PC Upgrade (Motherboard & CPU)

Riverside

Riverside
I've kept my current PC much longer than I originally intended, mostly because of the inflated price of components. Seems like it's looking like a good time to consider an upgrade.

Currently I have:
Intel i7 7700 CPU (4 cores/8 threads, 3.6GHz base clock 4.2GHz boost).
z270 ATX motherboard (Gigabyte z270X Ultra Gaming)

I've got 32Gb (2x16) PC3000 DDR4 RAM, hoping to be able to re-use this along with most of the rest of the components, plus a 1TB NVMe M.2 drive, an EVGA FTW3 GTX1080ti and a 750w EVGA (750GQ) power supply all packed into a Phanteks Enthoo Pro case. So I'm either happy with the rest of my build or can upgrade those components independently. For example if I get a replacement GPU I can consider the PSU at that time, but the main thing is I think I want to stick with DDR4 RAM for this upgrade.

What I'm looking at is a z690 chipset full ATX motherboard that supports DDR4 RAM (and 5.1 surround sound & 1Gbs LAN), and (almost certainly) an i7 12700k socket 1700 CPU. Pretty sure I'll get a socket 1700 compatible Noctua NH-D15 HSF to cool it.
I know very little about the current intel CPU & mobo chipset lineup, little more than what I've researched over the past few days and nothing at all about the AMD ecosystem.

The most taxing thing my current PC does is playing ED Odyssey :D, I do some photo & video editing, large file transfers and office stuff, I don't think any of that is likely to impact on my choice of new hardware ;) Mostly I just want EDO to run more smoothly (more cores, faster PCIe lanes) and to get something that's good enough to last a few years before I need to upgrade the motherboard again.

So What do you think? Is there a particular motherboard that's recommended, or an AMD combo I should consider instead of intel? Is DDR5 worth considering, and is the DDR4/5 dilemma a factor with AMD?

Shopping is fun ;)
 

TheMindBuddah

TheMindBuddah
I don't think you can go far wrong with the last few generations of AMD and Intel CPU's. Also don't over think your PC Build as you'll constantly hold fire before you press the buy option.

My thoughts!

DDR4/DDR 5 not really worth the price/extra performance difference. Better of putting what's saved towards the GPU or CPU.

Air Coolers Vs AIO Water Coolers: I have an eversion to air coolers! Never seen the point of pumping more hot air inside your PC. While AIO wont cool your CPU much more than a top air Cooler, while being more expensive. It wont pump hot air inside your case like on air. Why pump more hot air inside the case?

Motherboards: Buy the board that has the requirements for what your going to use it for. Its great having 4 NVE m.2 slots! But if your only going to use one, the extra cost of the board can be put to something more useful!. I have seen the same gaming results with £100 boards vs £300 boards. Pay for what your going to use!

Monitors: As you stated you have not upgraded for a few years, consider a new monitor depending on your present monitor or monitors. I recently had a friend with a more than capable 10th gen i7 and RTX 2080 who was still playing on a 24" 1080p 60hz monitor with no refresh technology. The screen tearing he was suffering from was gone with a new 33" 4k monitor with Free-sync.

We also have the RTX 4000 series on the horizon so ideal for next year to complete your new setup!

I have always had a dedicated PC just for games, any other considerations are taken care of by other PC's in my house like my wife's general use PC or my dedicated download server. So I always think you should always consider the best CPU/GPU combination, then fit what's left to your budget.


Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ivT7kj4J18
 

Dragsham

Dragsham
I've stayed with 9th gen intel cos the 12th gen just isn't worth the prices for just a 8 to 11% fps increase.
What l did do was dismantle my hp oem prebuilt keeping only the m.2 drive and sata ssd.
Bought a new z390 mainboard stuck a 9900k in it along with 32 gig 4x8 ddr4 4400mhz ram.
After a succession of gpus I ended up with a 3090fe. Which in my opinion does all the work (80% or so) compared to the cpus just 10% or so.
12th gen is nice yeah. But the gpu always is more important.
Would go AMD AMD Ryzen™ 7 5800X3D with a x570 board but again the increase in fps ain't worth it
 

Riverside

Riverside
Thanks for confirming my thoughts on sticking with DDR4, the qty & speed I have doesn't seem to be a bottleneck and at some future point I could get more & faster DDR4 than I have now anyway.

wrt AIO water coolers, I understand the benefit & am not ruling one out of hand but I've never had one before and I know air-cooled is straightforward. If there is a specific model anyone can recommend I'd love to take a look :)

Totally understand how easy it is to get carried away with motherboard features, apart from definitely preferring full ATX my requirements are low but I do want quality power distribution, stuff like that tends to be fitted to higher end mobos.

Monitors are not a factor for this upgrade. FYI I have a pair of 24" 144hz 1080p monitors, in portrait either side of a 43" 60Hz 4k main display, all three are connected via displayport & suit my needs perfectly. At some point I may consider a faster refresh rate main display but that decision will come after my next GPU upgrade, which itself will come at some point after this mobo & CPU swap :)



I have 7th gen hardware right now, bought new in 2017. I suspect your hardware would probably be fine for my requirement right now Dragsham, but I hope to keep this new mobo for a while & inevitably if I buy older stuff my next time to upgrade will come sooner. I've wanted to upgrade for quite a while but have been put off mostly by the over-inflated pricing for a relatively minor benefit. With the 12th gen I can see enough benefits over what I have that provided the pricing isn't extortionate I'm confident I'll get the benefit out of it. Cheap used stuff it tempting though ;)

I had a look at the AMD CPU & chipset you suggested, the CPU seems lower spec and about the same price as the i7 I am considering, but the mobos seem a little cheaper. If the choice is swings & roundabouts I think I'd rather stick with intel just because I am more familiar with their products.

Thanks for the advice, you've given me some things to think about :)
 

Robert Maynard

Volunteer Moderator
Robert Maynard
I've been using a 3900x / Asus PRIME X570-P / 4x 8GB DDR4 3600 for some time - it's not subjectively slow and runs the game fine (although I'll probably be upgrading when Zen4 is released and my boy will get the guts of this PC as he did when he got my 1800X based PC when I last upgraded).

Watching AMD's developments, the 5800X 3D seems to get good gaming reviews, at a bit of a price premium.

@Morbad is sure to be able to offer sage advice.
 

Riverside

Riverside
Yeah my son is eyeing up my current stuff for his PC ;)

Just seen this video from April, comparing some PC builds for MS flight sim 2020:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSLaJ_7pFLE


An interesting point they make early in the vid is that L3 cache seems to play a part in reducing 1% lows & frame hanging, which is one of the reasons I want to upgrade. The AMD 5800X has 32Mb of L3, compared to 25Mb for the i7 12700k. My i7 7700 has 8Mb of L3 so either way it's a huge potential benefit.

The X580 boards I've seen have PCIe gen 4 though, the Z690 boards (that use DDR4 RAM) have PCIe gen 5. I'm currently on Gen 3.

It's not an absolute decider but I think 25mB L3 is still a great upgrade on what I've got now, and PCIe gen 5, and slightly newer technology generally should give me a longer service life. Both look like they would be a great choice :)
 

Dragsham

Dragsham
Yeah choosing a gpu would be my priority. Board n chip just don't make that much difference anymore
 
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Bob McBobblehead

Bob McBobblehead
If you could hold out until the end of the year, you would have a lot of better options. Intel 13th Gen, Zen 4(leak shows the 7600x faster than the 5950x), RTX 4000 and RDNA 3(Rumour RX 7600 XT fast as the 6900 XT with 8GB).
 

Riverside

Riverside
Bob McBobblehead said:
If you could hold out until the end of the year, you would have a lot of better options. Intel 13th Gen, Zen 4(leak shows the 7600x faster than the 5950x), RTX 4000 and RDNA 3(Rumour RX 7600 XT fast as the 6900 XT with 8GB).
Click to expand...

Yeah, there's always something on the way :)

I've already waited a couple of years, as far as the CPU & mobo are concerned I'm looking to buy something that's available right now.

For the GPU I have a 1080ti that still works well at 4k. I was intending to get a GPU because the prices are coming down but given the potential oversupply coming up in the near future I'm looking out for a bargain & happy to wait.

Plus I think I know what I want with the GPU so didn't feel the need to start a thread asking for advice about that :D


The 'problem' with my current PC is dropped frames more than poor framerate (it's acceptable, 45-60fps while hunting salad on planets) which I think more cores (& more cache) and faster mobo pipes will help to mitigate. I can swap in a faster GPU any time.
 

Riverside

Riverside
Northpin said:
One thing you should keep in mind
if you plan to go intel 12 series, you'd have to either make the move to Windows 11 or disable the e-cores
With an AMD you can keep using on Win10
Click to expand...
Didn't know that :) I probably will want to update to win11 anyway.

I'm on win10 right now of course, and this PC was built by me 5 years ago with a retail copy of win10 so (fingers crossed) won't be tied to the current motherboard. So hopefully it shouldn't be an issue.
 

Northpin

Northpin
Riverside said:
Didn't know that :) I probably will want to update to win11 anyway.

I'm on win10 right now of course, and this PC was built by me 5 years ago with a retail copy of win10 so (fingers crossed) won't be tied to the current motherboard. So hopefully it shouldn't be an issue.
Click to expand...

If you have a retail copy of Win10 then you can move it to your new computer.

Anyway, I mentioned it because i'm still reluctant regarding W11, especially for a gaming pc, and personally i will keep using W10 until i find some compelling reason to make the move (for the moment only an upgrade to Intel series 12 would qualify as a compelling reason since W10 scheduler doesnt know how to deal with e-cores and p-cores)
 

Ashnak

Ashnak
Bob McBobblehead said:
If you could hold out until the end of the year, you would have a lot of better options. Intel 13th Gen, Zen 4(leak shows the 7600x faster than the 5950x), RTX 4000 and RDNA 3(Rumour RX 7600 XT fast as the 6900 XT with 8GB).
Click to expand...
The same rumors also place these new CPUs and GPUs firmly into the "space heater" category, i.e. a lot of the improved GPU power at least will likely come from a corresponding increase in power consumption. So check whether you really need that GPU power (either because of framerate or resolution).
 

Riverside

Riverside
Northpin said:
If you have a retail copy of Win10 then you can move it to your new computer.

Anyway, I mentioned it because i'm still reluctant regarding W11, especially for a gaming pc, and personally i will keep using W10 until i find some compelling reason to make the move (for the moment only an upgrade to Intel series 12 would qualify as a compelling reason since W10 scheduler doesnt know how to deal with e-cores and p-cores)
Click to expand...

I don't really share your concern (but I understand the sentiment).

It's not that hard to swap out the HD for another & put a fresh install of a different OS for testing though if there are any concerns.
 

Morbad

Morbad
Riverside said:
An interesting point they make early in the vid is that L3 cache seems to play a part in reducing 1% lows & frame hanging, which is one of the reasons I want to upgrade. The AMD 5800X has 32Mb of L3, compared to 25Mb for the i7 12700k. My i7 7700 has 8Mb of L3 so either way it's a huge potential benefit.
Click to expand...

Just comparing L3 without other considerations doesn't paint a very clear picture of things. Both Zen 3 and Alder Lake have non-inclusive L3 caches but inclusive L2 cache (the L3 doesn't duplicate what's in the L2, but everything in the L1 has to be in the L2), so you'd add the L2 and L3 capacity together to get total cache capacity. In this case, if we don't include the E-core clusters, the 12700K has 32.5MiB of cache andwith the rest of the processor. the 5800X has 36MiB.

However, this still doesn't paint a complete picture. The 12700K has intrinsically lower latency access to main memory (it's a monolithic part with the memory controller on the same die as the CPU cores), but both it's L2 and L3 caches are a bit slower than AMD's. Additionally, while the Alder Lake L2 is still considerably faster than a Zen 3 L3 and each Alder Lake core has 2.5x the amount of L2 as a Zen 3 core.

Things get even more complex when trying to compare multiple CCX AMD parts, where the cache in different CCXes will contribute almost nothing to the performance of lightly threaded applications that need to be scheduled to the same CCX for best performance as the latency for cores in one CCX to talk to another CCX is closer to the latency of talking to main memory than accessing local (to a given CCX) cache. It's for this reason that something like a 3950X has half the effective L3 for most games, relative to a 5800X, despite having double the total physical cache, and why something like a 5950X is only faster for games because of it's higher boost clocks, not all that extra cache in the second CCD. It's a vaguely similar situation with Intel's E-core clusters; the data in those L2s is not easily shared with the rest of the processor.

Ultimately, comparing cache across different architectures is of limited use, but the 12700K is a slightly faster Elite: Dangerous CPU than a 5800X (but probably not the 5800X3D) and both are much faster than a 7700K.

Northpin said:
One thing you should keep in mind
if you plan to go intel 12 series, you'd have to either make the move to Windows 11 or disable the e-cores
With an AMD you can keep using on Win10
Click to expand...

Windows 11's scheduler handles heterogeneous CPUs better than Windows 10, but it's certainly possible to leave the E-cores enabled even with Windows 10.

Ashnak said:
The same rumors also place these new CPUs and GPUs firmly into the "space heater" category, i.e. a lot of the improved GPU power at least will likely come from a corresponding increase in power consumption. So check whether you really need that GPU power (either because of framerate or resolution).
Click to expand...

Power consumption/heat production is largely arbitrary; they'll use whatever they can get away with at the high-end. As long as the newer architecture is more efficient and/or built on a more advanced process (and they are), it will perform better at any given power target.
 

Riverside

Riverside
Thanks Morbad, your insight on the cache is just the kind of info I was hoping for :)

So I have a serious alternative contender in the 5800X3D compared to the i7 12700k, I'm sure I'd be happy with either choice for the next few years. All other things equal my personal preference will be to stick with intel, I have found some z690 mobos I'd be happy to buy (price, spec etc), but I need to look into AMD mobos too, in particular to get an understanding of how they handle PCIe & USB data lanes for the NVMe slots & other peripherals.
 

Northpin

Northpin
Morbad said:
Windows 11's scheduler handles heterogeneous CPUs better than Windows 10, but it's certainly possible to leave the E-cores enabled even with Windows 10.
Click to expand...
Definitely, but i've seen reports that seem to indicate better (and consistent) performance when the e-cores were disabled in W10, hence the suggestion to disable the e-cores on desktop gaming machines.

However, if i would buy a laptop with an intel series 12 cpu, i would definitely go for w11, that's a no brainer.
 

Dragsham

Dragsham
I'm waiting for the AMD am5 socket which will support 3 more chips before it changes to another socket. The problem with intel is their 13th gen is the last gen to fit intels current 1700 socket. Then it'll be a new size.
So am5 is the way to go.
 
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