I think the way they stagger these lineups is increasingly a bit garbo and I would not consider a Ryzen 3, 5, or 7 tbh – the 9 is the good buy, it’s a matter of whether you get the 9 half a generation late from Microcenter or w/e
Alder Lake is the first thing they’ve released in years that’s not a total piece of shit but like… a 200W CPU that costs $400 is extraordinarily unappealing. This is probably what I’d be comparing between pending retail availability &c.:
Anyway like I said I’m waiting for 5nm (and I am on Ivy Bridge lol)
The new Intel parts are technically better than the newest AMD parts but like Felix said they run much hotter because they’re still on 14nm or the same process your current parts are. It’s actually Intel that’s spinning their wheels in that regard. 12th gen sockets are physically larger to accomplish the improvements.
The biggest question is how long you’re willing to wait. I’m surprised that you said your CPU is the bottleneck in your system — I just found a game that bottlenecks on an 8600k (Forza Horizon 5) but I’m also running a 2080 Ti and 120 FPS. Anything slower than that (or lower refresh rate) and your Skylake parts shouldn’t be the issue.
There’s a rumored Zen 3 refresh early next year I’d wait for either to drop prices on the 5600x or be competitively priced against Intel. Zen 4 (5nm) is probably a year or so out.
I was a bit surprised to find myself thinking my CPU was becoming a problem too. But the games I play recently, or am thinking of, I keep seeing people mention are rather CPU intensive due to lots of entities, and so on. Of course, I realize random shmucks talking about this only means so much… What I do know is that I play some games where my 980 should be plenty to run at medium settings, if not high, and I can clearly see that I am avoiding maxing out VRAM, and yet I end up seeing weird performance issues, that lead me to believe the CPU is dragging shit down. Could be mis-addressing the root problem though.
yeah, increasingly I find the whole concept of “I am looking for a solid midrange performer for my periodic upgrade” to be not very useful largely because Intel’s marketing team has been shuffling their product line like crazy to maintain their yearly cadence without process shrinks. For me it’s more like – when can I get something that’s 4x the performance of my old CPU for not much more heat or money, and does that involve buying high end last generation parts or mid end current generation parts? Sometimes it’s 4 years, sometimes it’s 8.
CPU bottlenecks are typically simple to diagnose (utilization pinned near 100%, GPU headroom going unused) so I’d check that first. Does the game run fine at a lower resolution? Unlikely it’s the CPU.
For another example my partner played Resident Evil Village maxed on a 4690k and 2080 Ti earlier this year. Hence the skepticism with apologies to your issues.
On a 6700k running at 4.5ghz, I was CPU-bottlenecked from hitting 60hz on a few titles in the past year: Flight Simulator, Watch Dogs: Legion, and Deathloop. If you’re aiming for 30hz or have a variable-refresh monitor you could squeeze a few more years out of it.
4k monitor, though I turned the rendering resolution to 50% (ie, 1080p equivalant). It can barely keep up with 60FPS on minimal settings. VRAM has plenty of headroom. I’ll open up some monitoring tools and pay some closer attention next time I run it.
fwiw I also played it maxed on my why-won’t-you-let-me-die 3570k and 1080Ti, I’m noticing more and more of a spread between games that still run fine on 4 threads and games that don’t even if they’re more or less visually equivalent. Flight Simulator didn’t and now it does, Horizon 4 does but 5 doesn’t
I don’t think the 12th gen stuff is any hotter than ryzen, from the benchmarks I remember. Definetly way more power hungry though. You can buy a ddr4 z690 board, and microcenter recently had a 12700k for $280. at prices around there I don’t think AMD can compete if you don’t already have an am4 board
the main problem I’ve seen with cooling ADL isn’t getting temps down (you can easily tamp down the PL2 and still have 97-99% of performance than if you let it run wild) but rather the physical shape of the CPU means it requires new mounting hardware and not all coolers are getting enough contact on the IHS
this is a lie, I saw DDR5 kits in stock earlier today, and it was only 500 dollars for a 32GB kit. you’d be stupid not to get those and make half of the price of your build just memory
as someone on X370 and cast by the wayside (thanks AMD), any upgrade means a new motherboard and then MC went mad with prices so I’ve got a Z690 board and a 16GB kit on hold and I’m deciding if I want to go 12600 or 12700 (also I have a big boy D15 on order to cool it)
even in spite of their numbers, they have a hilarious anti-AMD bias
As a result, even AMD’s prolific marketing infrastructure (youtube, reddit, forums etc.) will struggle to drive sales, at least until Zen 4 launches (est. early 2023).
(they really fucking hate the AMD subreddit)
and I would recommend literally any other source for sane commentary
an actual, meaningful problem is that you can just buy a 5600X and get 90% of the gaming performance as everything above it and the rest of the AMD/Intel stacks should only be considered if you’re doing actual productivity or production compute