New Computer

[LCOHEN448]

I am currently looking for a newer computer. I have an old CPU i7 4970k pc. I am looking to build a newer computer. Can someone help me, as what CPU, to buy? I will be doing 4k encoding and play some games. I was told from people to go to intel, and some said AMD is reliable.

Thank you

[GeoffreyA]

I can't speak for the AM5 platform, but AMD is reliable and has generally been the better choice for the past six years with regard to efficiency, value, and performance. Having said that, Intel's latest offerings have improved substantially. Here is some general advice from a couple of weeks back. Look at TPU's relative performance linked there to get an idea where each CPU falls. Once you choose a platform and CPU, the rest of the computer should be relatively simple.

As for gaming, it will depend on what games you are playing and your budget. If only casual e-sports titles, you might be able to get away with one of AMD's APUs, which have solid gaming performance at lower resolutions. Otherwise, Intel's Arc B580 is the value champion, though availability and actual pricing are another story. New GPUs are coming out next week at Computex.

[LCOHEN448]

Thanks for the information.

According, to the website AMD 9 ,9950x is stable enough for video encoding. But how come for games it shows AMD 7 7800x is best for games. I am bit confused. If i want to play games at 1080 or so, would that chip work? Becuse games they show Intel I9 is still good.

Thankyou

[Jamaika]

I would wait for AVX10.2 for vvc/avm video codecs.

[Asmodian]

Right now AMD's X3D chips are the fastest gaming CPUs (as always, depending on the game).

If you are not looking for the absolute best gaming performance then either AMD or Intel are great options, and not really significantly different. I think Intel is a little cheaper at the same performance levels. Intel uses Performance Cores and Efficiency Cores which makes thread scheduling very important; sometimes it does not work correctly and you get an important thread running on a much slower E core.

Intel has had a lot of 'tuning' to do with the last few generations. They have been working on the scheduling software side (drivers) for their new Ultra series hybrid CPUs, trying to optimize scheduling, along with clocking the Ring/D2D fabric higher. I would avoid the previous 13 and 14 gen Intel CPUs, due to weird issues with voltages killing CPUs and lots of microcode updates to try to fix them. They just came out with a new microcode update, so maybe they are fixed now, but we thought that with the last two updates as well.

For encoding I would look at a 16 core 9950X or 9950X3D from AMD, depending on budget. Intel's 285 or 265 are also good, with 8 P and 16 or 12 E cores respectively. The 9800X3D is an amazing gaming CPU, but with only 8 cores it isn't that great for encoding. Still, they are all an incredible improvement over the 4970K!

Do you have a approximate budget?

[microchip8]

It's not just the hardware. If you're on Windows (most likely), its scheduler is a mess with regarding to how it handles hybrid-core CPUs from Intel. On Linux, it flies...

[Asmodian]

Originally Posted by LCOHEN448

But how come for games it shows AMD 7 7800x is best for games. I am bit confused.

The 9800X3D and 7800X3D (or their non-3D counterparts) are recommended for gaming because of their simple uniform architectures.

For AMD, each set of 8 cores are on their own piece of silicon, called a CCD. For the 12 and 16 core CPUs, two CCDs are connected to the memory through an IO die. This works very well for encoding, but for games running threads on two different CCDs causes a significant performance hit when the threads need to share the same data. AMD turns off the second CCD to prevent this, effectively changing a 9950X3D into a 9800X3D when gaming. This did not work that reliably for the 7000 series, but AMD got it working much better for the 9000 series (the 7000 series got these driver updates too).

The 3D parts are also better in the 9000 series, due to putting the extra cache below the CPU core die, instead of on top, so the cores are cooled as well, so they can clock as high as the non-3D parts. The 9950X3D is both the best gaming and productivity (consumer) CPU available today.

Originally Posted by LCOHEN448

If i want to play games at 1080 or so, would that chip work?

Is this 1080p at 200+ fps with a 4090/5080/5090 and a high refresh rate display, or some casual 1080p120 gaming? If the latter I wouldn't worry about gaming performance very much, all of these options are very good.

I am very happy gaming on my 9950X3D.

Originally Posted by LCOHEN448

Becuse games they show Intel I9 is still good.

Intel has similar issues as the dual CCD parts from AMD. It is very important to schedule all the game threads on the P cores. Assuming that works properly, they are good gaming CPUs as well, just not quite as good as AMD's 3D parts with their massive amount of L3 cache.