We Test a $1,000 CPU From 2010 vs. Ryzen 3

[cfbcfb]

This article is lacking the most important thing for gaming benchmarks...equal clockspeeds.
Downclock everything else to 4.4GHz to alleviate this advantage, those are the results worth seeing.

Clock speeds are irrelevant when comparing dissimilar cpu architectures, as anyone who went from the pentium 4 to the original core architecture can attest.

The i7 tested here bares little resemblance in most ways to the modern cpu's it was compared to.

 

[regiq]

You can get Gulftown Xeon cheap, but don't count for a spectre/meltdown patch for X58 mobo. I'm using this combo for 4 years now and still don't feel like I need an upgrade - only the heat it generates and those unpatched vulnerabilities sometimes make me wonder...

 

[Gezzer]

I have 2 gaming computers and one that might end up as one once the 11xx (or 2xxx) series Geforces drop.

One that started 2010 as a i7 875K @4.1GHz (water) with 8GB RAM, two GTX 680's in SLI outputting to 3 1920x1200 IPS monitors. It's now transitioned to 3.7GHZ (still water) 16GB RAM and one GTX 980 outputting to a 2K IPS monitor.

I replaced it in 2014 with a i7 4790K @4.5 (air) 32GB RAM, two GTX 980's in SLI (same trip monitors) And the truth is while the newer one benches as faster for gaming I don't really notice much of a difference. My monitors are all 60Hz so anything over 60FPS is pretty much wasted anyway IMHO.

My latest is a Ryzen 5 1600x @stock (for now) 16GB RAM, AMD 7790 (needs to be upgraded) that is outputting to a 1080p touch monitor and a 4K HDR HDTV. I'm currently using it mostly for a HTPC and a Spotify jukebox outputting to my stereo.

I might go VR with it once I replace the video card. But the one thing that I'm just not thrilled about is the fact I have no choice but use Windows 10. It's an okay OS, but IMHO Win7 was the quintessential windows OS. Trying to add touch support made 8 a joke and windows as a "service" makes 10 a bit scary. So I think I'll be sticking with the older iron until they're interfacing the chips with our grey matter.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

"Today we tested a 1970 VW beetle vs a 2018 Malibu. We were shocked to find that outside of engine noise, the Malibu is better in nearly every regard".

Perhaps a better analogy would be a 1971 Rolls Corniche and a 2018 Malibu.

 

[loki1944]

For gaming your selection was far too small and resolution too low; in many games that 980X will place higher; and @1440p+ the gap will narrow further.

 

[loki1944]

It's nice to compare after so many years but the gaming tests caught my attention most. Ryzen 1600 isn't exactly battering an OC 980X here. Certainly if your use is gaming the case for holding onto a powerful platform for a long period while just upgrading the GPU a couple times is as good as ever.

GTX1080ti performance is an order of magnitude more than what was available from 2010, but the Gulftown still delivers the goods in a CPU bound 1080p, quite incredibly. I wonder what it might look like in 1440p or above.....would you even notice much!?

I had an i7 920 from 2008 that served first as a primary machine then relegated to other roles, After 8 years of hard use the motherboard failed. It still felt capable the day it died.

After a handful of GPU upgrades and passing to a young family member it went from beating up PS3 and X360 on games to beating up on an entirely new console gen, PS4 and Xbox One. So much for constantly blowing a fortune on upgrades every couple years to game on PC......

I know my i7 920@4.1 stacked very well vs a 7700K with both using a GTX 1080 in Wildlands https://imgur.com/G8ciaq2. In general my old bloomfield is still fantastic for gaming.

 

[Forebode]

With some of the comparisons to the 1600, it should have been overclocked. To be on this list it should have either been a 1600x or an overclocked 1600. That was the point of getting the 1600, because it could overclock as well as the 1600x.

 

[Lionvibez]

For gaming your selection was far too small and resolution too low; in many games that 980X will place higher; and @1440p+ the gap will narrow further.

The 980x will only place higher in your scenario because you are pushing the bottleneck onto the GPU at 1440.

For the purpose of this review they are focusing on CPU performance so what they did is fine.

 

[gamoniac]

Steve, how dare you make me realize that my 8 years old CPU (not an i7-980X) is now obsolete... You are now obligated to give me some ideas about what to do with an old but fully functional CPU.

Seriously though, I enjoyed reading this article. Thank you.

 

[Nightfire]

I would love to see a battle between the AMD 2400g and Intel 5775c. I think they would be pretty close CPU, iGPU, and dGPU performance.

 

[loki1944]

The 980x will only place higher in your scenario because you are pushing the bottleneck onto the GPU at 1440.

For the purpose of this review they are focusing on CPU performance so what they did is fine.

Except in reality someone with a 1080Ti is the least likely to play @1080p. So essentially it is pointless in practical terms. Using a GTX 1060 @1080p would be much more apt. And bloomfield takes a hit above GTX 980Ti/1070 due to PCIE 2.0 on top of it all.

 

[amghwk]

As much as people rant about Intel's "meager" improvement of CPUs in each generation, getting the newer gen CPUs does seem to be sound, especially when it comes to efficiency and power consumption.

It may not be leaps and bound faster than previous gen CPUs, but they do become more efficient AND powerful.

 

[Lionvibez]

Except in reality someone with a 1080Ti is the least likely to play @1080p. So essentially it is pointless in practical terms. Using a GTX 1060 @1080p would be much more apt. And bloomfield takes a hit above GTX 980Ti/1070 due to PCIE 2.0 on top of it all.

I'm well aware of the point you are trying to make and its been said 1000 times on forums on the internet. Obviously someone with a 1080ti will be gaming over 1080p. However the focus of this review is on the CPU's why is that so difficult to understand?

 

[Nightfire]

The 980x will only place higher in your scenario because you are pushing the bottleneck onto the GPU at 1440.

For the purpose of this review they are focusing on CPU performance so what they did is fine.

Except in reality someone with a 1080Ti is the least likely to play @1080p. So essentially it is pointless in practical terms. Using a GTX 1060 @1080p would be much more apt. And bloomfield takes a hit above GTX 980Ti/1070 due to PCIE 2.0 on top of it all.

And most GTX 1280ti owners will be playing at 4k in 5 years at which point an Intel i7 920 would be good enough, so what is your point? We all know that the higher = less fps = less cpu overhead.

I find it strange that many here say the 980x is still good for gaming while anything from Ryzen is only good for non gaming stuff.

 

[TrevorX]

With all of these legacy system comparison articles I've been reading over the last couple of years, what seems to be missing are some rational clock-for-clock comparisons between more sensible options. For example, there was a lot of excitement a couple of years ago around the E5-2670 v1(C2) Xeons because they were under $100 and still very competitive performance wise. This platform continues to be interesting because DDR3 RDIMMs are extremely cheap compared with DDR4 - by at least an order of magnitude.

What I'd like to see from comparisons between current gen and legacy hardware are a set of clock-for-clock performance numbers allowing the reader to see what capability current gen systems bring to the table over systems built on the tail end of DDR3 platforms. This is important for those with good six year old hardware wondering if there's any advantage moving to the latest gen - it's still PCIe 3.0, apart from addition features like m.2, Thunderbolt and USB-C (which can all be bolted on with add on cards) DDR4 and power efficiency improvements are the biggest changes, but how much are those really worth? What's the actual improvement people will see replacing still really functional older hardware?

 

[Sausagemeat]

I must say I’m quite impressed with the 980X and disappointed in the 2200Gs gaming performance.

 

[amstech]

Clock speeds are irrelevant when comparing dissimilar cpu architectures.

Not for games.

 

[Adhmuz]

Thank you for the review. But you forget about one very important thing like SATA III. X58 doesn't support it natively. So it's supposed to have a longer time in loading games or applicationes and frame rate drops. Also SATA II can impact performance terribly on heavy loaded Windows systems. No advantages of SSD.

Are you speaking from experience or merely speculation? I can easily confirm using an SSD on a X58 build, with both native SATA II and SATA III daughter boards offers a tremendous improvement to performance, you might not get the full potential out of a modern SSD from 2018, but when SSDs hit the scene back when this platform was still relevant they had no issues being used to their potential. Your heavily loaded system example is irrelevant because once everything is loaded into RAM the system performs as well as any other, I see very little system disk usage on my X5660 home server with 24GB or RAM running over 150 processes, and this is only using a budget orriented SSD on a Marvell 91xx SATA III controller.

In the competion a matter was if some 10 years old
12-threades CPU
can be on a par with
4-threades Ryzen 3 2200
and the answer is yes it still can beat it... in some benchmarks. Sorry, but I see no reason to buy that old piece even if it's slighty faster and cheaper, especially for one time usage.

The argument isn't so much to not buy the AMD Ryzen CPU and try to find a 10 year old platform, as much as if you still have said platform running you can potentially save a whole bunch on running cost and get slightly better performance in most applications.

Another confirmation that AMD did a great job.

It only took AMD 10 years to surpass Intel's 10 year old old architecture, great job indeed...

 

[tipstir]

CPU vs CPU has I can remember this has been going on for years now. I use to remember the limit on RAM was 640MB all sorts were trying to get more. Now CPU speed peaked over 4 GHz. This system running AMD 8 APU at 3.7 GHz with 32GB XP Ready RAM DDR3. Mine boots up quick. HDD has been replace with 64MB Cache keep the HDD clean and defrag. I don't store anything on the HDD except OS and programs. AMD 4 APU OC to 3.0 GHz Dual core really quick no issues with that. The other systems i3 on laptop that's quick too. I been waiting for some newer tech but even 32GB of RAM Windows 10 is just using like 3GB. There will always be test and those who like they're system to be the best it can be!

 

[Jyrkz]

8 years and intel only gives +40-50% overall fps improvements :O

 

[fktech]

Nostalgic look back. Thanks for the perspective!

 

[Forebode]

Odd, no where did it reference AM4.. the benefit to the ryzen 3 is you can still upgrade the cpu at your leisure, you might not get all the benefits in the future tech but it'll still work. I really hope the AM5 equivalent to be out in 2020/2021.. will also sustain multiple years. There's a greater chance that someone would rather upgrade the cpu than the entire setup.. increasing the possibility of future sales. A brand new socket or chipset every few years is lazy planning.

 

[Adi6293]

Can anyone here tell me if they have Vega 64 running on non UEFI motherboard? I've got Asus Rampage II Extreme and 4.6Ghz Xeon X5675 so not a bad setup, I want to upgrade my graphics card and get a freesync monitor but apparently Vega cards don't work with legacy bios? :-(

 

[Kibaruk]

It's nice to compare after so many years but the gaming tests caught my attention most. Ryzen 1600 isn't exactly battering an OC 980X here. Certainly if your use is gaming the case for holding onto a powerful platform for a long period while just upgrading the GPU a couple times is as good as ever.

I would still switch procs for efficiency, if possible just change the proc/mb. Specially if the idea is to game on the machine that will normally be up and running hot.

 

[Kibaruk]

Personally I no longer get the love affair some people have with these old Xeon CPUs

It's called self-reassurance, people will try as best as possible to avoid saying something they own is a bad choice, and although most of the people talking here have had their rigs for a long time, it makes no sense whatsoever to build that old machine more than for the omph of it.