CPU for 3440×1440

Originally Posted by lostforever
Thanks and good point on both. It looks like I will stick with 3600 if going with Ryzen and use that money for a good cooler as the stock one seems to be crap anyway

Yeah, the one on 3600x is slightly better, but not £40 better.

Originally Posted by Ivanwah
Yeah, the one on 3600x is slightly better, but not £40 better.

You mentioned that you have 3700x. What are your temps like please?

I am reading loads of horror stories about 3600, MB compatibility (even which claims to support gen3), high temps etc…

Originally Posted by lostforever
You mentioned that you have 3700x. What are your temps like please?

I am reading loads of horror stories about 3600, MB compatibility (even which claims to support gen3), high temps etc…

I got around 40-45C idle during summer (35C+ ambient where I live) bot now that it's gotten cooler I get 35C idle. While gaming, it doesn't get hotter than 65C. I got 75C while doing benchmarks and stress tests (Cinebench, Aida64) with stock settings or slightly over 80C with an overclock. That is with a stock cooler, but the one that comes with 3700X and better CPUs is much better than the one on the lower end CPUs. The most demanding game I played was probably Vampyr.

As for motherboards, I can't really talk from experience. I switched from Intel and bought a new X570 board and had no compatibility problems. There is an ongoing issue with slightly lower than advertised clock speeds with the new CPUs, but it is getting better with each BIOS update. Not that you'll notice it while gaming, but if you advertise 4.4GHz, give me 4.4GHz, not 4.35GHz. Oh, and the thing about advertised boost clocks, those are single core boost clock in single threaded workloads. Don't expect 4.2GHz on all cores without overclocking if you decide to go with 3600. But those are just numbers and in the end you should care about fps in games and you can see those in benchmarks.

You also mentioned you'd like to keep the cooler silent. There is an annoying tendency with Ryzen 3000 CPUs (and maybe the older ones, but I can't speak from experience) to boost their clocks while doing almost nothing (browsing, watching movies…) for a fraction of a second. That makes the temps spike for a second to and the cooler needs to catch up. It's not loud but it is quit annoying. And I read online that it isn't just me. You can fix this by tweaking the fan curve in BIOS or by using the power saver power plan in Windows. Tweaking the fan curve will mostly eliminate this but will impact idle temperatures. Using the power plan will almost completely get rid of the issue but it will make the CPU slow to boost when you actually need it so you need to switch power plans all the time depending on what you are doing. I don't know if that will get fixed or whether it can be fixed by a better cooler. It's not a huge issue, but I just find it annoying.

Sorry for kind of a long post but I hope you'll appreciate it. I know I would have liked to know about some of these kind of things before I bought some things i did.

Originally Posted by Ivanwah
I got around 40-45C idle during summer (35C+ ambient where I live) bot now that it's gotten cooler I get 35C idle. While gaming, it doesn't get hotter than 65C. I got 75C while doing benchmarks and stress tests (Cinebench, Aida64) with stock settings or slightly over 80C with an overclock. That is with a stock cooler, but the one that comes with 3700X and better CPUs is much better than the one on the lower end CPUs. The most demanding game I played was probably Vampyr.

As for motherboards, I can't really talk from experience. I switched from Intel and bought a new X570 board and had no compatibility problems. There is an ongoing issue with slightly lower than advertised clock speeds with the new CPUs, but it is getting better with each BIOS update. Not that you'll notice it while gaming, but if you advertise 4.4GHz, give me 4.4GHz, not 4.35GHz. Oh, and the thing about advertised boost clocks, those are single core boost clock in single threaded workloads. Don't expect 4.2GHz on all cores without overclocking if you decide to go with 3600. But those are just numbers and in the end you should care about fps in games and you can see those in benchmarks.

You also mentioned you'd like to keep the cooler silent. There is an annoying tendency with Ryzen 3000 CPUs (and maybe the older ones, but I can't speak from experience) to boost their clocks while doing almost nothing (browsing, watching movies…) for a fraction of a second. That makes the temps spike for a second to and the cooler needs to catch up. It's not loud but it is quit annoying. And I read online that it isn't just me. You can fix this by tweaking the fan curve in BIOS or by using the power saver power plan in Windows. Tweaking the fan curve will mostly eliminate this but will impact idle temperatures. Using the power plan will almost completely get rid of the issue but it will make the CPU slow to boost when you actually need it so you need to switch power plans all the time depending on what you are doing. I don't know if that will get fixed or whether it can be fixed by a better cooler. It's not a huge issue, but I just find it annoying.

Sorry for kind of a long post but I hope you'll appreciate it. I know I would have liked to know about some of these kind of things before I bought some things i did.

Thanks for the detailed post as it really helps

Your temps are very respectable so I guess other were unlucky. Also it seems I will need to get better cooler if I go down the 3600 path which sort of add more to the budget.

I don't think I will going with X570 as they are way to expensive, £150+. I think I will settle for either B450 board. Currently looking at B450 TOMAHAWK MAX or the one you linked. They both claim to support 3600 and are pretty much identical in terms of spec, where one has 2 memory slot at 50% cheaper price.

Yeah, X570 boards are ridiculously expensive. The B450 MAX boards are the only alternative guaranteed to be compatible.

I've seen B450 Tomahawk recommended a lot as a solid and quality mid-range board but I'm not expert in motherboards. There won't be any performance difference either way you go, but the more expensive one is (or should be) of a better quality, has some features the cheaper one doesn't (mainly 4 RAM slots and more PCI-E slots) and should be better if you decide to overclock. I'd say that if you're only gaming and don't need massive amounts of RAM, two slots is enough. 2x8GB is enough for every game (except some simulation type games that eat RAM like there is no tomorrow) and you can always upgrade that to 2x16GB if you ever need to.

Modern cpu are really fast (esp compared to what was available 20 years ago). Modern software is really inefficient esp compared to what was written 25 or 30 years ago.
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The truth of the matter many software eng know zilch about algorithms and invent some amazing code - amazing at the number of calculations they have to perform for an otherwise simple task.
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Really mmo should barely touch the cpu - now i suppose if they used ssl and non-persistent connections there might be a bit of overhead - but otherwise they really shouldn't be doing much at all - it is the server that handles all the collision computations. A friend of mine used to play one of those fury mmo - he got so bored he wrote a program to play it for him (i.e, he was able to decipher their protocol and generate his own packets).
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anyway what the point of my comment - in a sense it doesn't really matter why the game is slow - you're not going to be able to teach those peewee how to write efficient code and the corporate opinion is that it is cheaper to have people upgrade their cpu then to hire knowledgeable developers.
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as for why greedfall is slow - it is a modern game from a small indie company (not sure what engine they used) and it is probably doing a lot of things in a less than optimal fashion. But do we really care why it is slow - probably not.

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If you do overclock your cpu - even as a test to see if it will impact frame rate watch the clock rate with the intel tool. If the cpu gets warm it will throttle itself. Also I think you will need a lot more than 10% to see a change in frame rate but perhaps 10 or 20% will tell you if your cpu is on the edge or not. It is also possible the game is spinning and any cpu you use will run at 100%.

Originally Posted by Zloth
MMO's can hit the CPU pretty hard, actually. Maybe translating all those packets into people/enemies and trying to predict where they are if their packets don't show up?

Assassin's Creed: Odyssey burns the CPU hard because the fool engine keeps throwing out textures then re-loading them again. Re-loading means decompressing which means a CPU hit.

I'm surprised Greedfall is pegging the CPU. I wonder if it could have the same problem? If the game lets you lower the texture size, that might give a good indicator.

Originally Posted by you
If you do overclock your cpu - even as a test to see if it will impact frame rate watch the clock rate with the intel tool. If the cpu gets warm it will throttle itself. Also I think you will need a lot more than 10% to see a change in frame rate but perhaps 10 or 20% will tell you if your cpu is on the edge or not. It is also possible the game is spinning and any cpu you use will run at 100%.

Yep, that's why I mentioned that underclocking also makes sense for testing purpose to have a bigger gap and to see the impact more clearly. On the other hand, as mentioned before, don't expect any huge differences anyways.

Regarding latest AMD boards: Be aware that they also have new features which are negligible for the coming years for faster SSDs and stuff (these new ones cost more and you won't see the difference in normal use cases). However in order to do so they have integrated fans on the board. This alone would be a reason why I'd avoid the new boards. Fans are the first things to get loud and break, especially if you use the PC in a dusty environment (like in the same room where you sleep). And you likely won't be able to replace the fans.

My current MB is msi h81m-e33. Its cheap board I got 2 years ago for £30 after my original MB died. However it has no over clocking or under clocking options at all. I can't really complain as it has been fine till now!

Tbh I don't really NEED to upgrade but its good time to do so as we are not going to get any new CPU for few more months and black Friday can bring out some good deals…

Not TRUE!!! On nov 25th amd is releasing third generation thread rippers based off of 7nm. The 3920x has a retail price of just under $700. No clue if amd are discounted at the store - haven't purchased a new cpu in 4 1/2 years but my 2500k server is likely to get upgraded sometime in the next .5 to 5 years time-frame.

Originally Posted by lostforever
Tbh I don't really NEED to upgrade but its good time to do so as we are not going to get any new CPU for few more months and black Friday can bring out some good deals…

Originally Posted by you
Not TRUE!!! On nov 25th amd is releasing third generation thread rippers based off of 7nm. The 3920x has a retail price of just under $700. No clue if amd are discounted at the store - haven't purchased a new cpu in 4 1/2 years but my 2500k server is likely to get upgraded sometime in the next .5 to 5 years time-frame.

Yes true but I think thats very unlikely to affect the consumer desktop CPU prices anyway I am still waiting on black Friday week to make my purchase.

You might want to check when intel is cutting prices - i read somewhere they have or are planning to cut prices by over 40% to compete with amd - i'm not sure if it has taken effect or is planned to take effect at a later date - since i'm not in the market i just sort of skimmed the article but it was recent.
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here is one article that was earlier this week:
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/68359…ved/index.html
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btw the amd chips have had less security issues if that matters for your application.

Originally Posted by lostforever
Yes true but I think thats very unlikely to affect the consumer desktop CPU prices anyway I am still waiting on black Friday week to make my purchase.

Originally Posted by BriefDArt
Now now, those are cheap shots

All in good fun, nice to see ya back.

@lostforever, please post your frame rate difference when you get your new cpu, I’d be interested to see how much improvement you got.

Originally Posted by sakichop

@lostforever, please post your frame rate difference when you get your new cpu, I’d be interested to see how much improvement you got.

Yes I definitely will. Just need sales to start soon! I have settled on the 3600 still not decided on the MB and RAM.

For MB, its between these two
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/B450-TOMAHAWK-MAX
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/B450M-MORTAR-MAX

For RAM,
16Gb 3200 C16

RAM prices are all over the place. I have seen 16GB 3200 anywhere from £55 to £85 so not sure what to get yet.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Corsair-CMK…F11VG65SP&th=1

Bit pissed off with BF in UK. The 3600 has not dropped in price but the 3600x has but tis still £20 more but it seems RAM and MB prices went up yesterday!

BF… Um… Brexit kinda doesn't sound like BF…

Let's see yesterday's article from a site that so far wasn't shilling for anyone nor anything and especially never wrote stuff ment for those who don't even visit such sites (hotel owners).
https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/feat…uild-gaming-pc

Sub $1,000 Gaming Build

CPU AMD Ryzen 5 3600 $194
GPU MSI RTX 2060 Super Gaming X $369
SSD Adata XPG SX8200 Pro (1TB) $117
Motherboard MSI Performance Gaming B450 Gaming Plus $94.99
RAM Patriot Viper 4 16GB DDR4-3200 $59.99
Case NZXT H510 $69.99
Power Supply Corsair TXM Gold 550 $59.99
Total - $986.93

Man, I'd buy this instantly if I needed a new rig!
The problem is… Prices are listed from nonUK amazon…

Changing .com to .co.uk in CPU link goes to:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/AMD-Ryzen-3…/dp/B07STGGQ18
Where the price is £178.99.
That's cca only 11% off the 200 pounds sterling. Dunno, I'd check other webshops for possibly better offers.

Unfortunately it has nothing to do with Brexit since some prices are worse in EU!

Fuck Black Friday since there were no deals for me! Anyway just ordered,

AMD 3700X
MSI X570-A PRO Motherboard
Patriot Viper 4 Blackout Series DDR4 16GB 3600MHz Cl17

Cost £500

Yes more than my £300 but it has to last at least 4 years so there is that…

I will post some numbers later in the week once I build the new PC.

Originally Posted by lostforever
Fuck Black Friday

+1
I was eagerly browsing all internet to get me a juicy discounted internal 2Tb SSD, and savings are basically so low I can call them free shipping.
In other words, postponed for potential xmas offers (I don't need it desperaetly).

Originally Posted by lostforever
AMD 3700X
MSI X570-A PRO Motherboard
Patriot Viper 4 Blackout Series DDR4 16GB 3600MHz Cl17

Well, researching quantum physics as hobby seems viable on your side.

Yes the CPU is overkill for games and I should have stuck with 3600 but I was in bad mood since the 3600 wasn't discounted so went with 3700X! Like you say, I think I will pick up quantum physics as my new hobby!

Originally Posted by joxer
+1
I was eagerly browsing all internet to get me a juicy discounted internal 2Tb SSD, and savings are basically so low I can call them free shipping.
In other words, postponed for potential xmas offers (I don't need it desperaetly).

Especially before chritmas as offer vs demand spurs a price rise. There were better deals a few months ago than during the socalled black friday and cyber monday.

That being said, good deals coming from Switzerland, they allowed to build at a 25 or 30 pc discount.
It takes to reside in Switzerland, near the borders or to know someone who resides in Switzerland to benefit from them. Limited quantities too. But meaningful discounts.