Ryzen

[LunarMist]

I was rather surprised that 97% use Windows for games and most of the video cards are not very powerful.
What percentage of total gaming is that? Are all the XBoxers and PSers only a small proportion of gamers? Do the MAC and LINUX users have a PS/XBOX on the side or what?

 

[sedrosken]

Bear in mind with that figure that Ryzen laptops are quite uncommon and a lot of folks have gaming laptops. You're not likely to get any of those without an Intel CPU and nVidia GPU. The Steam Deck has gone a long way to remedying that, though.

Xbox/PS/Switch are the lion's share of gaming, period. I'd say about 80% all told, and that's being quite generous to PC marketshare in that segment. Linux people are a small proportion of the PC population and don't tend to be super into gaming, while Mac users tend to be creative types with enough money to get a gaming PC on the side.

 

[LunarMist]

I assumed that Ryzens were not very common, period. I confess to having no clue what normals/masses do with computers.
I'm roughly your parents' generation and we did not grow up with computers. More than half I know use the MAC, and the others Windows. I was talking with someone the other day that kept talking about the hard drive of a 2021 Windows laptop.

 

[Mercutio]

I confess to having no clue what normals/masses do with computers.

Home users mostly use them as web/Facebook/word processing terminals at this point. This is a big reason why I don't have a problem advocating for ChromeOS devices. Even people who say things like "I use it for pictures" really mean that they're looking through photos they already have, rather than editing or even bothering to organize them.

 

[LunarMist]

So who is using the Ryzens, mostly the gamers?

 

[Mercutio]

Most people don't have any idea what they have. Home users usually buy for a price point, but even that can be a bad idea because home users will do idiotic things like buy computers from the Home Shopping Network or go out of their way to find the one and only 17" notebook that still has an optical drive. I see a lot of relatively high income earners using laptops with Pentium or Celeron G CPUs because they don't see their computer as a priority and I see a lot of college-age people with over-specified machines because somebody was hoping they'd be able to do some gaming, even if those same people don't actually understand that fast/expensive computer is not necessarily a gaming machine. Conversely, I see a lot of relatively professional people with gaming laptops who don't need them, because their work gave them a budget to BYOD during the pandemic and they just asked their kid to get something.

From talking to people over time, people basically have managed to grok the idea that more RAM is better, higher CPU numbers are better (no matter where in the name those numbers are) and maybe a third of them are aware that a primary SSD is better than a giant mechanical drive, although plenty of people will still take 2TB spinning vs 500GB solid state. Anything more than that and you're probably talking to someone with at least a background in tech or, more likely, a gamer.

 

[LunarMist]

I'm not disagreeing, but not sure how this relates to the Ryzens, that's all.

 

[Mercutio]

At this point, it is an examination of how people choose to buy computers, Ryzens included.

 

[LunarMist]

Ryzen was a big mistake for me at the time.

 

[Mercutio]

In what sense?

 

[LunarMist]

The performance of the 3950x was underwhelming on the lower cores. To some degree the 5950x was a mitigation of the suffering, but another $800 just 16+ months later. I stayed with the Rhizomes for 7950x so that I would not have to reinvent Windows.
I have no idea when there will be better CPUs, but I will decide on AMD vs. iNtel based on the specs, available motherboards, and to some degree power. I read that the half-ass 14th gen iNtel has such a huge draw that it absolutely needs the liquid coolers.

 

[sedrosken]

Ryzen was more the start of AMD and Intel actually trading blows vs AMD having total dominion over the market. Intel was caught with their pants down at first, sure, but Coffee Lake and especially Alder are actually quite good performers. Intel just took way too long to bring pricing back to being reasonable. I went Ryzen back in I think 2020 because I was coming off of a 3570K build and I was sick of paying the Intel tax as I perceived it, but honestly, I've had so many little issues with the asmedia USB controllers that it's been a compelling argument for paying a friend to grab one of the Microcenter Alder combos for me. Thus far I've resisted, but I don't know that I'll hold out forever.

Basically, what'll happen is it'll randomly decide to drop all USB connections and reinitialize them. This is nearly transparent on something like a mouse or keyboard beyond a momentary loss of input and hearing the Windows disconnect/reconnect sound. It's a transfer-ending nightmare for copying something to or from a USB device. This happens on at least the 3 Ryzen boards I've had -- two B450M-Pro4s and a X470 Aorus --and I hear it happens a lot for some of my friends running Ryzen too.

 

[LunarMist]

I have two X570 (one was top of the line and one was lesser), but don't recall any particular USB issues. The X670E board I have for the 7950x is more of the mid-grade variety, but still over $500 is not exactly cheap. Somehow I assumed the main USB were from the chipset for years now. My x670E only has one fast (3.2 Gen 2x2) USB-C in the rear, but that's probably a compromise with how the PCI lanes are all used. Having four M.2 and three full length PCIe slots is the priority. Does this mean anything? I think the generac USB hub might be a 2.5"->3.5' front panel thing that has 2 USB C and 2 USB A, all from one channel of an internal USB 3.0 header.

 

[LunarMist]

My older x570 is like this. Is ASMedia in there and I'm not seeing it?

 

[Mercutio]

I don't have anything other that keyboard and trackball running through USB on anything. Sometimes I plug in a card reader, but only for as long as I need to read a card. This is also not anything I've noticed on either my workstation (Gigabyte TRX40) or spare PC (Some or other Gigabyte X570). What brand of boards are you buying?

 

[sedrosken]

Both of my B450 boards are ASRock. My X470 in my main now is a Gigabyte. My friends report issues on everything from ASUS to Gigabyte to Biostar/MSI to even some OEM machines, all the way from the B350 chipsets on up to X570. None of us own Zen4 yet -- those of us inclined to upgrade bought Alder machines instead as most of them live near a Microcenter and were able to capitalize on a bundle. I'm not sure precisely where ASMedia would come in for you guys -- maybe it's for any USB provided beyond what's included in the chipset? Each board I've had reports at least one ASMedia controller, and they've all been similarly fussy. They're not outright unreliable, but it is an annoying issue. I've also taken to just not having anything important hooked up by USB, but in $currentYear when most peripherals are USB, that's a torturous existence.

 

[Mercutio]

Neither of my AMD desktops has an ASMedia Controller listed in Device Manager nor any unknown devices.

 

[Chewy509]

IIRC, AMD licensed and used one the ASMedia USB 3.x controller designs in their Ryzen chipsets, so you won't see as ASMedia, but rather as a AMD chipset controller. Motherboard manufacturers would often add additional USB controllers to boost the number of USB ports.

It was speculated that it was the ASMedia design used, was the root cause of some users experiencing dropped USB devices, especially when they used some sort of VR headset on the USB 2 and USB 3 ports on their systems.

Having used a number of ASMedia based USB devices and controllers in the past, always had mixed results with them. Some are great, zero issues with, others, well they were extremely problematic when stressed with high load.

At work, we were testing a number of different USB to SATA bridges, and we a number of devices (with the same ASMedia USB-SATA bridge chip) that would drop the USB device (we suspect the controller was resetting itself), when we exceeded a number of concurrent IO with large block transfers (think 32+ concurrent IOs at 1MB each). Other devices with a different ASMedia USB-SATA bridge chips worked perfectly fine under the same conditions.

 

[Chewy509]

Appears I was slightly incorrect, it appears ASMedia designed the actual chipsets themselves...
Source for the above:

ASMedia Remains AMD Chipset & USB Partner, Increases Revenues By 44.7%

ASMedia Technology, a tech company that's best known for designing high speed controllers (most recently, USB 3.1 Gen2, and AMD's X370 chipset), has posted tremendous increases in revenue and profits. The Taiwanese company distributed cash dividends per share in the order of $0.21 in late 2017...

www.techpowerup.com

ASMedia 600 chipset family for Zen 3 available in late 2020

It has been a rumor for quite some time now, ASMedia fabricating a chipset for AMD Ryzen setups. As it seems, that now has been confirmed by motherboard manufacturers at CES, it's likely starting wit...

www.guru3d.com

 

[Mercutio]

I have no idea when there will be better CPUs, but I will decide on AMD vs. iNtel based on the specs, available motherboards, and to some degree power. I read that the half-ass 14th gen iNtel has such a huge draw that it absolutely needs the liquid coolers.

Intel seems to have dropped HEDT as a concept. My understanding is that too many users were buying Enthusiast CPUs and running them on workstation boards with big-boy I/O, so now you either get bragging rights CPU cores or lots of modest cores + decent I/O. And then there's the power draw. Intel 12th gen+ is nipping at the heels of AMD's workstation line. I'm sure those single-core high frequency highs are amazing but 280W is WAY too much power draw for something that's stuck with 30 PCIe lanes.

I'd have to look really hard to find a use case where the 5900X in my spare PC is out and out subjectively faster than my 3960X. Benchmarks say the 5900X should be faster per core, but there's really no point when I'm using the Ryzen 9 that I'm thinking "Well that's definitely faster than the big guy in the other room." I don't really use that computer for long processing jobs where I can judge; sometimes I export DNGs to have the copy of Lightroom do AI Noise Reduction, but that's not something I have on my workstation to compare. I suspect my Threadripper is going to wind up replacing my old file server but but I'm hoping to wait another generation of AMD desktop CPUs before I really think about it.

As for liquid cooling: it has a place, but it's one more thing to fail and one more thing to monitor. AMD in particular told people that the more expensive Zen4s should probably be liquid cooled. I've read a lot of things that suggest the cooling issues with the Raphael-based CPUs are the fault of a poorly designed heat spreader. Just another reason I'm happy with the PCs I have right now.

 

[LunarMist]

Liquid cooling might be too noisy since the rad fans face upwards and the tower case is under a table right next to me. Fans exhausting out the rear are far more muffled and further away, near the wall. The key is what amount of power is used at low load, like 20-25% and if that is low enough to keep the fans quiet. It's not clear if the future AMD will be compatible with the old AM5 sockets and boards.

 

[Chewy509]

Interesting take on Ryzen vs Intel

 

[LunarMist]

Is there some reason to use the slower X3D CPU that has the mainboard problems at full power or is it just for video games?
I saw the 7950X3D was coming out, but rejected it in favor of the regular 7950X with the higher power drain.

 

[Mercutio]

Is there some reason to use the slower X3D CPU that has the mainboard problems at full power or is it just for video games?
I saw the 7950X3D was coming out, but rejected it in favor of the regular 7950X with the higher power drain.

The 7950X has faster cores and it's cheaper. It's the one I'd buy too. The two CPUs are a push on content creation benchmarks so IMO the deciding factors are the $100 lower price vs the 50W lower power draw.

 

[LunarMist]

The cost is practically irrelevant for individual systems. I suppose it matters for major manufacturers or those small builders making a few dozen at a time. If the next gen arrives in 2024 and is much better then it's a moot point.

 

[Mercutio]

A newest and bestest best Intel desktop CPU was released today. The 14900KS can hit 6.2Ghz on its P-cores vs. 6GHz for the 13900KS or 14900K, all a peak TDP of 280W and an MSRP of around $650. I think that finally brings it up to a teensy bit better than the 7800X3D for gamers, but being 1% faster in gaming benchmarks than a CPU that costs half as much and draws half the power doesn't exactly seem like a win. Content creation apps still depend on workload but if we're lucky, someone will eventually tell us that one is better than a 7950 or not in Adobe applications that no one here uses.

If that's the next-gen you were looking for, there you go.

 

[LunarMist]

Are those probably just binned parts, not really a new design? I was hoping for newer designs before the end of 2024.

 

[Mercutio]

We'll probably get Zen 5 in September, but from what I've heard, it's mostly a refinement over Zen 4, with the only real change being higher IPC and a smaller lithography process, but no change in number of cores or clock speeds. We should probably be thankful that AMD hasn't switched the P core and E cores Intel likes these days.

These are the CPUs I'm waiting on as well. I hope to be able to move my Threadripper to be the back-end system and get a 9000-series to be my daily driver. Hopefully, AMD works out the weirdness with EXPO RAM and improves its heat spreaders on the next guys. My 5900X has been incredibly stable, but it's also not subjectively better for what I spend the most time doing, either.

 

[LunarMist]

My 5950x is due for the scrapheap of CPUs.
Is there any chance that the Zenti 5 will be on the same chipsets as 7000 series X670E?

 

[sedrosken]

Meanwhile, my 5700X looking at the calendar and shrugging.

I'll get whatever's reasonably powerful and on sale in 3 or so years.

 

[LunarMist]

You have youth and time on your side.

There are minimal differences between single-threaded performance within an architecture compared to between generations.
I could really use another 20%+ on a core.
The RAM is really BS on the EXPO as Merc says. I'd opt for 128GB if it runs at the same speed as lesser amounts.

 

[Mercutio]

I haven't built one for myself but I have put together a few 7x00 systems. I had RAM weirdness with two of them. One of them got better by disabling the iGPU. The other I wound up swapping a 4 DIMM G. Skill kit for a 2 DIMM Corsair kit. There's something weird with DDR5 on AMD, especially past about 5600MT/s modules.

 

[LunarMist]

My 2x32GB G.Skill are fine at 6000MGT using the EXPO with no tweaking. I don't know if it is possible to get 4 RAMs at 6000. I would not even try. That was over a year ago, so maybe today there is better RAM.

 

[Mercutio]

Minisforum is shipping a Ryzen 7 8840U tablet in China, available now. 8c/16t, 3.3 - 5.1GHz Zen5 CPU, 28W TDP, Radeon 780M graphics. That doesn't change the delivery date of next-gen desktop parts but these guys might show up in Beelink or other NUC-style boxes soon.

 

[LunarMist]

Is the 8840 really all that much better than the 155H/165H? You could just wait a bit and get the 155H or 165H in Asus or AsRocks NUC.

 

[Mercutio]

There aren't many comparable benchmarks published for the 8840U yet, but if it's 15% faster per P core than 155H and the pricing is comparable, it might be worthwhile. Supposedly, the new architecture should see 15% better IPC vs the 7000 series Ryzen.

 

[LunarMist]

Intuitively the AMD should be more power efficient at high CPU loads and perform better in the smaller laptops with limited cooling.
It might make less difference in an NUC that can provide maximum power and cooling.

Is the integrtaed 780M worth a damn for the Compute compared to the Arc
at that 28-30W range?

 

[CougTek]

Minisforum is shipping a Ryzen 7 8840U tablet in China, available now. 8c/16t, 3.3 - 5.1GHz Zen5 CPU, 28W TDP, Radeon 780M graphics.

I wish there would be a Zen5 CPU available now, but the 8840U is Zen4-based.
It is clearly written on AMD's general specifications page.

 

[LunarMist]

Do you think that AMD has a problem with the Zen 5? The Zen 4 was back in 2022 and intel is seemingly developing more CPUs more often.

 

[LunarMist]

The 8840U has the exact same CPU and GPU as the 7840U, but a better NP for AI. Whoopdeedo.