Hey all, quick question because this is driving me crazy - I have a pending build (with Scan) which began life with a 3900X but I was then convinced the 9900k was the way to go for a PC that's primarily for gaming. I'm now questioning my decision. Most reviews show the Intel is a bit faster, but am I being an idiot giving up those extra cores, PCI-E 4.0 etc? I've already paid for it, so I'm not really driven by value here - both options are roughly comparable in price. It's performance vs. being a bit future proof I'm concerned with. Thanks in advance for any advice!
No bad choice there, it is probably a given that which ever you upgrade in the future they will likely need new motherboard etc, so no real future proofing, sure AMD have done a grand job supporting sockets giving an upgrade path but there will be new standards down the road anyway like DDr5/pcie5/usb4 etc, so unless you have a use case that will need pcie 4.0, I wouldn't worry about it.
That's reassuring to read! I suspect the two options being so close might be why I'm struggling so much with this decision. Thanks for the reply!
I would go AMD because of: more cores better socket support PCIe 4.0 for faster storage If you really only game, Intel will be good. I don't think it will make a real-world difference in gaming.
Primary question is - what is your timeframe for delivery ? Because current 3900X shipments seems to be arriving around the 2nd week of August.
Scan seem to have both for their 3XS builds, at least for the dates I’m booked in for which is around the second week of August anyway as I’m on holiday before then.
I think I’ll stick with the Intel spec then. Thanks for the responses, they’re all appreciated. Knew I could rely on bit for sensible answers - difficult to find elsewhere, it’s fanboys wall to wall and I don’t know who to believe!
What he said, I've been gaming on a gen1 Ryzen for a couple of years, I've never felt I've needed more, happily fed a couple on 1080is no bother, the fact the gen 3 are so much closer to Intel now can only mean it is even better. The only tangible benefit you might make use of besides pcie4 on AMD is the StoreMI facility but its not expensive you could buy it on intel and use Optane.
My wifes old 3770k has Intel rapid store that does more or less what store mi does but its limited to a 64gb sad I can't really tell it makes a difference though as various reinstall of her os over the years I have left it out with no mention of it being slower
Not the same thing one is caching, the other is tiered storage, but Intel RST does work well I used it for years and it has tangible benefit.
Sounds to me you're not going to lose any sleep over the purchases. Might as well stick with it and maybe upgrade when Intel bring out new stuff in 2021 or switch to AMD. The PCI-e 4.0 components will be cheap as chips by then and they're already working on PCI-e 6.0 and be out in 2021 so a lot of stuff happening in few years time.
amd marketing blurbs makes it sound like its caching, as it directly says it keeps your most used stuff on the drive, so does RST, but in reality its not my most used stuff ... at least its the one level and its 25 gigs of assets that I just loaded into on the spinning disk maybe they mean tiered storage, but its marketing makes it sound identical to RST, meaning its not going to pick out that my currently most played game is Shadow of the Tomb Raider and move that entire program over, rather vs how many times am I going to load the first level of a game, ok I guess firefox and the system loads a tiny bit faster but... its no magic bullet, most of what you want to be fast is on your mechanical drive, if you screw up a level 4 or 5 times it might get faster, then your back to square one applications on the other hand I can see it being a benifit, it does make a difference when loading her graphics art programs ... but then im quibbling over a couple seconds
Nope. The standard itself will be released in 2021; the earliest anyone's likely to see hardware is 2022. Let's put it this way: PCIe 4.0 was released, as a standard, in 2017 but has only now landed in consumer gear two years later in 2019 - and PCIe 3.0 to 4.0 was a much smaller leap in complexity than 4.0 to 5.0 or 5.0 to 6.0. If we see mainstream PCIe 6.0 hardware before 2023 I'd be surprised.
It's different in that your ssd is the priority drive in the tier and your data goes on to that first, rather than cached on use, stuff you don't use is moved to slow drive, you can also use all your space, but yes should you not play a game for a few months it may have been moved out to slow disk if other data has taken priority, but with 256GB or even 1TB it might take some time before you can use enough other stuff to shift data off the fast drive. A little video I don't use it personally, I have loads of NVMe drives but can see how it would benefit someone with more modest system and one ssd.
Just for pedantry purposes: PCIe 4.0 has been shipping for over a year on IBM Power 9 boards. Hardly relevant to consumers, but a handful of months from standard ratification to shipping hardware is possible if the spec is de-facto locked down long enough before ratification for the PHY layer to be implemented.
