My thoughts on the CPUs of 2017

painkiller (42)in #tech • 7 years ago

I'm going to apologize for the wall of text upfront, and urge those of you that don't like to read to jump to the tl;dr at the bottom. If you opt for that, you can skim through to find the section you agree/disagree with to find out more! :)

2017 has been a fantastic year in terms of CPU launches, for not only AMD and Intel but consumers as well. With the advent of some seriously powerful CPU choices across all price ranges, as well as the return to a competitive market there are now more good choices than there have been in years. With different platforms offering similar performance in similar price ranges, as well as different core counts, PCI-e connectivity, and other differences there are plenty of options that should fit many needs, and beyond that there are some interesting places where each company has found a “hole” in the other’s pricing scheme and found a way to exploit that hole. The long and the short of it is that now, with all CPU launches for desktop finished for the year, consumers can take a look at the market and size up each chip and where it stands in the grand scheme of things.

With all of that, this isn’t going to be a super structured analysis of each chip, or a guide based on usage or price range or some black magic tea leaves reading. This is just going to be me looking at the general market and the different levels of performance. No strict rules, more of a comparison of the chips and how they seem to be structured against the competition. I feel that this will allow for good discussion regarding price and performance, as well as other factors. I’ll also consider other facets, such as platform life, upgradability, features, connectivity options, etc. This is more of a “overall best” rather than specific best kind of opinion piece. So let’s dig in!

We’re gonna start at the low end, because frankly it’s easier. At the lowest end of them all, the so called “poverty” tier, we’ve not got many options, really the Pentium G4560 and the AMD Athlon X4 950. As far as performance goes this is a no brainer, the Pentium slaughters the AMD offering. This Athlon, despite featuring the new AM4 socket, is still using bulldozer cores, and that REALLY limits the performance. Really, the only redeeming quality of the Athlon is the upgrade path, since it actually you know, has one. Best you can do with the pentium platform is upgrade to a 7700k, but that’s it. LGA 1151 as a socket is still a thing, but to upgrade to a Coffee Lake offering you need a z370 board. There’s even talk that to upgrade past a 8700k you’ll need ANOTHER new chipset, which is just absurd. With the Athlon, you can upgrade to a 8 core ryzen as of now, and the socket itself will be supported through 2020. You might get some new features on the newer chipset offerings from AMD, but at least you can upgrade. The value of the pentium is diminished a bit considering that you have to go with a z-series motherboard if you want to overclock, which are a bit more expensive than B350. Even with all that considered though, I’ve gotta give it to the Pentium. Team blue scores an early lead.

Moving up the food chain we get into the i3/R3 lineups, and boy oh boy is there plenty of performance to be gained. Really, going from the previous tier to this will more than likely offer a more noticeable and meaningful upgrade than any other upward movement. Other higher tiers will offer better price/performance and just flat out better performance, but the move from 2 cores to 4 (or 2c/4t) is a big jump. All that aside there’s some good competition here. We’ve got the R3 1200 and 1300x from AMD and the i3 7100, 7350k, i3-8100, and 8350k. To start with, we’re throwing the i3-7100 out. You can't overclock it, it’s got 2 less cores than the AMD offerings, and with similar clock speed and the similar IPC between the chips, as well as the lack of an upgrade path it’s out of here. We’re gonna throw out the 1300x too, because it’s really just an overclocked 1200, and given the OC cap on all Ryzen chips any higher binning most likely won't matter, we’re talking like 200mhz max. Next, we’re gonna throw out both of the unlocked i3s. Fact of the matter is for the asking price, you can spend another $5 dollars and go with another Intel chip or an AMD offering (i5-8400 and R5 1600 respectively). That leaves us with the i3-8100 and R3 1200. This generation, Intel has graced the consumers with the first ever 4c/4t i3, meaning that the performance is going to be much closer to the R3 1200 than earlier offerings. The Intel chip is around $20 more, and is a locked chip. Even though you won't be overclocking this thing, you do have to get a z-series motherboard, which will drive the total cost up compared the AMD option. However, there is some pretty good performance to be had in this little chip, especially for gaming. With a healthy OC on the R3, it still lags behind in a number productivity tasks, winning some others. In gaming though, the i3 really shines and leaves the R3 in the dust. For less than a 20% price increase user should see somewhere between a 5-20% increase in performance, depending on game and GPU, which I feel needs to be considered here. No one buying a R3 or i3 is going to pair that with a high end GPU, or at least I hope. That performance stat from earlier is based off the wonderful results from Techspot, where they tested with a Vega 64. Realistically that isn’t a great pairing, and one I’ll wager you don't see often in the wild. Further, these were done on titles that are primarily CPU heavy, so this is more of a best case scenario. So, even though at first this looks like a huge advantage, the low clock speed of the i3 really limits it in gaming, and prevents it from totally dominating the 1200. I managed to find a video* comparing just this scenario, a R3 1200 at 3.9ghz and a i3-8100, both with 2400mhz DDR4. In GTA V the chips are within 3fps of each other for the 1%, and .1% measures, and the i3 squeezes out a 6fps lead on average.. CS:GO shows AMD with a 6 fps lead over intel, but for 1% and .1% the R3 is much lower, 128 to 165 and 83 to 99 respectively. The last title tested is Witcher 3, which shows the i3 pulling ahead again: 72-62 average, 50-40 1%, and 34-26 at the .1% lows. All games considered, this puts the average fps of the r3 at 97% of the performance of the 8100, at least for those 3 games. Bear in mind as well, this is with memory speeds at 2400. While both chips will benefit from faster memory, the Ryzen architecture gains far more with the move up in memory speed, which could potentially eliminate the already marginal 3% lead. So, for gaming, the chips are even, and in productivity the i3 seems to lead by an average of 10%, give or take depending on the task. Realistically, while the productivity tasks matter in some cases, neither of these is a video editing or CAD powerhouse, and with the performance usually pretty close, in real life this is more of a draw. I will go ahead and give the advantage to the i3. Now that we’ve looked at everything, its decision time. And really, I’ve gotta give it to the R3. This segment of the market is all about value, and the R3 delivers in spades, once platform cost is considered. With the ability to get a B350 motherboard for a little more than half of a z370, it really drives that value proposition through the roof. The added ability to upgrade on that socket for the next 3 years is fantastic, and there are plenty of good offerings from the Ryzen lineup to upgrade to even now. Score: RED-1:BLUE-1

Moving into the R5/i5 lineup this is where the real beauty of this year of chips lies. I said before Ryzen even launched that the 1600 (well, the 6 core chip) was going to be the star of the show. And lo and behold it truly is a great chip, and a contender for best price/performance of this generation. In the ring we’ve got the R5 1400, R5 1500x, R5 1600, and R5 1600x from AMD. Intel is fielding the i5-8400 and the i5-8600k. We’re gonna throw the 1600x out from AMD, for the same reasons we threw the 1300x out earlier, other than that everything else stays. Things start to get interesting here, with different chips having subtle differences and the use case starting to matter more. Looking first at the AMD options, the 1400 and 1500x are very similar, both have 4c/8t, however they differ in the amount of cache, 1500x sports a 16mb cache and the 1400 is packing 8mb. At the surface this seems like a small difference, but it amounts to roughly a 7% increase in performance for the 1500x when both are at the same clock speed. Given the prices of these chips and the Intel offerings, we can't really disqualify either for that difference alone. The 1400 is a better bargain, but the 1500x does offer an interesting stopgap between that and the 1600. For the money though, money spent towards a 1500x would be better spent towards a 1600, so we’re gonna have to chuck it out, leaving us the other 4. Looking again at the 1400, again I think we’re going ot have to let this one go. Fact of the matter is that it offers marginal performance benefits over the similarly priced (but not included) i3-8350k, and compared to the i5-8400 or the R5 1600 it just doesn’t stand up. The only positive it has seems to be price, where it does offer a really solid offering between the R3 1200 and R5 1600. But for this segment, it’s just a bit anemic. Next on the chopping block is the i5-8600k. Frankly, it costs too much. At that point you can up to a R7 offering which will beat out the i5 in productivity, albeit lose in gaming. On the flip side, for a almost $100 dollar increase you get marginally better gaming performance over the i5-8400, which can be cooled with a simple $20-$30 air cooler, where the i5-8600k will require some serious cooling if you overclock it to take advantage of higher clock speeds and performance. All of that makes it a horrible value, so it’s gotta go. With two finalists this is where specificity starts to play a role in our comparison. The Intel chip will be faster for gaming, no two ways of looking at it. For productivity, even though the i5 puts up a honestly impressive effort, the R5 still pulls ahead, and by a fairly large margin in most cases, especially with overclocking. The extra 6 threads on the R5 really help it out in this use case. Given that the earlier mentioned problem with the z-series motherboards is still here, and that the R5 offers good, albeit not great, performance in gaming, stellar productivity performance, and a upgradeability that Intel just doesn’t match, this is another win for AMD. Score: RED-2:BLUE-1

Moving out of the college teams and into the minor leagues! These guys offer top notch performance for the mainstream market and, if I’m being honest here I still can believe the kind of performance we’re able to get for the money now. You can build a whole R7 1700 system for what a 6900k cost this time last year, and get similar if not better performance, which is mind blowing. That’s not to say that the Intel offerings aren’t similarly impressive, they offer excellent performance as well. In this round we’ve got the AMD R7 1700, 1700x, and 1800x, as well as the Intel i7-8700 and i7-8700k. We’re going to throw the 1800x and 1700x out for the very same reason we pitched the 1300x and ultimately the 1500x, they cost more for the same chip. The one note I’ll slide in is that if you aren’t the gambling type and can get it for a slight price increase (read: $20ish more) than the 1700x is a solid chip and might help you hit that sweet 4ghz/3200mhz just a bit easier, but you can get a lemon there too! Leaving us with the R7 1700, i7-8700 and i7-8700k. So things get interesting here, the R7 has the most cores and threads, but a lower single core performance. The i7-8700 is a great balance of performance and low(er) price, and the i7-8700k reigns supreme for single core performance, but does lack 2c/4t compared to the R7, and isn’t necessarily the king of the hill. Use case starts to matter more here, just as we saw before with the R5 vs. i5. As far as productivity is concerned, a overclocked R7 1700 is going to win most of the time. Certain apps will of course favor the higher clock speed of the i7s, but overall this swings in AMD’s favor. For gaming though, jesus christ. It’s an absolute slaughter of team red over here, at least at 1080p. At this price range we can comfortably assume there are going to be a good number of 1440p players as well as some 4k, and in those areas the difference is still there, although far less pronounced. Gaming is 100% a win for Intel though, and productivity is an AMD advantage, but close enough I won’t call it a win. The extra cores for AMD might make a difference for work with virtual machines or other cases, but again that’s dependent on circumstance. Really, it comes down to what you want to do on your computer. If you’re going to do a majority of productivity tasks and some gaming, go with AMD. If you’re going to mostly game and do some productivity, go Intel. For streaming I’d opt towards the AMD offering, as the extra cores will help with balancing the load, but performance is close between the two. So with performance so close in multitasking and an absolute landslide win for intel in gaming, and assuming a pretty even mix of work and play, the last thing we can really look at is price. The i7-8700k has a MSRP of 359.99, but due to shortage of supply and high demand, the lowest price I could find on PCPartpicker as of writing was a whopping 409.99!! The 8600, should you be able to find it in stock is a much tamer 339.99. The R7 1700 carries a MSRP of 315.99, but PCPartpicker shows the lowest asking price as of writing to be a very tame 289.78. The R7 can take advantage of some B350 boards, but not necessarily as cheap as the previous Ryzen chips due to power delivery. With that in mind, the motherboard advantage AMD has enjoyed is still there, although not as pronounced. We’re going to assume best cases for all of these chips, so the below MSRP for the R7 and the MSRP for the i7, and in that case the value award has to go to the R7. The superior productivity performance and the flexibility of more cores, as well as above average gaming performance all put it into a good spot. For best overall performance, that’s got to go to the i7-8700k. The staggering performance in gaming and competitiveness in productivity helps it claw to the top. As for the winner, well, I’m inclined to give that to the i7-8700. It offers better gaming performance than the R7 1700, while remaining close to the i7-8700k and R7 1700 in productivity at a much more appealing price. In that same way though, it’s the average of the two, not a winner in either category, so it’s less appealing than either of the others in their zone of expertise. It does offer a significant advantage over the i7-8700k, however, something we really haven't talked about up until now, and that's in terms of cooling. The i7-8700k is a hot sonovabitch. You’re looking to spend a minimum of $120 or so on cooling to keep in under control. Even with a delid, you’re still looking at at least $80 for a cooler. Both the R7 and and lock i7 can be cooled with a substantial overclock on a $50 air cooler, lowering the price/performance argument for the i7-8700k. All of that really pushes the i7-8700k out of whack in regard to these other parts. A example R7 build would cost around $400 for CPU, mobo, and cooler, or the price of the i7 as of writing. Things are a lot better with the locked i7, resulting in a much tamer $460 price tag. Assuming MSRP for the i7-8700k, a sample system would run roughly $550, and that’s assuming you’re using the cheapest z370 board and allocating $80 for the cooler, which would mean you would also have to delid your CPU. That’s a lot of compromise, but it’s definitely doable. Based on pricing the 1700 is the no brainer decision, but I keep coming back to the performance of the i7-8700k. I’ve got to hand it to Intel, they built a monster in this chip. This is a hard one for me, but I think I’ve got to give it to AMD. The fact of the matter is even though Intel blows it out of the water in gaming, that's in a way “wasted performance”. It doesn't matter if the Intel is getting 180fps average and the AMD is “only” getting 160, both of which are more than enough for 144hz, and WAY more than needed for the average 60fps panel. On productivity, however, there is never the same “wasted potential” an extra 30 seconds here or 10 seconds there matters, and it adds up. This is probably the hardest decision I’ve had, but given the cooling hassle with the i7-8700k, the higher price, and the lack of a clear upgrade path (rumors of z390, LGA1151 being on it’s third rendition) it’s hard to recommend as a overall best. If you intend to do high refresh competitive gaming (and you don't suck) then this is the best. But really, if you’re looking for top gaming performance, why not go with the 8600k? You’d save $100 bucks or so, and get 95% of what this monster offers. As it stands, even though this is really a wicked fast CPU, I just can't recommend it over the much better price/performance and productivity performance of the 1700. Score: RED-3:BLUE-1

Stepping up into the big leagues! We’re out of mainstream and into enthusiast grade now, that said there are a lot of goddamn chips from here and up, so we’re gonna be splitting this up into 2 more categories. For this first one, I want to look at the i7-7640x, i7-7740x, i7-7800x, i7-7820x from Intel, and the R9 1900x and R9 1920x from AMD. We’re kicking out the i7-7640x and i7-7740x right out the gate, there is no reason for those chips to exist, period. The next to fall is the i7-7800x. It’s been outclassed in nearly every way by its bigger and badder little brother the i7-8700k. That leaves us with a much needed smaller list, but we’re not done yet! The 1900x is horrible in terms of price/performance. Effectively a $550 dollar R7 1700, we’re throwing this thing right out. The few redeeming qualities of this chip is the fact that it supports up to 128gb of ECC RAM, and that it sports the absolutely monstrous 64 PCI-e lanes that it’s bigger Threadripper kin also feature. Maybe a solid choice for a homeserve build, depending on your needs, but not enough to redeem it here. That leaves us with 2 equally priced options, the i7-7820x and the R9 1920x. And man, compared to the last section this is a no brainer. The R9 advantages include: far greater PCI-e connectivity (64 vs. 28 lanes), a massive performance advantage in multithreaded workloads (read punching a cpu above its price range) support for bootable RAID-0 with NVME drives without paying extra, 4 more cores and 8 more threads, more reasonable power draw, and that sweet ass socket. The i7-7820x does have its (few) advantages, markedly higher single core performance, support for faster memory, cheaper motherboards. Up until recently I really had a soft spot for the i7-7820x. I treated it as kind of the ultimate gaming CPU. 8 blisteringly fast cores, more support for mGPU setups, and other nice enthusiast features like dual NICs, quad channel memory, etc. Assuming you could cool the beast 5.0 was not out of the question, perhaps even higher with a no bullshit cooling system (read phase change, TEC chiller, real hardcore stuff) But with the i7-8700k stepping in all of that is gone, sorry. And at this point, when you’re buying 8 cores and up, single core performance does matter, but not as much as before. If you need fast cores, you can't also have a lot of them, and right not the single thread champ is undoubtedly the i7-8700k. This goes to the 1920x, hands down. Score: RED-4:BLUE-1

And now we’re into the upper eschelon, the super heavyweights. This is the best of the best category, all bets are off. These are the monsters that many dream of yet few will ever tame. We’re going to be looking at the R9 1950x from AMD, and from team blue we’ve got the i9-7900x,
I9-7920x, i9-7940x, i9-7960x and the behemoth that is the i9-7980xe. We’re gonna start by throwing out half of these bad boys! The i9-7980xe, i9-7960x, i9-7940x are all out of here. Fact of the matter is that they just cost too much, and near the upper end are just some horrible bastard version of a xeon with NOS shoved into every orifice possible. They just don't make sense at those prices. Looking at the remaining chips, we’ve got 2 entries from the extreme series and 1 from Threadripper. Looking at performance, we see the 1950x ripping through the Intel offerings, and i mean it. Rip and tear assing past the equally expensive 7900x, the 1950x manages to squeeze out roughly 1000 more points in cinebench R15, or roughly 50% faster, no small feat. Hell, on average it manages to score somewhere around 40% better. Threadripper offers more PCI-e connectivity, far more performance, and does it in a package that draws less power, although all of these monsters drink electricity like there’s no tomorrow. Numbers on the i9-7920x are incredibly difficult to find as of this writing, and as such we’re going to just take a quick and dirty estimate and assume the i9-7920x is 20% faster than it’s little brother. Even with that in mind, we’re talking about a score of 2900-3000 with a fat overclock, which would take a monster cooling setup to manage, or a harrowing delidding experience and still require a no nonsense cooling option. Even then, the performance lags comparative to the monster than is the 1950x, and that’s before we consider the earlier mentioned shortcomings in other areas, all of which still apply to this larger chip. The lone 2 advantages the i9-7920x enjoys is support for faster memory and single core performance. But if you’re looking to buy 10-16 cores and notion of single thread performance mattering is gone. As for the memory speeds, that is a fringe case if ever there was one, so we’re gonna throw that out. Beyond all of this, we’ve now got a new problem from team blue, mainly that there are relatively few motherboards on market with a competent enough VRM design and cooling to handle this kind of overclocking on this kind of chip. You’re going to have to do something about that as well. In terms of performance, yes, Intel has managed to know Threadripper off the throne, but for a minimum of 45% more asking price, and realistically more than that once you factor in the price of a competent motherboard and the cooling for these things. Value is always subjective, and sometimes performance needs to be weighed a bit more heavily. But no matter what the Intel i9 lineup is ALWAYS standing in the looming shadow of the 1950x and the absolutely crushing value it provides. There’s no other way to put it, the 1950x is a threadripping monster, it has no peers, and certainly no equals at the price, features, and absolutely massive performance it offers. Out of all of the categories, to me this is the clearest example of a no contest knockout. AMD came to win, Intel just managed to show up. Think of it like this, AMD is that big mean sonovabitch biker at the bar that no one wants to even look at, and Intel is the sweater-tied-around-their-neck, 90s looking yupie that walks into the bar, orders a strawberry daiquiri and loudly starts talking about how no one there could afford their bike, and how it’s faster than that “glued together POS” our front. That yupie never stood a chance, and neither did the 7900x or 7920x for that matter.
FINAL SCORE: RED-5:BLUE-1

I just want to take a moment now that we’re at the end of this long ass delve into the CPU of modern era and say that I really didn't expect it to go this way, and a lot of it has to do with the prices that Intel insists on driving. If there was a $50 dollar cut across the mainstream, a $100 drop in the lower end HEDT parts and a $500+ drop on the upper end this would be a completely different discussion. I almost went with the 8700k as well, and for what it’s worth I really do like that CPU, a lot. Same with the 8400. Both are incredible offerings from Intel and as soon as locked, cheaper motherboards are available from Intel the i5-8400 is going to be the new pick for that section. If the temperatures were a bit more manageable and the price came down about $50 on the i7-8700k, then it too would be the no brainer choice. As it stands though, the value proposition not only from AMD’s CPU but from their platforms in general speaks volumes, and the performance is there for everything but gaming. Again, I want to iterate that this is MY list, and my OVERALL list, NOT a specific list. I’ll probably make some of those too, but this is just the overall. And I think it paints an interesting picture. This year AMD came out of the cage biting and clawing, and Intel was caught with its pants down. Next year with Ice Lake and Zen2 is when the real fight is going to happen, and I can't wait.

Tl;dr (I don't blame you)
Poverty tier - Pentium G4560
i3/R3 - R3 1200
i5/R5 - R5 1600
i7/R7 - R7 1700 (with the 8700k in a VERY close second)
i7/R9 - R9 1920x
i9/R9 - R9 1950x