Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

Y'all are kind of glossing over that the base clock speed for the 7700k, no OC required, is 4.2ghz vs 3.6 for the 7700. The K chips are in fact faster whether you (can) overclock or not.

Will it be significantly faster in games? Eh, not by much no. But if you're after the best chip for the board, it is in fact the K chip.

And they can actually be had fairly cheap here and there, but buying used CPU's is always a bit of a risk. You never know what they might have done with it.

The nice thing about buying the non K if you're stuck buying used is that you know it didn't get overvolted and forced to run at 4.9ghz 24/7 for years. It just sat in a board, happily running its stock speeds like it was supposed to.

Basically, if you find a good deal on a 7700k you don't think was tortured for it's entire lifespan, go for it. If you find a 7700 cheap, go for it. IMO this is an either/or, not a thing where one option is clearly better.

Also, keep an eye out for used HP/Dell/etc workstations. They sometimes end up wildly cheap and can be a possible source to harvest a CPU from.

I've seen Dell workstations with ~2 or 3 generation old hardware for $200 before.

Thin_J wrote:

Basically, if you find a good deal on a 7700k you don't think was tortured for it's entire lifespan, go for it. If you find a 7700 cheap, go for it. IMO this is an either/or, not a thing where one option is clearly better.

It'd need to be a really good deal to make it worth upgrading from a 7500, otherwise the upgrade is too incremental to be worth an outlay of money IMO, unless he's able to turn around a flip the 7500 and get a good return on it. I have no idea what the South African used parts market is like.

Seems like the money would be better saved for a more substantial upgrade.

Yeah, if we are talking $200, I will remind people that my mobo, RAM, and ryzen 3600 totaled $311.
Drop it down to a ryzen 3100 and it is $230. I don't think it makes sense to get a 3300x since the 3100 is $20 cheaper and can clock to the same speeds.

fangblackbone wrote:

Yeah, if we are talking $200, I will remind people that my mobo, RAM, and ryzen 3600 totaled $311.
Drop it down to a ryzen 3100 and it is $230. I don't think it makes sense to get a 3300x since the 3100 is $20 cheaper and can clock to the same speeds.

3300x is a 4+0 chiplet design rather than 2+2 of the 3100 so theoretically it has the benefit of lower latency.

Interesting. Aren't there some trade offs though? I could have sworn I listened to something about 1 big CCW vs. 2 smaller CCW's.

*Legion* wrote:

Seems like the money would be better saved for a more substantial upgrade.

This is absolutely true.

Wow, thanks for the deep dive on my question guys! Appreciate it. I learned a lot today!

Anyway some additional comments:

I did try to google to get to this answer on my own, but PC motherboards and CPUs have always been my kryptonite. It somehow just does not make logical sense to me how it all works. That said, I am slightly proud of myself that I did actually get to the best CPU I could find at the end.

I had a cheap i7 9700 offered to me and was almost 100% down the road of buying it before I realized it would not work with my Mobo.

As to the South African used CPU market, well, it does not really exist. The selection is tiny.

But as I said earlier, thx for all the feedback! I'll be keeping my current PC for a while still. (Still works fine anyway)

Thanks for the help a couple weeks ago with my nephew's PC purchase.

Now, I have an old college friend who wants to do a small side business at home in the evenings. He needs a laptop for this. So I don't become the support guy, in the past I have told friends to go to Dell's Refurb site and get something from there. I give them some minimum specs for what they are going to be doing and leave it at that.

He doesn't need a beefy machine, and of course, he wants to spend as little $$$ as possible - I'm going to say under $800. It will rarely travel, but it will now and then. He can survive with a 14" screen, but would like bigger. He will not be playing games on it. He is in the low-end user category - he won't car about IPS vs. TN, etc. I would like the machine to have an SSD/M.2 in it if possible.

The machine doesn't need to be workstation level or even business level as it will only get a couple hours use each day and will be stationary on his table.

Besides pointing him to Dell's Refurb site, what do you guys suggest he look at? I've looked at a few new 15" Dells that I may have him look at that have 8GB RAM, 1080p, 512M.2, etc.

-BEP

?
I am tempted to get one. There is a ~500$ ryzen 2-in-1 that I'd like also. I am waiting on availability of ryzen 4000 laptops too. They just seem so awesome.

Reviews are starting to pop up for Dell's all AMD G5 laptop. I haven't read anything yet myself but I hear good things.

Check Costco! I got a sub $500 Asus for work off Costco's website. It's absolutely great. I went the more 13" ultrabook route, but they probably have some good deals on others if you have a Costco membership. I got it when some newer budget laptop AMD Ryzen processors came out which has been great in terms of battery life and performance. I've had it a little under a year now. I always just hook it up to a monitor when I'm at a desk.

PaladinTom wrote:

I have this question (#2) as well. How does one check if newer cpus are compatible with their older motherboard nowadays?

tl;dr: With Intel, it's usually not compatible, but ask to make sure. With AMD, it usually is compatible, but ask to make sure.

Longwinded version:

On the Intel side of things, rarely. They switch socket types with every generation, normally. And the delta in any given slot is usually small enough that it's not worth sinking a ton of money into. You will spend more than you should to even find a CPU that's not being made anymore, and then you won't get much of a performance boost. If you have a very slow/crappy CPU in a given slot, then maybe you might find it worth upgrading, but usually not. With Intel, you should normally assume motherboard plus CPU, and you may need new RAM, too.

On the AMD side, until recently, at least theoretically you could plug any AM4 chip into any AM4 motherboard. In practice, that was dependent on the manufacturers producing BIOS updates that supported the newer chips, but a lot of them did, so there has been very wide back- and forward-compatiblity there.

That's changing with the new 4000-series processors; the old boards don't have enough flash memory to store the microcode for all the possible CPUs you might plug in. So those will be stuck on 3000-and-lower chips, unless they get a special BIOS flash, which will lock them to 4000-series chips only. You won't be able to go back, either: that will be a one-way trip. You will flash the board with an old processor, power it down, swap in a 4000-series, and pray it works. It will never again work with the old CPU.

Newer boards may be able to run the whole line of CPUs, since at least in theory they can put in as much flash as they want. Whether that will actually happen, I don't know.

Thin_J wrote:

Y'all are kind of glossing over that the base clock speed for the 7700k, no OC required, is 4.2ghz vs 3.6 for the 7700. The K chips are in fact faster whether you (can) overclock or not.

I have a 4790K that I've never overclocked. I bought it because of the high base speed. Because of the high stock clocks, it came with most of the benefits of overclocking already baked in, without having to actually do any.

I just run it on Auto and am still happy with it, although those 4000-series Ryzens are sounding pretty good.

I’ve been excited about PC lately. I’m a laymen about what cpu I want. It sounds like the next generation both sound great. Price will probably be a huge factor of what to get.

September come quick so I can upgrade for 4 or so years.

According to this video. AMD might be back peddling on the 4000 series not being compatible with the 400 series boards.

Oh, I thought we'd talked about that. There's going to be a one-way upgrade, to let old boards support the new chips. But that will render the boards permanently unable to use the old chips anymore. You will flash the BIOS with your old chip, power it down, install the 4000-series unit, and pray. If it doesn't come up, you've got a real problem, because the board won't run the old CPUs anymore.

It seems to me that they should have phased it more, so that it would drop only the oldest CPU line, but maybe they're hoping fewer people will try to upgrade if they make it "possible", but hard.

edit: also, with the motherboard shortages, that may be the only way they can actually sell any CPUs.....

Malor wrote:

It seems to me that they should have phased it more, so that it would drop only the oldest CPU line, but maybe they're hoping fewer people will try to upgrade if they make it "possible", but hard.

I think this IS what they're doing?

We know that the BIOS chips on most boards (the MSI "Max" models with the larger ones aside) have enough space to support about three generations' worth of CPU's, since they're currently supporting 1000 series through 3000 series. I would assume that the new BIOS would sacrifice 1000 series and maybe 2000 series support as well to make room for the 4000 series chips - it's not a matter of "4000 series and nothing else," it's just that there isn't enough space for four generations' worth of support so it's "4000 series, but in exchange you lose (something)." We already encountered a similar situation with the BIOS update that allowed the 300 and 400 series chipset boards to use Ryzen 3000 CPU's: support for some low-end APU's that still used Excavator cores got cut in exchange, but nobody really cared because those chips were red-headed stepchildren anyway.

You would think AMD and their board partners might have headed this problem off from the start by spending the pennies for larger BIOS ROM chips but apparently the early Zen CPU's had a design limitation which prevented them from using anything beyond the first 16MB?

This article is a pretty good breakdown of the whys and wherefores and how this might work: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15807...

What I was last seeing was that it was an all-or-nothing, that boards would be 1000-3000, or 4000-only, with no middle ground.

I don't know whether that was actually correct, however.

Malor wrote:

What I was last seeing was that it was an all-or-nothing, that boards would be 1000-3000, or 4000-only, with no middle ground.

That may turn out to be the case but man, I can't see why they would do it that way. It seems spitefully obtuse.

Agreed.... dropping 1000 + 2000 support would be much friendlier. I hope that's what they end up settling on.

EvilDead wrote:
EvilDead wrote:

The outputs are all different so both cables are different but known working cables borrowed from work. They were used with a similar setup on an RX580 which has the same outputs. Standard HDMI and 3 displayports (non mini)

What is DisplayLink?

I just ran into this making me think there might be issues with HDMI on these cards.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/com...

I tried a different HDMI port on my monitor. Same thing. I'm ordering a DP > DP 1.4 cable but that won't be here for 10 days because of the delay Amazon is adding to all my shipments. Time to play the waiting game and keeping my fingers crossed.

Displayport is 3/3 on waking the monitor. *Knocks on wood

Agreed.... dropping 1000 + 2000 support would be much friendlier. I hope that's what they end up settling on.

I can't imagine they won't do that.
Though I am lucky that my mobo has qflash that lets you boot into the bios and upgrade it without a cpu.

I cannot wait to see what the replacement for the 3900x is going to be. (if they have a direct replacement since it sits in such a sweet spot right now)

Both my Ryzen boards have dual BIOS with a dipswitch on the board to hop between them, and also allow you to flash the BIOS from a USB stick with no CPU installed.

I may never buy another board without at least the CPU-less flash from USB capability. It's just too useful.

I totally agree. I wanted to use it but didn't get a chance as during the first boot, I missed the window to hit the del key and it booted right into windows and just worked.

fangblackbone wrote:

it booted right into windows and just worked.

There's something to be said for this, too.

Thin_J wrote:

I may never buy another board without at least the CPU-less flash from USB capability. It's just too useful.

I am in 100% agreement with this. Frankly I think AMD ought to push board manufacturers to make it a standard feature. AMD's sockets types lasting for multiple CPU cycles is one of their killer features, but there should be no need for their CPU loaner program. Every board should be able to at least flash from USB without a CPU.

The problem may go away in the next generation, as apparently the early Zen 1 boards were limited to 16M of flash, due to a chip addressing limit. Presumably, in the AM5 socket, they can specify that, perhaps, 128M of flash is required on all boards for a chipset license. That would cover a lot of microcode.

Thin_J's idea of making CPU-less flash possible is also a good one, although keep in mind that having another CPU on the board is potentially another attack vector. If all AMD boards are done in the same way, you could see motherboard viruses. Proofs of concept have already been made, but haven't been seen that often (at all?) in the wild... of course, that could also be because they're so hard to detect.

If they were ever standardized, they would become a much more popular attack vector. With the access most of those motherboard processors have, a virus could embed itself permanently, simply refusing to service any attempt to remove it. You'd either have to have a dual-flash board (and be VERY CAREFUL not to get the alternate flash infected, too), or would have to desolder and replace the flash chip to recover the board.

Okay, okay, okay. I knew this would be the case but I lazied my way into what would have been a "better than stock" option. And then nothing but issues, until:
I just installed the hyper evo 212 cooler and, yeah. My computer now idles at 35 degrees and during the stress test, it capped at 67.5 degrees.

There you go. You're all set now.

Yup.
I dunno why I fooled myself into thinking 6c/12t would run cooler than the 4/8 piledriver. (which was rumored to be such a beast)
I guess I am getting so much more single and multi thread power. I mean as I said earlier, the cpu bottlenecking in WoW from the fx-8300 was so drastic, it was like an on/off switch.

The other shocking thing is the quiet running. I live in an urban area so the ambient noise is higher than average. But I can barely hear any of my fans even when I put my ear right up to the case. IBUYPOWER didn't steer me wrong back in 2014.