If you are thinking of buying a new computer soon.... (1 Viewer)

Feb 27, 2011
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It might be an idea to hold off for a bit.

There are two main companies producing CPU's for most computers. These are Intel and AMD.

AMD was good a long time ago but had problems with performance (bulldozer) and other things. This has meant that Intel really haven't had to try that hard for at least 5 years.

Their pricing has not had any pressure at all.

AMD are about to release their new family of Processors called Ryzen and initial feelings are that it will be something special.

Now AMD can't compete on absolute performance but they may get close. Where they do compete is on price. Intels top consumer CPU comes out at around $1,000 and then reduces in price as you go down the range. You probably won't want to buy one of their top CPU's.
However the Ryzen top level part is supposedly going to come out at the $500 mark... If Ryzen is within 95% of the performance of the i7 then this will put tremendous pressure on Intel to drop their prices. This will have knock on effects down the range.

What this means is a couple of months after Ryzen is released, if it lives up to it's billing we are likely to see Intel rejigging their pricing with some not insubstantial drops.

As the CPU tends to be the most expensive part of a computer this will have knock on effects on the price of computers. So my advice is, if you are looking to buy, hold off a little longer.
 
Feb 13, 2013
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Great piece of info - I used to keep up with all this but life moves on ..... Always been a big AMD fan from the Athlons onwards - currently still using a 6 core Phenom which I bough for peanuts, compared to Intel processors 4/5 years ago and see no reason to change - runs everything I chuck at it!
 
Feb 22, 2008
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Also more laptops are available with SSDs which should be an improvement on conventional hard drives for speed and reliability.

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Lorryman100

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AMD are also rolling out a new GPU called Vega which showcased at CES running Doom in 4k at 60 fps. Very impressive as AMD use freesync which is virtually standard on most monitors not equipped with Nvidias G-sync which comes at a premium price on certain monitors. The Vega put Nvidias new Titan X with Pascal architecture to shame with that demo but I suppose it would be good as Doom was written for AMD systems using freesync. I personally cant wait for Vega to be released as Nvidia have been sitting on their new line up to counter the Vega cards and I have my eye on the rumored Titan X Black Ti which has nearly 4000 shaders or cuda cores. That coupled with the I7 6950x will get me some interesting results in autocads 3d rendering, 10 cores with 20 threads running 40 Pci lanes with a 25mb L1 cache coupled with the Titans 11Tflops of brute force and superfast 12gb Gddr5x memory, cant wait. :D
 
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Gromett
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Always been a big AMD fan from the Athlons onwards
I used to keep track of it all and was passionate about my technology. These days I just get what works at the best value.

AMD did a lot of great work, they even forced Intel to release 64 bit desktop processors. From memory Intel even licensed AMD's 64 bit extensions :)

However Intel through their process technology and absolutely MASSIVE R&D budget out performed AMD at every step. Then came a number of weak designs and cock ups from AMD that didn't even make them a decent budget processor. I used to use all sorts from AMD to Cyrix. I now just stick with Intel as on the whole they are the best performance for single threads. The last 5-10 years have been attrocious for AMD. I was hoping after their purchase of ATI things would starting looking up, as ATI had competent designers for their multi-core GPU's.

Fingers crossed they come back fighting with the Ryzen.
 
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Gromett
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AMD are also rolling out a new GPU called Vega which showcased at CES running Doom in 4k at 60 fps. Very impressive as AMD use freesync which is virtually standard on most monitors not equipped with Nvidias G-sync which comes at a premium price on certain monitors. The Vega put Nvidias new Titan X with Pascal architecture to shame with that demo but I suppose it would be good as Doom was written for AMD systems using freesync. I personally cant wait for Vega to be released as Nvidia have been sitting on their new line up to counter the Vega cards and I have my eye on the rumored Titan X Black Ti which has nearly 4000 shaders or cuda cores. That coupled with the I7 6950x will get me some interesting results in autocads 3d rendering, 10 cores with 20 threads running 40 Pci lanes with a 25mb L1 cache coupled with the Titans 11Tflops of brute force and superfast 12gb Gddr5x memory, cant wait. :D

I am happy running either my internal i5 GPU or my GTX 750Ti when I do occasionally dig out my copy of WOW. Not being a game player I mainly bought it to test out GPU transcoding.

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Lorryman100

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Personally I hope AMD do well and give serious competition to Intel and Nvidia as they have had the monopoly for far to long which is reflected in their pricing, extortionate!! All my time in OC and tweaking has been on Intel/Nvidia/windows based systems as I try to eek that little bit extra out of CPU and GPU to put off the next upgrade a little longer. Hopefully the competition will force Intel to come up with a new chip set at a realistic cost instead of what they have been doing for the last few years of adding a couple hundred mhz to an old chip design and saying it is the new bees knees. That way you could justify upgrading your system more often to keep up with the latest software and games. BTW I love first person shooters on the pc and the game play depends on the quality of the CPU/GPU so they will always have a market for hard core gamers and software designers looking to cut the processing time of demanding workloads.
 
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Needs good battery capacity too. I have been using this laptop for some months, it was one of my sons cast offs. Absolutely love this laptop it is i7 and 250gb SSD touch screen etc. but the battery does only last a few hours on a full charge which can be a pain when out and about. A good battery is a must...

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Oct 29, 2008
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TBH there's always deals to be found. If you need now one you need one now. Theres always a new model over the horizon.
We bought a new rear projection TV years back, friends said Plasma is coming, Plasma came, it was 10x more expensive than rear projection. Friends then said Plasma prices will come down, they finally did. They had been watching their small screen CRT TVs for around 10 years since we changed and we had enjoyed our 42" rear Projection while they waited and waited. We still have the TV.
 
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Gromett
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I have just seen a few more videos regarding the Ryzen including one from Linus who had an insiders pass.

He rans some rough tests and the two CPU's were on a par performance wise (actually faster in the tests I have seen). Not only is it cheaper.
But here is the big one for me. It is lower power. 140Watts vs 95Watts for the highest specced part. That is a massive saving on heat and electrickery.
 
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Gromett
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During the "New Horizons" live stream, which served as a coming out party for AMD's Ryzen CPU, the company showcased a brand new performance demo. It pitched a stock Intel Core i7 6900K processor—an eight-core Broadwell-E chip that retails for just shy of £1,000/$1,100—against an eight-core Ryzen CPU. Both chips were tasked with transcoding a short video clip into the "Apple TV 3" preset in Handbrake, a notoriously CPU-heavy workload that scales well across several cores. The result, according to AMD's demo, was a completion time of 54 seconds for Ryzen and 59 seconds for Broadwell-E; Ryzen was about 10 percent faster.

But the real kicker was that while the Broadwell-E chip ran with its standard boost enabled (up to 3.7GHz), the Ryzen chip was locked at its base clock of 3.4GHz. Not only did AMD claim to have caught up with Intel's multithreaded performance, it claimed to have surpassed it—and with TDP of just 95W compared to Intel's 140W.

https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/01/amd-ryzen-motherboards-hype/
 

pappajohn

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My processors a bit slow but works ok....

14875935082231409916098.jpg

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Gromett
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It's arrived, released on 22/02/2017


Watched that video, Linus is a bit of a marmite guy which is why I didn't share the video.
Release date is 2nd March 2017.

I will be leaving it a few month before considering the upgrade. Waiting to see what intel does :p

I think I will probably go for one of them though. Possibly the fastest of the 65Watt TDP. At that power rating I could even run it from an inverter for short periods of time.
 
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Gromett
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Pricing is confirmed. £10 cheaper than predicted :)
http://amzn.to/2loKygu

Just waiting for Intels response to this now.

Though I am seriously tempted by the Ryzen 1700.

I have heard rumours that there may be issues with the superfast ram. If you have 2 Dimms it is fine, but if you have 4 installed you have to drop the speed of the memory down. I hope it is a motherboard issue that can be resolved with a BIOS update or is a pre-release issue that is resolved in the final release.
 

Lorryman100

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Hopefully the MoBo's will catch up with the AMD processors. Currently running my gaming pc with an intel 6700k at 4.6Ghz in XMP 2.0 with 4 x Corsair Dominator platinum DDR4 8Gb Dual channel at 3000mhz 32Gb stable at 1.3v with average memory temps around 48C. Nvidia have a countdown on their website for the launch of the new Ti branded GTX1080's, hopefully there will also be a Titan X black in the mix, fingers crossed.:D2

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sedge

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I have to tell you that most of the info and discussion on this thread - except Gromett's original post saying there's something new which is better and cheaper, so that's obviously good news - goes way over my head.

However I was astonished to read the following

AMD are also rolling out a new GPU called Vega which showcased at CES running Doom in 4k at 60 fps. :D

After how long???? - even in computers, they are still measuring stuff in foot pounds per second!
 

Lorryman100

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Lol: If anyone is still awake after getting to here and is still interested, FPS is rendered Frames Per Second :)

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Gromett
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Gromett
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ok, AMD have lifted the embargo on tech journalists so I have just spent a couple of hours reading reviews, benchmark results and detailed breakdowns.
Here is what it looks like currently.
If money is no object and you play games then stick with the very high end Intel CPU's.
If you are interested in productivity stuff, multi-threaded applications (video rendering transcoding etc) then you get more performance per £ spent with AMD.
If you are looking for decent performance at the lowest possible cost then AMD definitely has it.

For my use cases, which is running server orientated software (database, web servers etc). Compiling large software and transcoding video. AMD are definitely in the lead on a per £ spent basis and I will be looking at upgrading in the next 6-9 months.

For single core performance it looks like Intel still have the lead in performance but you need to spend a lot more money to get this.

Looks like AMD have done very well. As this is the first iteration of this new architecture they do look like they can improve on this in the near/medium future though.

On the memory front. There is an issue, I am hoping it is a problem that can be fixed with a BIOS update though. But I suspect it is more an issue with the current chips. It looks like you are limited to either 2400Mhz memory or at best 2600Mhz if you use single gang memory. I think it will be worth waiting a few weeks for memory suppliers/manufacturers to start releasing Ryzen specific memory.
 
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Gromett
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Intel price drops have started to come through. There will likely be more. So already if you waited you have saved money :p

upload_2017-3-2_17-50-13.png


PS: $ = £ approx when it comes to CPU pricing.

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