https://i.imgur.com/475qgKv.png

5700 XT ($400) is only 9% slower than RTX 2080 ($700). Worth it! :p

I recommend holding off on purchasing the newest stuff for a month or so. Apparently there is a software issue with the motherboards that prevents overclocking from working properly, and may have fried some 3900X CPUs.

Customers losing? what because of their own stupidity? how many YEARS has Intel taken advantage of being #1 with no competition? every new chip requires a whole new socket, which requires a new motherboard, every fucking time. But all the numpties threw their money at Intel.

I had an AMD Phenom II 965 BE, lasted until i bought the Ryzen 2700x shortly after release, so what.. 10 years give or take a bit?

Sure it struggled in the latter years, but damn the improvements since then have been laughable, and i was still hesitant to buy an Intel considering how scummy they have been. They deserve the shit they are in.


Yeah by the time Ray Tracing really comes into play Nvidia will have it's next set of cards lined up with even better performance on it.

One never rushes for the new tech that is in it's infancy unless you have a shitload of cash to blow on whatever you want, much like HDR, expensive for what it is and not worth the price, not yet anyway, as hardly any games benefit from it.

PhysX was another, i remember the separate PCI Cards for it.

Pretty sure my motherboard supports the new Ryzen chips, so I'll probably grab one later this year since it'll be so easy. My current Ryzen 5 1600 has been pretty solid, even though it is behind Intel a bit in single thread performance. With these improving in that area, there's no real downside IMO.

If I'm wrong and need a new motherboard though, I'll probably wait until the new consoles change things up.

Which one is your motherboard?

Ab350 Gaming 3. I just googled and it does indeed support these new chips, though it says the top of the line 3950X might be throttled back for power consumption reasons. I'd never buy that one anyway though, so all good. I'll probably get the 3700X.

3700X is an excellent choice. I checked some tests, it's mostly 20% faster than 2700X in games. I doubt you would have problems even with 3950X unless you're doing OC.

I would give the RX 5700 a couple more months of driver updates. Quite a few "Known Issues" listed in the latest driver release notes.

The b350 Gaming 3 has pretty poor VRMs, practically I suspect it will struggle with 12/16 cores and wouldn't get anywhere near boost unless there's a lot of motherboard airflow. Power draw itself won't be a problem, the socket can handle heaps more than can practically be pulled in non exotic set ups; the heat from the draw will be though. I suspect it may struggle to get a decent PBO/ boost result even with an 8 core. My Gaming 5 gets decently toasty even just overclocking a 1700, and its VRMs are a bit better than a 3s.

Gigabyte's 3000 series compatibility BIOS flash is also... problematic. It requires a utility/ MB firmware upgrade which blackscreened my computer and then boot looped it, albeit a full power off (cord pulled) got it back again. Hopefully they've improved it since I did it, and the flash itself was painless.

(My biggest gripe is the pricing though, here the cheapest 8 core option is $100+ more than I paid for my 1700 in June 2017 and the 570 motherboards have an even greater premium. They're better products for sure, but it's also 2 years later)

And now the $150 question: When will a normal home user have use for PCIe 4.0? Having some programs open 0.1s faster if one has a brand new, superfast SSD seems to be the only benefit right now for a home pc. I understand noone can see the future.

Oh and local prices have shown up and they were pretty much where expected. Eight cores are not cheap.

I read that this flashing utility is Windows 10 only. Which would mean that Zen 2 and later processors won't be usable on a Win 7 computer ? Or is there another way to flash the MB on a Win 7 computer ?
And what component exactly does this utility flash ? It's not the BIOS, since this flash is necessary in order to flash it after.

The utility is called the "EC FW Update Tool". So far as I'm aware it flashes the firmware (hence FW) rather than the BIOS itself. Not sure practically what the difference between the MB firmware and BIOS is and why they can't just flash the BIOS directly to F40 with whatever it does integrated, but you're meant to run it before flashing the BIOS to F40 if you want more than 2 sticks of ram to work.

So I guess if you don't mind having only two ram sticks supported Win7 is an option and you can ignore the utility, but officially I don't think even the 1000 series are officially supported with win7.

And for anyone considering an upgrade and wondering about how their motherboard would cope someone's done a nifty little chart. Looks like both the 300 series Gaming 3 and 5 are quite a bit better prepared for handling the new processors than I thought.

Best prices today within short distance from me:

8 cores- Ryzen 7 3700X €282 (U$D 318) + VAT
6 cores- Ryzen 5 3600X €209 (U$D 236) + VAT

So on top of those prices I will need to pay VAT and the lowest bus fare, which is just a tad under the cheapest P&P (S&H in USA).

The competing Intel processors are discounted this week to make choosing even harder.

The new motherboards are expensive and RAM is getting hard to find at reasonable prices already :-(

Don't forget that its not a race about who is the king of CPU IPC speeds but rather how large the gap between the two competitors is.

I'd rather spend 200 bucks for a cpu that is 10% slower than the same deal which costs 150 dollars more. Now the gap is even more slim and price per performance CPUs even more effective. And since the competition is so strong now we can expect vastly better CPUs in the very near future.