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Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

That's a bit outdated. Yes, the fastest cpu for games is still an Intel cpu, the i9-9900K. But the distance is not big. The 3950X is very close, the more reasonable AMD cpus - Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 5 3600 - are also close. I collect benchmarks, comparison here [0]. When the next Ryzen generation arrives on the desktop even that small top spot for Intel will likely end.

It's not only that the turbo boost of those Ryzen cpus is high and at the same clock Intel does not have a lead anymore. It's also that recent games are already pretty parallelized. There is no need to wait for the next console generation to see that effect.

Btw, the 3800X is not a good pick. It is just a minimally higher clocked 3700X. If you want 8 cores, get the 3700X, the higher price of the 3800X is just a waste of your money. But for gaming you want to stick to a Ryzen 5 3600.

[0]: https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids[...

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> Btw, the 3800X is not a good pick.

That really depends on the pricing situation, very much like with the 3600x.

Over the months I've seen the price difference between a 3800x and 3700x see as low as 20€, the same with the 3600 and the 3600x.

That's because the 3600 and 3700x are recommended, and sold so often that retailers sometimes end up sitting on large stocks of 3600x/3800x too long and clear them out at discounts.

Imho even for gaming the 3800x might be a pretty good long term choice. The higher clocks are particularly relevant yet you still get the core advantage of the 3700x, without taking the same clock hit.

But if it's all about the budget and price/performance then it's really difficult to beat the 3600.

There is no big clock hit. The turbo clock is 4.4GHz vs 4.5GHz, that's nothing. In practice the difference is mostly 1 FPS. The base clock difference looks bigger, 300 MHz, but Ryzen does not stay at the base clock like old Intel cpus did, it always turbos.

Now, if it's the same price there is no reason not to get the 3800X over the 3700X :)

The 3700X is a 65W part, so its quieter for those who dont like listening to fans spin loudly.

Higher base clock might mean you can overclock it higher. Of course, most people don't overclock their CPUs, even if they are unlocked.

I don't see why the base block would be the factor for that. The Ryzen cpus overclock on its own, it should be the turbo clock and PBO that shows how well they overclock. I just linked in another comment to an article that explains that while the 3800X does overclock better, it's a minimal difference, right in line with their turbo clock specs.

Presumably it basically is the same CPU, potentially just better binned ones being flashed as 3800x?

Exactly. https://www.techspot.com/review/1899-ryzen-3800x-vs-3700x-di... explains more details:

> The top 20% of all 3800X processors tested passed their 4.3 GHz AVX2 stress test, whereas the top 21% of all 3700X processors were only stable at 4.15 GHz. Also, all 3800X processors passed the test at 4.2 GHz, while 3700X processors were only good at 4.05 GHz, meaning the 3800X has about 150 MHz more headroom when it comes to overclocking.

That's a minimal difference of course, but right at the clock wall of Ryzen, so AMD has to do binning here to enable the 3800X.

I think average frame (which I assume this is) is much less useful than minimum, 0.1%, and 1% frame times. As a human, I'm more sensitive to instantaneous gameplay experience, not average. It would be very interesting to see graphs that show these more telling numbers.

Yes, these are average FPS. Minimum is a useless metric that is usually caused by benchmark issues, but 0.1% and 1% would be interesting. But they are usually correlated to average frame times, it's too rare that in specific games one processor has good average fps but sporadically dips to make the enormous effort to collect that data as well. When that happens it is because the architecture does not work well for gaming (Threadripper 1000 and 2000, fixed with the 3000 series) or there are not enough cores, something the site addresses in the build guide. When that happens the average FPS also are not great when looking at enough games, which the benchmark does for almost every modern processor.

It would not make a difference when judging Intel vs AMD or Ryzen 3000 vs Intel 9000 series.

The source articles for the benchmarks are linked though, often enough they also have those 1% or 0.1% benchmarks.

IIRC correctly the 1% and 0.1% frame times tell you how the frame rate varies i.e. if most of the time it is running at 60FPS and every so often tanks to 1 FPS. So some average FPS numbers might look okay but the frame rate might be tanking like every minute.

its close any way you cut it. theres a billion benchmarks out there with the data you want

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