The Best CPUs: This is what you should get

So I guess would you buy the 1600x or the i5 7600K if you were building a PC today as they are basically the same money, the i5 has slightly higher IPC but only 4 core vs the 6 of the 1600X? The i5 has no hyper threading and the Ryzen has 12 threads...

Each persons opinion is there own but no way I could recommend an i5 CPU.

I do see your point with the integrated graphics of the Intel chips and have been a little sheltered as I don't see many used outside of the USFF desktops. Majority of fleet is dual and tri screen (work) which are dedicated cards. Actually that is handy for troubleshooting as well,.
The simple question is how many people use workloads where the slower IPC is outweighed by their threaded workloads? That answer today is a slim minority

The other question is how many people buy dedicated GPUs not for gaming? Again the answer is a slim minority.

So unless you fall into the category of someone with a highly threaded workload who doesn't play games but likes wasting money and dealing with finicky immature hardware then you're still considering the i5. I'm not saying there will not be improvements for Ryzen down the road but it's too early for the recommendation (hence why other outlets recommend both depending on workload).
 
I wish someone here would just make "MY" mind up about which is gonna be my next platform. Sheeesh...
Arguments from both sides are so relevant and convincing and I am a gutless flip-flopper!
 
I wish someone here would just make "MY" mind up about which is gonna be my next platform. Sheeesh...
Arguments from both sides are so relevant and convincing and I am a gutless flip-flopper!

I hope this is implied with a heap of sarcasm ;)

Seriously go with what you like
 
So I guess would you buy the 1600x or the i5 7600K if you were building a PC today as they are basically the same money, the i5 has slightly higher IPC but only 4 core vs the 6 of the 1600X? The i5 has no hyper threading and the Ryzen has 12 threads...

Each persons opinion is there own but no way I could recommend an i5 CPU.

I do see your point with the integrated graphics of the Intel chips and have been a little sheltered as I don't see many used outside of the USFF desktops. Majority of fleet is dual and tri screen (work) which are dedicated cards. Actually that is handy for troubleshooting as well,.
The simple question is how many people use workloads where the slower IPC is outweighed by their threaded workloads? That answer today is a slim minority

The other question is how many people buy dedicated GPUs not for gaming? Again the answer is a slim minority.

So unless you fall into the category of someone with a highly threaded workload who doesn't play games but likes wasting money and dealing with finicky immature hardware then you're still considering the i5. I'm not saying there will not be improvements for Ryzen down the road but it's too early for the recommendation (hence why other outlets recommend both depending on workload).

I chat with mates who are anti AMD such as yourself all the time and AMD could be 20% better IPC and then the argument would change to I don't want to use the extra 20W to power it and I hate all that heat.

The reality is that $330 (AUD) is a bad price for a 4 core CPU in 2017 and everyday life on a PC is highly threaded and be even more so in the next few years. Even if people don't realize it computers are considered an always on or instant on device expected to do lots of things at once.

You can buy your Intel and me AMD and you know what I am perfectly ok with that.
 
Just remember this has only just come out and everyone please give Ryzen and AM4 the same time as Sandy Bridge to mature.
A strange request when you also say this:
Lets call it what it is...... a great WIN for AMD.
and
I think this is perfect for majority of consumers...

Those statements are still correct, I was more meaning towards the high end enthusiast consumers wanting 3 way SLI etc.

It is a great win for AMDas it made the i5 pointless overnight and really the only Intel CPU I would buy is the 7700K as its single core IPC is still way ahead.

IPC is'nt 5% higher, the clocks are way higher but even with clocks difference, when developers start to optimize real world results will change
 
Those statements are still correct, I was more meaning towards the high end enthusiast consumers wanting 3 way SLI etc.

It is a great win for AMDas it made the i5 pointless overnight and really the only Intel CPU I would buy is the 7700K as its single core IPC is still way ahead.
Those statements conflict with each other. Also the i5 still has better IPC as Ryzen -
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11244...x-vs-core-i5-review-twelve-threads-vs-four/17
Before the debate about cores from AMD’s past rears its head (Vishera/Bulldozer designs in that case), given that AMD’s single thread performance is not too far behind, having a big set of cores as an alternative is something interesting for end-users, especially as more work flows and gaming titles rely on multithreading to scale. As a result, where Intel offer four cores and four threads, AMD is now offering six cores and twelve threads – a potential +200% uptick in the number of threads and +50% in cores, albeit at 10-15% lower instructions per clock.
and
10-15% higher Instruccions Per Clock? Fake, Intel is about 5% higher Instruccions Per Clock over RYZEN on monothread but clocks higher, 7600K is 3.80GHz base 4.20GHz with much "Turbo" States between these clocks that helps on low-threaded aplicacions like games, most of RYZEN CPUs Max clocks under 4.20GHz for 2 Threads
 
I chat with mates who are anti AMD such as yourself all the time and AMD could be 20% better IPC and then the argument would change to I don't want to use the extra 20W to power it and I hate all that heat.

The reality is that $330 (AUD) is a bad price for a 4 core CPU in 2017 and everyday life on a PC is highly threaded and be even more so in the next few years. Even if people don't realize it computers are considered an always on or instant on device expected to do lots of things at once.

You can buy your Intel and me AMD and you know what I am perfectly ok with that.
You should start by not making assumptions - I am not anti-AMD. What I am against is making the recommendation to anyone at this moment in time that one is better than the other. If you are that person where multi-threaded workloads are your bread and butter the Ryzen offerings are a no brainer. For those of us whose only "heavy task" consists of games (the majority of which are DX11 titles) then the Intel is the correct choice today.

I would have liked the article to include a disclaimer to wait if you are building a new computer today. Of the 10 or so reviews I've seen most report that the AM4 platform is still exhibiting some growing pains though they appear confident that in time most issues will be resolved. When they are resolved, Ryzen meets mainstream adoption, and software developers begin to utilize Ryzen's strengths in their offerings then it will be "no-brainer" over the i5.

Until then it's a tradeoff.
 
Still not terribly impressed with these chips for gaming, the platform as a whole is nothing special either. I don't see myself buying any of these Ryzen chips any time soon.
I agree.
Ryzen is very impressive and people keep throwing out the $1000 6900K, which is valid, but that's the most extreme comparison. Thats been the leading CPU up until this point and released over 12-14 months ago (Q2 of 2016), things have changed drastically lately.
The biggest gripes with Ryzen is that it kinda sucks for gaming and the overclock headroom is non-existent. People are hitting 4.4GHz to 4.6GHz with the 6900K, and 5.0GHz with the 7700K.

If you get 4.3 from Ryzen you got a golden chip, most can't go over 4.0GHz.
Thats how fast my i7 from 2010 goes.
A Core i5 7600 beats every Ryzen chip there is for gaming and costs $220, and that's at STOCK clocks.
There are only 1 or 2 games (which both suck btw) that utilize more then 4-8 logical cores, it will be aleast 2-3 more years before games utilize more then 8 logical cores. Most games might be a bad indicator of what Ryzen can really do, but some newer games are good indicators and I haven't seen anything convincing. Not trying to shade Ryzen but its not good in two very important areas.
 
Still not terribly impressed with these chips for gaming, the platform as a whole is nothing special either. I don't see myself buying any of these Ryzen chips any time soon.
I agree.
Ryzen is very impressive and people keep throwing out the $1000 6900K, which is valid, but that's the most extreme comparison. Thats been the leading CPU up until this point and released over 12-14 months ago (Q2 of 2016), things have changed drastically lately.
The biggest gripes with Ryzen is that it kinda sucks for gaming and the overclock headroom is non-existent. People are hitting 4.4GHz to 4.6GHz with the 6900K, and 5.0GHz with the 7700K.

If you get 4.3 from Ryzen you got a golden chip, most can't go over 4.0GHz.
Thats how fast my i7 from 2010 goes.
A Core i5 7600 beats every Ryzen chip there is for gaming and costs $220, and that's at STOCK clocks.
There are only 1 or 2 games (which both suck btw) that utilize more then 4-8 logical cores, it will be aleast 2-3 more years before games utilize more then 8 logical cores. Most games might be a bad indicator of what Ryzen can really do, but some newer games are good indicators and I haven't seen anything convincing. Not trying to shade Ryzen but its not good in two very important areas.
I also agree, Ryzen would do fine for people who do video editing/streaming. For gaming Intel is best. I have i5 7500 that I expect to replace with a Hex core Coffee Lake in 2018/19 (hopefully there will be a Hex intel for LGA1151 chipset). Thanks AMD for bringing back competition but at current prices Ryzen is just for AMD fans.
 
I also agree, Ryzen would do fine for people who do video editing/streaming. For gaming Intel is best. I have i5 7500 that I expect to replace with a Hex core Coffee Lake in 2018/19 (hopefully there will be a Hex intel for LGA1151 chipset).

You cannot say Intel is best for gaming when opinion is purely based on benchmarks with no internet connection and no background tasks. Many agree that 8-core Ryzen runs games more smoothly than 4-core Intel. Also on many games 7700K is already around 100% CPU utilization while 8-core Ryzen has about half of that. Ryzen is clearly better choice for tomorrow. To be honest, at current prices every i5/i7 is only for Intel fans.

There won't be hex for Intel LGA1151 CPU socket. At least if we believe Intel's official statements.
 
If you get 4.3 from Ryzen you got a golden chip, most can't go over 4.0GHz.
Thats how fast my i7 from 2010 goes.

First gen i7's hit 4.2+ GHz let alone the generations that followed. AMD clocked Ryzen as high as possible just to compete, they could have had them clocked lower which would give you the satisfaction of overclocking them, but then the base clocked chips would look worse in the benchmarks when comparing stock to stock with Intel. It's a good strategy, but I could only imagine how many chips they have that don't make the cut.
 
First gen i7's hit 4.2+ GHz let alone the generations that followed. AMD clocked Ryzen as high as possible just to compete, they could have had them clocked lower which would give you the satisfaction of overclocking them, but then the base clocked chips would look worse in the benchmarks when comparing stock to stock with Intel. It's a good strategy, but I could only imagine how many chips they have that don't make the cut.

AMD produces only 8-core (2*CCX) chips and those go to:

- Best clocks with CCX all cores working: Ryzen 7 1800x/1700x or (so far) unknown 16 core HEDT series high clock version
- Lower clocks with CCX all cores working: Ryzen 7 1700 or (so far) unknown 16 core HEDT series low clock version
- Lowest power consumption at around 2.8-3 GHz clocks with CCX all cores working: Naples 32 core server chips

- Best clocks with 1 core broken per ccx: Ryzen 5 1600x
- Lower clocks with 1 core broken per ccx: Ryzen 5 1600

- Best clocks with 2 core broken per ccx: Ryzen 5 1500x
- Best clocks with 2 core broken per ccx: Ryzen 5 1400

I expect they make very few chips that do not make it for any of those.
 
I know it's good to recommend for the price...

But excited about more cores? Bow is it helping, especially for games?

Recoomending a CPU based on cores, is ummm...well???
 
I also agree, Ryzen would do fine for people who do video editing/streaming. For gaming Intel is best. I have i5 7500 that I expect to replace with a Hex core Coffee Lake in 2018/19 (hopefully there will be a Hex intel for LGA1151 chipset).

You cannot say Intel is best for gaming when opinion is purely based on benchmarks with no internet connection and no background tasks. Many agree that 8-core Ryzen runs games more smoothly than 4-core Intel. Also on many games 7700K is already around 100% CPU utilization while 8-core Ryzen has about half of that. Ryzen is clearly better choice for tomorrow. To be honest, at current prices every i5/i7 is only for Intel fans.

There won't be hex for Intel LGA1151 CPU socket. At least if we believe Intel's official statements.


"Background tasks"?
Antivirus and some voice application use next to nothing, a browser -even with a 100 open tabs- doesnt use any CPU time neither as long as it isnt actively loading anything (which it wont, when you are in a game), it just uses a lot of RAM.

An i5-7500 with a H110 mainboard is about 250€ and beats anything AMD has to offer at this price point by a far margin.
Even an R5 1600 with a B350 mainbaord (which is already the best p/p AMD has to offer at 310€) is still slower in many games when not overclocked.

Ryzen is a nice CPU overall but when strictly looking at games an i5 is still the best you can get from a p/p point of view, because most games just cannot make use of more than 4 cores and prefer IPC/clockspeeds... this might change in the future - but it might aswell not change, considering the i5 has been THE gaming CPU for nearly a decade now and game-studios/programmers know that 90% of their customers have such a CPU.
 
"Background tasks"?
Antivirus and some voice application use next to nothing, a browser -even with a 100 open tabs- doesnt use any CPU time neither as long as it isnt actively loading anything (which it wont, when you are in a game), it just uses a lot of RAM.

An i5-7500 with a H110 mainboard is about 250€ and beats anything AMD has to offer at this price point by a far margin.
Even an R5 1600 with a B350 mainbaord (which is already the best p/p AMD has to offer at 310€) is still slower in many games when not overclocked.

Ryzen is a nice CPU overall but when strictly looking at games an i5 is still the best you can get from a p/p point of view, because most games just cannot make use of more than 4 cores and prefer IPC/clockspeeds... this might change in the future - but it might aswell not change, considering the i5 has been THE gaming CPU for nearly a decade now and game-studios/programmers know that 90% of their customers have such a CPU.

They tend to use much more than "next to nothing" for a short periods. And those usage spikes matter when gaming.

Perhaps slower in games today with no background tasks on. You also forget that there is no good upgrade path for i5-7500 while you can put 8-core CPU to B350 board. Also even if not upgrading, Ryzen is more future proof because it has more cores. B350 platform is also much better than Intel's bottlenecked solution. So far, every single time option "more but slower cores" has proven to be better choice than "less but bit faster cores".

Not long ago quad core CPU's were useless because most games use at most 2 cores. Now it's "hexa cores are useless because games use at most 4 cores". Believe or not, soon it's "octa cores are useless because games use at most 6 cores".

For those reasons, as you can read from article too, Ryzen really made all i5 and i7 CPU's obsolete.
 
This conversation will go back and forth forever. Personal preference will always win.

For me with 3x 2k screens an i5 cannot complete to the 1600x I just purchased. 2k Netflix/Youtube on one screen, chrome on another and then gaming on the third the 3770K I had was struggling and the 1600x was a huge jump in user experience.

Lets be honest, if you have a 1080p monitor at 60Hz it really doesn't matter what you get and I would have kept my 3770K but buying new Ryzen was the logical choice
 
"Background tasks"?
Antivirus and some voice application use next to nothing, a browser -even with a 100 open tabs- doesnt use any CPU time neither as long as it isnt actively loading anything (which it wont, when you are in a game), it just uses a lot of RAM.

An i5-7500 with a H110 mainboard is about 250€ and beats anything AMD has to offer at this price point by a far margin.
Even an R5 1600 with a B350 mainbaord (which is already the best p/p AMD has to offer at 310€) is still slower in many games when not overclocked.

Ryzen is a nice CPU overall but when strictly looking at games an i5 is still the best you can get from a p/p point of view, because most games just cannot make use of more than 4 cores and prefer IPC/clockspeeds... this might change in the future - but it might aswell not change, considering the i5 has been THE gaming CPU for nearly a decade now and game-studios/programmers know that 90% of their customers have such a CPU.

They tend to use much more than "next to nothing" for a short periods. And those usage spikes matter when gaming.

Perhaps slower in games today with no background tasks on. You also forget that there is no good upgrade path for i5-7500 while you can put 8-core CPU to B350 board. Also even if not upgrading, Ryzen is more future proof because it has more cores. B350 platform is also much better than Intel's bottlenecked solution. So far, every single time option "more but slower cores" has proven to be better choice than "less but bit faster cores".

Not long ago quad core CPU's were useless because most games use at most 2 cores. Now it's "hexa cores are useless because games use at most 4 cores". Believe or not, soon it's "octa cores are useless because games use at most 6 cores".

For those reasons, as you can read from article too, Ryzen really made all i5 and i7 CPU's obsolete.
Anyone with i5 7500 can upgrade to i7 7700/k (4c/8t) which tops all the gaming charts beating even an R7 1800X (8c/16t). You can see any review online including techspot's. Moreover, upcoming Intel Coffee Lake 14nm will utilize socket LGA1151. And if there is a Hex core offering (like the X-series) we could assume a Ryzen (12c/24t) competing to it and still losing.
 
Anyone with i5 7500 can upgrade to i7 7700/k (4c/8t) which tops all the gaming charts beating even an R7 1800X (8c/16t). You can see any review online including techspot's. Moreover, upcoming Intel Coffee Lake 14nm will utilize socket LGA1151. And if there is a Hex core offering (like the X-series) we could assume a Ryzen (12c/24t) competing to it and still losing.

Going from quad core to quad core is somewhat impossible to call an upgrade. Also i7-7700K prices are high and motherboard availability will be serious problem in the future. So that upgrade simply makes no sense. This is very easy to predict just looking in the past (LGA1155 and LGA1150).

You probably notice that i7-7700K beats even i7-6950K ($1700 CPU) on today's gaming benchmarks (different thing than gaming). Coffee Lake 6 core will also lose to i7-7700K on today's gaming benchmarks, release time is unknown too.

Kaby Lake is Skylake with different name and Coffee Lake will be Kaby Lake with different name. Also there is no guarantee that Coffee Lake will work with current motherboards. LGA775 proved that same socket name means nothing about compatibility.
 
Well I wish I had seen this before I bought the Ryzen 1800X. However I will say I am pretty happy with the system so far. I will agree that it needs to be given a little time to mature. I am still running my ram at 2400 (Have 4 sticks) but the system is awesome when paired with a 1080 ti and a 950 Pro. I have never seen anything boot this fast and with USB 3 ports galore. The only thing I have run into that really bothers me is my Blu Ray writer is simply not detected. I have had to resort to a USB 3 Drive container to use it. Other than that pretty awesome. Running on an Asus Crosshair 6 Mobo.. Possibly the only thing I would change together with only getting 2 sticks of Ram. Oh I have a perfectly good LGA1366 system that has xfire etc however with the direction DX12 games are going its no longer competitive so its a single card solution for the future.
 
When I do upgrade it will be with AMD. Even where (and if) Intel offers a little more performance per dollar, AMD has amazingly reduced the difference to the point where I can accept it in order to help fuel competition. If the market does not reward AMD for their valiant effort in Zen, the company may be forced to give up. It seems impossible for them to come from behind yet again in such a high-stakes arena. Then Intel will really slack off, and several years from now we'll ALL be worse off than if they were still duking it out.

Everyone has to make their own decision, and I couldn't buy the Bulldozer etc fiascos, but the AMD product is now a real contender - and we need to keep them there.

(For the same reason my next GPU will be AMD. I switched to NVidia but, considering the bigger picture and the fact that Vega too should be a contender, will go back.)

Really nice thought. Monopoly is going to ruin the innovation in the long term.
 
Really nice article. Ryzen and Vega are my next upgrades. AMD deserve some faith, and we need competition to fuel the innovation.
 
"Bottom line, how can you not love a 6-core/12-thread CPU that can be overclocked to 4 GHz using the stock cooler for under $250."

I would really love for my next build to use an R5 1600 but atm I would almost be forced to go with an intel setup as I am fixed on the mini-itx format for which at the moment there are no good am4 boards. In particular id want something to challenge the Asus strix z270 mini-itx board.
 
Still not terribly impressed with these chips for gaming, the platform as a whole is nothing special either. I don't see myself buying any of these Ryzen chips any time soon.
[snip]
The biggest gripes with Ryzen is that it kinda sucks for gaming and the overclock headroom is non-existent. People are hitting 4.4GHz to 4.6GHz with the 6900K, and 5.0GHz with the 7700K.

If you get 4.3 from Ryzen you got a golden chip, most can't go over 4.0GHz.
Thats how fast my i7 from 2010 goes.
[snip]

You do realize that it's been decades since you could use the core frequencies of AMD & Intel chips to determine which one performed better, & why they do benchmark testing nowadays?

It's also ironic, given that this was the complaint about AMD fanboys in the past, since the AMD FX chips were technically "faster" than Intel's comparable chips -- the FX-8350, for example, is "faster" (4.0GHz core/4.2GHz max Turbo, without overclocking) than the comparable Ivy Bridge i5-3570K (3.4GHz core/3.8GHz max Turbo, without overclocking) or i7-3770K (3.5GHz core/3.9GHz max Turbo, without overclocking)...but we all know that when it came to performance (especially in games), it's only been in the past year that those FX chips caught up to the Intel counterparts.

So saying that an Intel chip is better because it has faster core speeds, or because you can OC it to a higher frequency, is completely ludicrous. If clock frequency were the only yardstick we needed, then they'd be pushing the i3-7350K, which starts off much faster than its i5 & i7 brethren, plus is unlocked so you can OC it even higher. Except, oh yeah, that's right...most (if not all) benchmarks show it performs below a core i5 or i7.
 
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