In Hindsight: Some of the Worst CPU/GPUs Purchases of 2017

I'd like to offer a few words in defense of the Ryzen 5 1500X.

Compared to Ryzen 5 1400:

-The extra L3 cache gives a very small advantage.
-Comes with a better stock cooler, which means better thermals even at stock frequencies.
-Faster out of the box.

Compared to Ryzen 5 1600:

-Faster single-thread performance out of the box.
-Better thermals with the stock cooler.
-If the aim is to overclock the CPU on a B350 motherboard, the four core is the safer choice. None of the current B350 boards have a great VRM and pushing a six or eight core Ryzen to its limit will very possibly make the VRM run hot enough to shorten its lifetime (unless extra steps are taken to provide proper cooling for the VRM).

For overclocking, both the Ryzen 5 1400 and the Ryzen 5 1600 should ideally be paired with a good aftermarket cooler, whereas the 1500X should be able to cope relatively well with its stock cooler. In the case of the 1600, I'd personally opt for a Noctua top-down blowing cooler to keep the CPU as well as the VRM cool. Upgrading the cooler would thus mean a price hike for the 1400 - in which case it would likely cost at least as much as the 1500X - and a considerable price hike for the 1600. Performance-wise all three CPUs are pretty close to each other in games that do not scale well with cores and threads. At stock frequencies the 1500X may even take the "W" in some cases. With something like a GTX 1060, all three would be bottlenecked by the GPU to some extent, making the margins even smaller. The 1600 should in any case offer the smoothest experience, especially with games that do scale well with cores and threads, but unless the CPU is paired with something like a GTX 1070 or better, is it enough to justify the higher price (combined with the better cooler) and increased power consumption? Maybe not.

In short, for purely gaming purposes the Ryzen 5 1500X offers the best value of the three in my opinion, assuming the plan is to overclock on a B350 board and pair the CPU with a mid-range GPU.
 
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Those K-series i3's have copped a bit of flak from the tech media, but I'm seriously considering the 8350K for my next machine as I just need something to speed up Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 5.7 (doing my best to resist the CC subscription). It's the cheapest way to get some IPC speed, and Adobe is fairly rubbish at using anything more than 4 cores.
 
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Agree on the vega flop. Vega, in my mind, was a pointless launch. Polaris with the same number of cores could have gotten the same performance, for a lot less cash, and all the vega work could have gone into navi, while the polaris XL chips could have deprived nvidia of those juicy sales. The complete and utter lack of third party models due to AMD's inability to get its memory height right isnt helping.
 
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Only 1800X makes some kind of sense, I mean being an X model. The others don't.

AMD put a lowest price than it should to the R5 1600, making almost all other models looking expensive. Also they should have avoided creating so many X models when XFR in this series of Ryzen CPUs doesn't offer really much. Not to mention that you pay more and lose a nice stock cooler.
AMD should have offered only three models. 1600 at $250 price, 1700 at $350 and 1800X at $450, ALL with coolers. 1600X and 1700X wheren't making much sense from day one.
 
TLDR:

CPU: if you bought Intel recently you got screwed due to lack of mobo compatibility (as usual) and cores.

GPU: unless you bought AMD GPU at launch you overpaid and lack of competition with cryptominers make buying GPU expensive.
 
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Most of these "bad purchase" have to do with price rather then performance.

The 7700k is a great CPU and at the time king of gaming performance, AMD could not touch it for gaming performance yet it's over priced (unless you get it at Microcenter for $279).

The AMD 1600x is bad purchase (or any AMD CPU after the 1600 for gaming) when you can get a 1600 for less but for equal money it's a great purchase.
 
Lot of tech released fairly immediately obsoleted by unannounced new stuff, but then if you bought what you needed, it still works as well as when you bought it so that softens the blow somewhat.
 
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The whole year has been terrible for graphics cards because of miners. It's nearly always better to try and schedule a new GPU purchase shortly after a full new generation launch which was summer 2016.

It's like buying a 1070ti now, unless you really need to it's a dumb decision. Because in about 6 months it'll be a mid range card when Volta drops and worth half what you paid for it. Whereas if you had bought a GTX1070 last summer it'll be nearly two years old before it's value is halved by a new generation.
 
I agree, I was lucky enough to get i7 7700k from Inter (Retailedge program) for just $200 and I couldn't be happier.

dirtyferret said:
Most of these "bad purchase" have to do with price rather then performance.

The 7700k is a great CPU and at the time king of gaming performance, AMD could not touch it for gaming performance yet it's over priced (unless you get it at Microcenter for $279).

The AMD 1600x is bad purchase (or any AMD CPU after the 1600 for gaming) when you can get a 1600 for less but for equal money it's a great purchase.
Click to expand...
 
Mr Walton's arguments are all about price and upgrade path ("new parts are same price for better performance. I feel ripped off") ("I have to buy new board for my new CPU, what a ripoff!"). He forgets that sensible people build their PCs to actually use them, usually for 3 to 5 years, and they don't worry about what comes next being faster/cheaper. For the complainers there have always been many examples of this phenomenon, (self-induced buyer's remorse). For some reason, the gloom and doom folks all seem to have jobs writing for tech sites now. Gather your snowflakes, see how many "likes" you can get spreading negativity. After all, you're entitled...
 
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There should be a linch mob outside Intel's headquarters every day!!!! What a crappy company. I will never buy another Intel product if I can help it. I will at least go out of my way to find a competitive AMD product every time I am looking to build a new system. I avoided all of those pitfalls in earlier 17', even though I was forced to build right in the middle of all of it. I smartly went with the Ryzen 1700, even with so many on forum threads trying to push me to the 1700x or 1800x. But there were a couple of videos from smart reviewers like "Techdeals" who pointed out that the "x"less 1700 could be overclocked about as high as either one of those chips, and it was tons cheaper. That was very appealing to me, and thus I stuck with the 1700. Now, my cpu is clocked at 4064mhz, and runs very well with my GSkill FlareX 3200c14 DDR4 memory, overclocked to 3482mhz. Keeping everything in line is my ASUS CrossHair VI Extreme mobo, which also holds a Gigabyte Aorus 1080ti Extreme graphics card. My system runs extremely fast, and scores very well (Topping 98%) on all benches. I am now a huge AMD fan once again. And in the near future, once multiple threads truly are accepted, and incorporated into every piece of software written, I will upgrade to a threadripper. But as it stands, my 1700 has 8 cores and 16 threads, and there's nothing out there that even takes full advantage of these cores and threads right now. So everything in its time.
 
dj2017 said:
Only 1800X makes some kind of sense, I mean being an X model. The others don't.

AMD put a lowest price than it should to the R5 1600, making almost all other models looking expensive. Also they should have avoided creating so many X models when XFR in this series of Ryzen CPUs doesn't offer really much. Not to mention that you pay more and lose a nice stock cooler.
AMD should have offered only three models. 1600 at $250 price, 1700 at $350 and 1800X at $450, ALL with coolers. 1600X and 1700X wheren't making much sense from day one.
Click to expand...
Why does the 1800x makes sense, when the 1700 can easily overclock to 4ghz??? Again, I think you are missing the point. Why would you pay $500 for an 1800x, when you can spend as little as $285 (which I did) and get a cpu which runs better without all the XFR crap, at almost the exact same overclock speed???? No, the 1800x did not make any sense at all. It's paying a ton more money for absolutely unnoticeable gains.
 
azicat said:
Those K-series i3's have copped a bit of flak from the tech media, but I'm seriously considering the 8350K for my next machine as I just need something to speed up Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 5.7 (doing my best to resist the CC subscription). It's the cheapest way to get some IPC speed, and Adobe is fairly rubbish at using anything more than 4 cores.
Click to expand...

8350K = $170 US + $20 US for cooler and you're basically at a Ryzen 5 1600. I don’t really care what you’re using it for right now, buying a 8350K over an R5 1600 seems nuts to me. You also have to pay $120 US for a Z370 while the R5 1600 can be stuck on a $60 US B350 board. That’s why reviewers gave it a hard time ;)

dirtyferret said:
Most of these "bad purchase" have to do with price rather then performance.

The 7700k is a great CPU and at the time king of gaming performance, AMD could not touch it for gaming performance yet it's over priced (unless you get it at Microcenter for $279).

The AMD 1600x is bad purchase (or any AMD CPU after the 1600 for gaming) when you can get a 1600 for less but for equal money it's a great purchase.
Click to expand...

Can you imagine, a bad purchase has to do with money. That said with the 7700K it’s just as much to do with compatibility and complete lack of an upgrade path. As for performance, get back to me in a year or two and let’s see how the 7700K and 8700K stack up.

hood6558 said:
Mr Walton's arguments are all about price and upgrade path ("new parts are same price for better performance. I feel ripped off") ("I have to buy new board for my new CPU, what a ripoff!"). He forgets that sensible people build their PCs to actually use them, usually for 3 to 5 years, and they don't worry about what comes next being faster/cheaper. For the complainers there have always been many examples of this phenomenon, (self-induced buyer's remorse). For some reason, the gloom and doom folks all seem to have jobs writing for tech sites now. Gather your snowflakes, see how many "likes" you can get spreading negativity. After all, you're entitled...
Click to expand...

Could you imagine an article with the title “In Hindsight: Some of the Worst CPU/GPUs Purchases of 2017” talking about price? COULD YOU IMAGINE THAT!?!?! I think though this is down to the fact that when you purchase something you spend this stuff called ‘money’. If you spend too much money, it’s considered a bad purchase, if you pay less money than expected that’s often referred to as a ‘bargain’.

“Sensible people buy their computers to use for 3 to 5 years”. Well hot damn that being the case if you could get 50% more for the same price within the same year, I feel like that’s going to be massively beneficial to you in 5 years’ time. Especially when it affords you the ability to make another cost effective upgrade.
 
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The recent removal of newer CPU support on the same socket motherboards seems like an arbitrary attempt to force you to spend more money. Its leads me to believe they have a contract with the Mobo vendors to insure more consumer spending. It seems all corporations in all fields are focused on screwing the customer over in any way possible. Nothing last as long as it used to and charging more for less seems to be a common thing.
 
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Steve said:
8350K = $170 US + $20 US for cooler and your basically at a Ryzen 5 1600. I don’t really care what you’re using it for right now, buying a 8350K over an R5 1600 seems nuts to me. You also have to pay $120 US for a Z370 while the R5 1600 can be stuck on a $60 US B350 board. That’s why reviewers gave it a hard time ;)
Click to expand...

Sound logic Steve, when applying general price-performance evaluation - but I'd argue that K series i3s have very specific case uses for which an equivalently priced Ryzen may not be optimal. Puget Systems compared Photoshop CC performance across Coffee Lake processors and found the 8350K to offer 90% of the 8700K's performance for 40% of the cost, with all Ryzens falling behind even the i3 due to IPC performance.

(I've heard that this is due to a pile of legacy code being tangled within Photoshop and Lightroom which was mostly written at a time when clock speed was more important)

Of course I'd go for more cores and threads if I was doing more than just Photoshop, where Ryzen makes more economic sense.
 
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azicat said:
Sound logic Steve, when applying general price-performance evaluation - but I'd argue that K series i3s have very specific case uses for which an equivalently priced Ryzen may not be optimal. Puget Systems compared Photoshop CC performance across Coffee Lake processors and found the 8350K to offer 90% of the 8700K's performance for 40% of the cost, with all Ryzens falling behind even the i3 due to IPC performance.

(I've heard that this is due to a pile of legacy code being tangled within Photoshop and Lightroom which was mostly written at a time when clock speed was more important)

Of course I'd go for more cores and threads if I was doing more than just Photoshop, where Ryzen makes more economic sense.
Click to expand...

Yeah I get what you're saying and with the Adobe software you are indeed correct. I just keep hoping that we'll see a new version that takes advantage of heavily threaded CPUs. Surely it has to happen soon ;)
 
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