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It all depends on what you're doing with it. For gaming alone, current games are barely using 6 threads, so a 2700X is complete overkill with 16 threads. It's
by paulmd 8y ago
It all depends on what you're doing with it. For gaming alone, current games are barely using 6 threads, so a 2700X is complete overkill with 16 threads. It's always a bit revealing that people leap to recommending AMD's flagship processor as some sort of a value king for gaming. You really should save $100 and go with the 2600X instead, there's virtually no difference in gaming benchmarks.
The 9600K, 9700K or 2600X are really what gamers should be looking at. The only thing that's going to make use of a 2700X or a 9900K right now is productivity tasks (video encoding, 3D modelling, etc).
Intel still has a lead in high-refresh gaming (which is a coded way of saying they have better gaming performance that is currently bottlenecked by GPU performance), so if you're primarily a gamer it's still worth leaning to the 9600K/9700K. And the 9900K, while expensive, combines that gaming performance with a ~20-25% lead in productivity tasks. Expensive, but hands-down the fastest thing on the market for at least a year.
Threadripper is great for productivity stuff, but since it's NUMA it really doesn't perform any different than a 2700X for gaming. Also, the 2990WX has an even weirder configuration where half the dies don't have access to RAM, so it's hard to recommend except as a specialty product. 2950X is the generalist recommendation there.
Next year the Zen2 upgrade will hopefully bring AMD up to parity with Intel in gaming, and probably beat them in productivity. But it's hard to recommend planning on buying two different processors to "save money", so if that's your cup of tea, just wait until next year.
So, the recommendations look like:
60 Hz gaming => buy a 2600X
high-refresh gaming => buy a 9700K
60 Hz gaming+productivity or productivity only => buy a 2700X
high refresh gaming and productivity => 9900K
really heavy productivity stuff => 1950X/2950X/wait for 3800X/3950X next year
- babypuncher 8y agoThere are some games, like the new Assassin's Creed, that benefit from having 8 physical cores. The 2700 is probably not the best value proposition to play games that are out right now, but it probably is a good value if you want a chip that will handle new games for the next 4 years without needing an upgrade. Games today may be using 4 or 6 threads but it wasn't that long ago when games ran on only 1 or 2.
- individualcell 8y agoAre you saying that when you start a game, you are closing all the programs you have opened and disable all the services/background processes? If a game uses 6 cores, you can have 2 more for your office, browser and god knows what else running without slowing you down.
- FractalParadigm 8y agoSo much this, to say "you only need x cores because the software can only use x cores" is a little shortsighted, because there's always stuff happening in the background.
- Boxxed 8y agoJust because the program is running doesn't mean it's using any appreciable amount of CPU. Most applications spend their time waiting for IO, and when you're not interacting with them, there isn't any.
- individualcell 8y agoSure, but are you checking that every single application you have opened does "nothing" before you start a game? The point is to not being worried about such things.
- paulmd 8y agoBackground services (Discord, etc) use a negligible amount of processor power. It should be like sub-5% on a modern processor, with the processor clocked down to its lowest frequency. With the processor at turbo, you should be pulling 1-3% easily, even actively using multiple tasks. These days even Chrome is very aggressive about throttling background tabs, much to the consternation of some webdevs here. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/chrome-57-background-tab-suspension-download/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/chrom...
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago> For gaming alone, current games are barely using 6 threads, so a 2700X is complete overkill with 16 threads. But then so is the 9900K, or even the 9700K. If you legitimately don't have anything that can use more than six threads, why are you paying for eight cores? Both vendors offer processors with fewer cores for less money.