos is a magnitude faster as the boot drive and cache works for me. Rendering video out is much quicker. I'm not a big user of office stuff so for me I'd never ever in a million years consider
booting from a hard drive again. Horses for courses....but I still stick by my sweeping statement, that 99.9% of people will find a huge benefit to booting from an ssd. I admit that the one Win 7 machine I have left is so slow compared to Win 10 to boot and generally sluggish even though it has a fairly good spec that perhaps your judgement is based on your OS choices as well. Heck even my Linux box doesn't enjoy as much of a boost as the Win 10 machines. The biggest speed increase however has been on a small itx box that is used for my projector setup at gigs. I use some software (heavym) that is used to projection map and control lights. The transformation has been huge - no lag, no wait just smooth all around. The time to set up a projection mapping scene has dropped hugely. In fact it is probably 5 times as fast to achieve what I need to do now compared to before. All I have changed is the boot device and all it cost me was £30 for a second hand ssd.
But it is horses for courses - and for web work in WP I see no benefits. But I still stand with what I said. My first go to speed booster is an ssd boot drive. But I'd also recommend Win 10 too as I turn off a lot of the nasty stuff.

On sweeping statements, the comment I objected to was that "anybody" booting from an HD needs to "wake up" to the benefits of SSD. The clear message is that anyone that doesn't boot from SSD hasn't woken up. I know quite a few people that don't, and it isn't because they're ignorant of the benefits.

I boot from HD most of the time, and I'm fully aware of the benefits of SSD. They just don't make any difference to me, and won't make any, or enough, difference to quite a lot of people.

Just because something is faster doesn't mean it's worth paying to upgrade. Suppose I do 3000 miles a year in my car, most of it local, with a few 100-ish mile trips up the motorway. Currently, I do it in an M3, limited to 155mph, on a road limited to 70mph and where going over 100mph is likely to get me banned.

So, I could upgrade to a 200+ mph Bugatti Veyron, but it'd cost me a million quid, and the road is still limited to 70, and I'll still loose my licence at 100+.

My cousin, on the other hand, lives in Germany, does 30k miles a year much of it commuting between Germany and Switzerland on unlimited autobahns.

For my usage, given my driving, the M3 is already overkill, and the Veyron, while much faster, offers no real-world benefit to me. My cousin, on the other hand ....


As I said in the last post, will many benefit from SSD? Yes. Most? Very possibly. Everybody? No.

You've changed your sweeping statement from "anybody" to "99.9%". That's an improvement, but I still very much doubt that 99.9% is correct. It certainly doesn't tally with my exoerience.

My view is there are three categories of user

a) heavy users for whom SSD makes a huge difference
b) mixed users for whom SSD woukd be better, but not by enough to justify the cost
c) light users who will gain no perceptible benefit.

You, and many users here, will be in group a). But not everyone is. Some, including (these days) me, are in group c). My wife would be in group b).