Current rig is an (aging) 8086K with 32GB DD4-3000 and Asus ROG Hero mobo. Last week I swapped out my old 2080ti for a 5080. Framerates in games (4K, ultra settings) are now through the roof, as desired.
However, my CPU is having a really hard time pulling this off. There were already games which pushed it to its limit (Helldivers 2, STALKER 2,…) but now with the new graphics card, CPU load in these games is anywhere from 85% to 100%. As a result, my cooling water gets hot (50°C) in about half an hour and my CPU starts thermal throttling, often leading to stutter etc.
I’ve selected the following components for upgrade:
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
GIGABYTE X870E AORUS PRO socket AM5 mobo
Corsair 64 GB DDR5-6400 Kit
Noctua NH-D15 G2 LBC
This would set me back around €1.556 right now. What are the chances this is going to go up significantly in the short/medium term in the EU?
I’m also still running Win10 since I absolutely loathe Win11, so I was thinking of starting off with Linux for this one since I don’t really have another €150 lying around to hand to Microsoft for shits and giggles. I have some professional experience with Linux but not in terms of daily driving it. I suppose I could also go with dualboot if need be.
You should at least upgrade to a 32bit processor 😁
One thing i have to say is that you should not expect to have great performance even if you buy the latest and greatest for everything. Most performance heavy games today are so fundamentally flawed in terms of their engine and optimization, that you will never get actually good performance and stability.
Also, dont buy that cpu if your primary use is gaming. Its a huge waste of money to buy anything above the 7800X3D.
The mobo might be a bit overkill too but its hard to find good test data for those so idk.
If you wanna try out linux for gaming, check protondb.com first to see if the games important to you will run.
Also, dont buy that cpu if your primary use is gaming. Its a huge waste of money to buy anything above the 7800X3D.
My idea was to future-proof the rig a bit with 8 extra cores. I know that nothing that is out today will see any difference in performance between those two CPU’s, but in one or two years, who can say? I got the same feedback when I bought the 8086K (“overkill”, which it WAS at the time it came out, but not so much in the last few years or so).
I tend to “overspend” a bit on a (nearly) fully new rig just so I can keep the system as-is for a few years at the minimum. I actually think this strategy saves me money in the long run when taking into account prices in terms of $/fps etc.
There is little to no difference to a 8700k. Same arch, same core count, same cache, the only difference is the default clockspeed. But both is an unlocked part so the difference is even less than they specsheet would suggest (3-5%).
So how did it future proof anything? There is no game that the 8700k would struggle with but not the 8086k.
The issue with future proofing is that you cant know what will be the next requirement. For example things like gpu raytracing cores were something that you cant plan for. Maybe 16 cores will be useful in 4 years, but maybe there will be an entirely new feature that makes all cpus without that feature obsolete.
Agreed, but the price difference isn’t that much, only around €200. Would I be crippling single core performance if I did this?
Nah with a 4090 testbench the FPS values were all within 1% of each other. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B31PwSpClk8&t=855s
No, but the CPU is still asymmetrical. In some cases you might see worse performance than the 9800x3d as the latency between the two CCDs is also bigger than between inter-CCD cores.
Hardware aside, I migrated to Linux as my gaming machine about 6 months ago. Overall, it has been excellent, not least of which due to Steam making most games virtually work without anything extra. On a couple of titles, I’ve had extra steps, but they’re fairly documented and help has been available. Only one still doesn’t allow multiplayer due to anticheat. GPU passthrough to a w10 VM solved that one.
Note though, I use AMD GPUs, so that’s one less barrier.
The only thing that irks me is that I didn’t swap earlier.
X670E + 7900x + 7900xtx + 96GB DDR5-6400
https://massgrave.dev/ will save you paying MS, but also you should usually just be able to carry your license from one machine to the next, whether it’s tied to an MS account or deactivating it on the original and reactivating the key once you’ve assembled your upgrades.
You don’t mention what chipset you’re on, but if you’re on a Z390 you can actually go up to an i9-9900k. It’ll be a bit of a boost that would help with CPU constraints at a much lower cost.
For me i want to see what happens with tariffs. If upgrades are going to be expensive now with Trumpler in charge, I will just wait.
