The Best CPUs: This is what you should get

[Julio Franco]

Who would have thought a year ago that we'd see AMD dethrone Intel at the high-end CPU segment? It's an exciting time to be a PC enthusiast and after extensive testing, we've come up with this quick guide to bring you the best CPU choices available right now.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/bestof/cpu/

 

[theruck]

Not many ryzens there. looks like Intel solved it quite easily

 

[Evernessince]

Not many ryzens there. looks like Intel solved it quite easily

Take into consideration the the 8400 still can't be found in stock unless you want to pay an eBay scalper over MSRP price. AMD doesn't have a product in the bottom of the market yet for Ryzen so Intel wins by default.

 

[Puiu]

I'm a bit confused. Didn't Intel say they stepped up their 8th gen production? The 8400 is still a no show and the 8600k is very close in price to the 8700k.Thanks to this even Ryzen went up in pricing too.

 

[dirtyferret]

The i5-8400 is hard to find and without a budget board I don't see the point since the 8600k is $229 at my local microcenter and fully stocked. They also have the 8700 non k for $349 fully stocked.

 

[Vulcanproject]

Not many ryzens there. looks like Intel solved it quite easily

If/when AMD can ramp the clocks on Ryzen then Intel will have serious competition for enthusiasts. See if Pinnacle Ridge can do that, find out soon enough.

 

[MaikuTech]

Not many ryzens there. looks like Intel solved it quite easily

LOL sadly yes much as I like amd, intel began to shut them down, midway through late april after a good launch.
Intel is making 15.00 billion more but amd is still doing a great job here.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/intel-earnings-q3-2017.html

https://www.thoughtco.com/zeros-in-million-billion-trillion-2312346

 

[moobg]

Long time reader, first time poster but I couldn't ignore such a glaring mistake.

Ryzen prices haven't been that high in quite some time, with the 1800X usually available for $349 and the 1700X available for $299 (at least at amazon) and even cheaper if you have a Micro Center nearby.

You said: "There is little point in purchasing the 1700X at $360 or the 1800X at $460 given we've found all three Ryzen 7 models hit the same overclock of around 4 to 4.1GHz."

You then linked to newegg, but if you bothered to actually click on the very links you posted, you'd see the listed prices are $299 and $349 respectively.

 

[Apogee777]

Not many ryzens there. looks like Intel solved it quite easily

Take into consideration the the 8400 still can't be found in stock unless you want to pay an eBay scalper over MSRP price. AMD doesn't have a product in the bottom of the market yet for Ryzen so Intel wins by default.

theruck loves an "easy" throw and run answer - which encapsulates generation z mentality.

 

[dj2017]

I think both Ryzen 5 1600 and Ryzen 7 1700 can share that title.

Now, based on titles given, the list is correct. But given different titles, the list could be different. For example a "Best Value processor for professionals", would probably point to a Threadripper 1950X.

 

[Evernessince]

I think both Ryzen 5 1600 and Ryzen 7 1700 can share that title.

Now, based on titles given, the list is correct. But given different titles, the list could be different. For example a "Best Value processor for professionals", would probably point to a Threadripper 1950X.

You'd be correct but unfortunately TechSpot focuses more on the consumer space than the professional one. This list is tailored to their audience.

 

[reallynobody]

Stop being a cow for greedy corporation to milk. Still running core 2 duo/8800gt here!

 

[Demur]

Not many ryzens there. looks like Intel solved it quite easily

Take into consideration the the 8400 still can't be found in stock unless you want to pay an eBay scalper over MSRP price. AMD doesn't have a product in the bottom of the market yet for Ryzen so Intel wins by default.

To be fair, it's impressive that they have something in the performance/overclocking category at all, after the trainwreck of a state that their CPUs were in immediately prior. Their offering in the single-threaded performance space still isn't as strong which is why they can't beat Intel on that front. I'd say that's the main reason the Ryzen 7 1700 isn't able to unseat the i5 8400 in the gaming value category.

But they're definitely on the right track, though. It all depends on whether they can keep the ball rolling and gain even momentum.

 

[Evernessince]

To be fair, it's impressive that they have something in the performance/overclocking category at all, after the trainwreck of a state that their CPUs were in immediately prior. Their offering in the single-threaded performance space still isn't as strong which is why they can't beat Intel on that front. I'd say that's the main reason the Ryzen 7 1700 isn't able to unseat the i5 8400 in the gaming value category.

But they're definitely on the right track, though. It all depends on whether they can keep the ball rolling and gain even momentum.

I wish I could say the same about their GPUs. AMD is 2 generations behind at this point.

 

[dj2017]

I wish I could say the same about their GPUs. AMD is 2 generations behind at this point.

They don't have the money to fight at two fronts. They decided to go the compute way with Vega and hope it will overclock very high to offer also gaming performance. It didn't, so they had to factory overclock it way more than it's optimal frequency and even that wasn't good enough. So they look way behind Nvidia in the eyes of the gamer.

Fortunately for them, some major companies prefer to do business with them than with Nvidia, for various reasons. So, Apple keeps using AMD GPUs and even Intel gives GCN a helping hand to keep it's GPU market share (and AMD money) with the Kaby lake G series.

 

[Ben Myers]

Stop being a cow for greedy corporation to milk. Still running core 2 duo/8800gt here!

Oh, I can top that for price-performance ratio! How about a hex-core Xeon E5645 running at 2.4GHz and 24GB of memory? The first-gen LGA1366 CPUs are dirt cheap and pretty doggone fast.

 

[EClyde]

It all depends on the game. My i5-4690K and R9 280 still whips the Llama's ***

 

[wiyosaya]

Long time reader, first time poster but I couldn't ignore such a glaring mistake.

Ryzen prices haven't been that high in quite some time, with the 1800X usually available for $349 and the 1700X available for $299 (at least at amazon) and even cheaper if you have a Micro Center nearby.

You said: "There is little point in purchasing the 1700X at $360 or the 1800X at $460 given we've found all three Ryzen 7 models hit the same overclock of around 4 to 4.1GHz."

You then linked to newegg, but if you bothered to actually click on the very links you posted, you'd see the listed prices are $299 and $349 respectively.

The 1950X is also at $899. The article implies it is $1,000. TS must be slipping?

 

[Julio Franco]

Long time reader, first time poster but I couldn't ignore such a glaring mistake.

@moobg @wiyosaya Glaring and honest editing mistake. Luckily our conclusions remain the exact same, I should know because I bought that R7 1700 for my home office machine a few weeks back. Thanks for the correction.

For the couple of "lack of testing" complainers, that's either very shortsighted or you haven't been on TechSpot for long. Luckily we have hundreds of hours of benchmarks and dozens of reviews to back up our words. The Best Of features are meant to skip all that, condense the information, and just tell you want to buy.

 

[FreeBetaTester]

Not many ryzens there. looks like Intel solved it quite easily

So true. AMD overpriced their Ryzen from the get go back in March of 2017 at release. R7 1800x at $500? Who were they kidding. This why AMD can not be declared best bang for the buck in this Ryzen era, until they significanly underprice Intel.

 

[CheekyP]

So true. AMD overpriced their Ryzen from the get go back in March of 2017 at release. R7 1800x at $500? Who were they kidding. This why AMD can not be declared best bang for the buck in this Ryzen era, until they significanly underprice Intel.

There were much cheaper Ryzen 7s at launch too, did you forget the 1700 and 1700X? IIRC the 1700 was about $300 and that was the model most people were buying, especially since it also included a decent HSF for the price.

AMD also had less competition from Intel back then (Coffee Lake was still 7 months away), so its smart business sense for them to 'make hay while the sun shines' so to speak. I don't begrudge them of that, its simple business sense, if I was an AMD shareholder I would want them to do exactly that after so many years of having a non competitive product.

Now that Intel has responded with Coffee Lake chips, obviously AMD cannot price their CPUs so high due to increased competition.

I actually agree with most of the choices that Techspot chose, although I think the 1600 deserves the 'best value' tag over the 1700, but that's just my opinion. The 1700 is a fine choice for anyone who can max out the cores/threads.

 

[dj2017]

It's really amazing how people are so ungrateful towards AMD, a company with 33% profit margin that forced Intel to finally offer more cores to it's customers. And they are ungrateful at the same time they will happily give their money to Intel, a company with 60% profit margin that will constantly ask it's customers to also buy a new motherboard.

 

[lanmansa]

This article is interesting and completely contradictory to the article that was posted only 3 weeks prior, which showed that every category AMD was killing it compared to Intel. https://www.techspot.com/article/1530-best-cpu-gpu-purchases-2017/ I guess a lot has changed in a short amount of time.