Even with VR and an RTX 2080 Ti, you likely aren't going to be CPU limited with a higher-end 6c/12t or eight-core part from either Intel or AMD, unless you happen to have a head set capable of much more than 90Hz...or plan on getting one.
AMD's new Ryzen 3 seems to have surpassed Intel for gaming for the first time!
Generally not, at least at the extreme high-end of CPU limited gaming (which is a niche mostly limited to competitive gamers or those with 240Hz displays), especially once overclocking comes into play. Encoding while playing at the same time is another matter, but with the improvements that have been made to OBS and NVENC on Pascal and newer parts, this is far less of an issue that it was, even for those that take streaming or recording relatively seriously.
Anyway if the Ryzen 3000 line had surpassed Intel for gaming performance, this would be at least the third time, not the first. The original K7 bested the Pentium III and the K8s were generally faster than the Pentium IV and Pentium D variants they competed against, with the exception of the Galatin based EE parts, which were in a whole other price category.
Anyway, there are very few scenarios where I would not recommend a Ryzen 3000 part currently.
Only thing I'm really not liking about these new boards is the re-introduction of the tiny motherboard fan.
Sounded like these where added for pci-e 4. So it's not an AMD only issue.
I really hated those back in the day and they often made my office/game room as loud as the factory floor I worked at.
Should at least make them conform to normal sizes so I can upgrade to a silent fan or just replace a broken one.
All these board makers putting fans on their X570 boards instead of using real heatsinks is an annoyance. It's not like there haven't been passively cooled chipsets of vastly higher power consumption/heat dissipation in the past.
Linus is full of crap, this cooling is not a nessary evil, it a lazy hack. The peak disipation of the X570 is 14w. I have ten year old X58 boards with 40k hours of heavy load on them than don't need chipset fans and dissipate twice that, all while coupled to comparatively ancient and inefficient VRMs.
However, without making use of the extra I/O the new chipset provides the load should never get high enough for the fan to even need to speed up, and they should only be audible if they start to fail.
Agreed
I'm thinking it may be time for me to give serious thought to liquid cooling.
I'v also seen articles re high M.2 ssd temps that need better cooling to prevent throttling.
Always sumpin'
SSDs don't produce much heat either and simply replacing the air gap that usually under an M.2 drive with a thermal pad will almost always eliminate any throttling. It's not very blingy though...
That's my HTPC. See that pale green stuff under the M.2 drive? That's less than two dollars of cheap thermal gap filler pad, stacked until it needed to be compressed slightly. It cut load temps of that SSD by more than 30C and there is nothing I can do to make thermally throttle now.
Anyway, watercooling a ~14w chipset is a waste of a waterblock and tubing, IMO. There is no non-cosmetic justification for putting another point of failure in a loop when any passive heatsink with actual surface area (fins) would achive the same practical effect.