Very short fused decision: CPU, i9-9900K vs. Ryzen7 2700X vs. Threadripper 2920X vs ???

Well, it looks like my venerable i7-5820K is biting the dust. I've had several early morning lockups this morning; the system was good enough to stay up long enough for me to get a syslog message indicating a soft CPU lockup. That's likely a hardware problem in my view. I'm running the 5820K at a modest overclock, which I need in order to process multiple video streams and such (stock is not quite fast enough) running Linux. This isn't for gaming; it's more of a server workload.

So, now the decision time. I was hoping to do the upgrade this summer after the Ryzen 3000 comes out, which sounds very impressive (if the buzz is to be believed). But I don't have that option; I have to look at what's around, and probably today. But if I build a new system now, I'm not going to for several years.

Upgrading the 5820 doesn't look like a very good option. The only upgrade that looks significant is the 6950X, which is very expensive. The 6850K and 5960X aren't cheap, either. Of course, new processor means new motherboard, so that adds to it, but Broadwell/Haswell is obviously a dead end.

The Ryzens look attractive in thread count and total throughput, which is mostly what I need. The 9900K has very fast single thread performance and apparently much lower TDP, but with Intel's propensity to obsolete sockets with each generation (and desktop vs. HEDT) and the 9900K being the top of the line, that's probably a cap. The 9900X is much more expensive, as are the Threadrippers (the 2920X isn't all that much more, but also apparently not all that much faster, even factoring in threads).

One option might be a Ryzen 2700X, which I'm pretty sure would be fast enough and is cheap, which I could later upgrade to a faster processor (albeit without PCIe 4.0).

Thoughts?

 

I would go with the Ryzen. At least you are guaranteed one more upgrade in the near future. Im a little biased though as I own the 2700X If predictions are true, you should be able to buy a 16 core 32 thread Ryzen for around the same cost as the 9900K. For your purposes its a no brainer to me. Thats my .02 cents .

 

If you need cores/threads, I would look at a first-gen Threadripper. The 1920X (12c/24t) and 1950X (16c/32t) are available on Newegg for $435 and $575, respectively.

 

I wound up going with the Ryzen 2700X, with the intent/possibility of upgrading to a Ryzen 3000 (or potentially 4000) later. The mainstream Ryzen ecosystem is a lot cheaper than the Threadripper. The main disadvantage of the mainstream is a limit of 64 GB, but I'm not too concerned; that's enough to let me run a fair number of decently large virtual machines or even a decent Kubernetes/OpenShift cluster-in-a-box (the other highly parallel things I do are not particular memory hogs).

I think the i9-9900K will be a dead end. Intel seems to change its sockets with every generation, so I doubt there will be materially faster processors compatible with that, and the 9900K is not a big enough jump for the next 5 years in my view. If the Ryzen 3000 really is what's being kicked around, that will be a big jump, and AMD has apparently pledged to maintain compatibility through 2020, which might mean a Ryzen 4000.

The other less serious problem with the AM4 boards is that they only seem to have 1 NIC, and I really do need the second NIC. I bought a cheapo, and that wouldn't link up, so I made a second trip to get a proper Intel NIC that works fine (modulo that OpenSUSE wanted to turn the firewall back on when I changed the NICs, which caused me a lot of DNS grief until I figured out what was going on).

The 2700X is significantly, but not overwhelmingly, faster than the 5820K. 1 hour of 1080p video takes about 16 minutes to transcode on the 5820K at stock, or 14 minutes at 4.2 GHz boost. It took 11.5 minutes or so on the 2700X at stock, but (so far) I'm just reusing my existing DDR4-2400 RAM.

The motherboard decision appears to be a lot more important on AMD, with the variety of chipsets available.

 

I've ordered some G.Skill F4-3000C16D-32GVRB's from Newegg (the price was especially good) but haven't received them yet and can return unopened if I so decide. Are there really significant differences in reliability/substantial performance differences between different models at the same nominal speed?

What I see on e. g. https://tekeverything.com/ryzen-ram-test-2400mhz-vs-3000mhz/ is that synthetic tests do show a significant increase from certain synthetic benchmarks, but the real world performance increase (e. g. Cinebench) is rather smaller, on the order of 1%. That (or an additional increment over that) isn't particularly worth spending a lot more money on, assuming that that's representative.

 

9900K or go with Threadripper if you need tile based rendering prowess.

2700X while cheaper is slower at everything compared to the 9900K even at stock. The 9900K is also deadend while the 2700X could provide an upgrade path if you're into wanting to reuse a motherboard. With DDR5 and PCI-E 5.0 both on the horizon, who really gives a ****? Get the best chip now that suits your needs. If you need something faster in the future, well then you can upgrade your board and get both DDR5 and latest gen PCI-E.

 

As I said, I went with the Ryzen 2700K. It was about $250 cheaper than the i9-9900K. It's considerably faster than my old i7-5820K and meets my needs at present.

I wasn't planning on doing the upgrade quite yet, although the 5820K was right on the edge of my needs. So I wanted, for better or for worse, to keep the price down and go with something that gives me more options later.

PCIe gen 4 devices are going to be scarce on the ground for quite some time yet, and DDR5 is out in the future too.

 

Ryzen 2700x on stock clock should breeze gaming as well for the foreseeable future... but Ive always been a big proponent of not OC'ing unless you're trying to milk a little extra time out of a cpu... I'm still using a factory clocked 2700k i7 on my rig & have yet to bottleneck & gaming is all I do (+ 1080/16gb ram build)

but maybe i'm the minority? clean system goes a long way i guess...

 

I agree with you (and I'm most emphatically not a gamer). I overclocked my 5820K out of necessity; the 2700X has ample headroom for my current needs. I would have use for more processing power, but it is not essential at present.

 

The only time you see a real difference in OC'ing is when the speed is 2x the original then you would see gains but micron gains don't justify a dead CPU.

 

So, update...so far, so good. I wish I had gotten one of the ASRock TaiChi motherboards with two NICs onboard, but I was in a hurry.

The Asus Prime X470 Pro motherboard is a bit of a disappointment. When you flash the UEFI you lose all of your settings. I tried saving them to a profile and restoring them, but evidently something wasn't compatible and I soft bricked the mobo (had to short the CMOS pins to recover) and had to re-enter everything. My previous much older ASRock Fatal1ty board handled that stuff a lot better.

I experimented with OC using Precision Boost Overdrive; it made for a small all-core improvement under load (3.99 GHz vs. 3.93 or so), which translated into not enough improvement to matter. I guess AMD got Precision Boost 2 tuned pretty well, if overclocking setups that don't use really exotic hardware don't accomplish much.

Well, I have what I have now. Just have to wait and see whether I upgrade the CPU when the Ryzen 3000's come out.

 

Get an AM4 board. Doesn't matter if you get 2600, 2700 or 2700x. Whatever fits your budget on the assumption when the 3700x comes, that's what you want. 3700x is should beat the 9900K just about for everything and it's expected price is $350.

DO NOT CHEAP OUT ON YOUR MOTHERBOARD if you plan to get the 3700x. Get a good board with good VRMs. Rule of thumb, anything less than $150 will have inadequate VRM for maximum effectiveness with AMD XFR / PBO. The VRM on cheaper boards will run too hot and not feed power properly. That includes Asus Prime.

For more information buildzoid and Gaming Nexus do a great job explaining why you shouldn't be cheap with your motherboard.

For right now, the boards recommended are ASRock X470 Taichi, Asus Crosshair VII, MSI X470 Pro Carbon or MSI B450 Pro Carbon (Believe they use the same VRM), and Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 7. The Gaming 5 has the fake 4 phase VRM the 7 is the one to get.

Lot of PC builders cheap out on the power supply and the board. Expect to pay around $200 for the board and at least $80 when good power supplies go on sale.

Look out for the sales. I picked up the ASRock X470 Taichi for $145, which is a 12 phase VRM, even with 4.2 ghz overblock on my 2700x VRM temps run cool, probably doesn't even need heatsinks.

4 ghz on all 8 cores isn't impressive to you? Remember stock is 3.7 ghz. And remember this is on EIGHT cores, 16 threads at 4ghz is not impressive to you? I have 0.0100 negative offset, and about 1.25 volts when at 100% on all 8 cares, and stays under 60 C on air, I'm impressed. Ryzen 2700x is an amazing chip considering I got it for $268. That's incredible.

 

What's not impressive -- but not a big deal -- is that with overclocking I only got 60 MHz improvement (about 1.5%).

I *thought* that the Prime was supposed to be a good board. No? Maybe I should have stuck with ASRock