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You're right about the AVX2 part. If that's important to you. Otherwise I'd have to disagree, waiting all those years and going to a quadcore is sad. This is a

You're right about the AVX2 part. If that's important to you. Otherwise I'd have to disagree, waiting all those years and going to a quadcore is sad. This is a monumental shift to see $330 8C/16T chips start to be mainstream. I also hate that Intel went with that cheap TIM that requires delidding. You're in a tough spot given the focus on AVX2 IMO. My thoughts on Ryzen in general though is that the base 1700 is the chip for everyone building completely from scratch in 2017 and beyond. I personally won't be building another quadcore from this point onward. Just feel too much like a sucker to do so and I do think it's foolish (even for gaming! ... where almost everyone's system is going to be GPU bound at 1080P or higher anyway) unless you have some specific need like what you're describing with a massive 50% penalty affecting you.

keldaris 10y ago
Ultimately, the number of cores doesn't mean anything by itself, it's the aggregate performance that matters. We'd all happily take a 16 Ghz single core CPU over a 4 Ghz quad core any day, if such a thing was possible. It's true that I'm in a very niche spot in that most of my workloads are vectorization-heavy, but I don't think it's quite as niche as people think. If you look at the benchmarks, quite a few workloads (check out x265 performance on ffmpeg, or audio encoding, or compression...) are sufficiently vectorized for the 7700k to be more cost efficient than the 1800X. Realizing that does feel a bit sad, though, I agree. For pure gaming, I'd still get the fastest Kaby Lake i5 and be done with it. It doesn't matter what happens with DX12, etc., games are still going to be GPU bound for the foreseeable future and the cheap i5 won't significantly bottleneck you for many years to come.
- BuckRogers 10y ago
  Your info is a little outdated, checkout Digital Foundry's videos on i5s vs i7s in current gen games. The day of the quadcore being a great choice for gaming is already over if you play the "wrong" games. No longer a slamdunk recommendation. At this point I'd recommend gamers step up to the i7 or R7. Anything "will work", people are using G4560s. I'm suggesting what's ideal at this point in time. The aggregate performance of an 8C/16T machine from any vendor is astonishing, of course.

keldaris 10y ago

Ultimately, the number of cores doesn't mean anything by itself, it's the aggregate performance that matters. We'd all happily take a 16 Ghz single core CPU over a 4 Ghz quad core any day, if such a thing was possible. It's true that I'm in a very niche spot in that most of my workloads are vectorization-heavy, but I don't think it's quite as niche as people think. If you look at the benchmarks, quite a few workloads (check out x265 performance on ffmpeg, or audio encoding, or compression...) are sufficiently vectorized for the 7700k to be more cost efficient than the 1800X. Realizing that does feel a bit sad, though, I agree. For pure gaming, I'd still get the fastest Kaby Lake i5 and be done with it. It doesn't matter what happens with DX12, etc., games are still going to be GPU bound for the foreseeable future and the cheap i5 won't significantly bottleneck you for many years to come.

BuckRogers 10y ago
Your info is a little outdated, checkout Digital Foundry's videos on i5s vs i7s in current gen games. The day of the quadcore being a great choice for gaming is already over if you play the "wrong" games. No longer a slamdunk recommendation. At this point I'd recommend gamers step up to the i7 or R7. Anything "will work", people are using G4560s. I'm suggesting what's ideal at this point in time. The aggregate performance of an 8C/16T machine from any vendor is astonishing, of course.