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You could just buy a CPU for a third or fourth of the price if you want to just browse. You don't need a $750 16-core CPU. You can buy a $200 9600KF or a $240 3

You could just buy a CPU for a third or fourth of the price if you want to just browse. You don't need a $750 16-core CPU. You can buy a $200 9600KF or a $240 3600x or something even cheaper. For anything multi-core the 3950X blows the 9900k out of the water, and for 1440p gaming the 3950x trades blows with the 9900k. If you want 1080p gaming, or web-browsing, this is not the CPU for you. That said, even for 1080p gaming and single-threaded benchmarks the 3950 is usually within a few percent of the 9900K.

seminatl 7y ago
Ok but if it’s “trading blows with” and “within a few percent of” a CPU costing half the money, why is it rational to prefer it? I know why I want AMD parts and that is because of ECC memory support but this article doesn’t even mention it.
- linkgoron 7y ago
  First of all, the 9900k doesn't cost half the money. Second, you can also buy a 3900x if you want 12 threads with similar ST characteristics and pricing closer to the 9900k. There are other options. If you want to game @ 1080p and do mostly single threaded work (without parallelism), this CPU is not for you. If do a lot of single-threaded jobs in parallel (for example, gaming + being a server or gaming and streaming) or anything multi-threaded, this CPU destroys the 9900k, while being just a bit weaker when doing just one or two single-threaded tasks.
  - seminatl 7y ago
    Look I'm not arguing about which CPU is better. I'm arguing that taking the geometric mean of a bunch of completely unrelated benchmarks doesn't make any sense. There are clearly workloads in this very article where a cheaper part is better, sometimes even a cheaper AMD part.
    - linkgoron 7y ago
      And the article states clearly: "[the Core i9-9900KS] does pull out ahead in a number of ST tests as well as in low resolution (CPU-bound) gaming." Regarding the geomean, they clearly state that their benchmarks prioritize multi-core benchmarks: "This metric also puts the 3900X above the 9900KS, because despite the 5.0 GHz all-core on 8-cores, moving to 12-core and 16-core at almost the same performance per core gives more of an advantage in our test suite's MT-heavy workloads." They're not hiding behind anything. Everything is clearly stated.

seminatl 7y ago

Ok but if it’s “trading blows with” and “within a few percent of” a CPU costing half the money, why is it rational to prefer it? I know why I want AMD parts and that is because of ECC memory support but this article doesn’t even mention it.

linkgoron 7y ago
First of all, the 9900k doesn't cost half the money. Second, you can also buy a 3900x if you want 12 threads with similar ST characteristics and pricing closer to the 9900k. There are other options. If you want to game @ 1080p and do mostly single threaded work (without parallelism), this CPU is not for you. If do a lot of single-threaded jobs in parallel (for example, gaming + being a server or gaming and streaming) or anything multi-threaded, this CPU destroys the 9900k, while being just a bit weaker when doing just one or two single-threaded tasks.
- seminatl 7y ago
  Look I'm not arguing about which CPU is better. I'm arguing that taking the geometric mean of a bunch of completely unrelated benchmarks doesn't make any sense. There are clearly workloads in this very article where a cheaper part is better, sometimes even a cheaper AMD part.
  - linkgoron 7y ago
    And the article states clearly: "[the Core i9-9900KS] does pull out ahead in a number of ST tests as well as in low resolution (CPU-bound) gaming." Regarding the geomean, they clearly state that their benchmarks prioritize multi-core benchmarks: "This metric also puts the 3900X above the 9900KS, because despite the 5.0 GHz all-core on 8-cores, moving to 12-core and 16-core at almost the same performance per core gives more of an advantage in our test suite's MT-heavy workloads." They're not hiding behind anything. Everything is clearly stated.