Best CPUs (Archive)

[Jakko_]

After the Ryzen 5 launch, there is no excuse for only recommending Intel cpu's anymore. I don't care about brands, I just want performance and you Tomshardware, suck at advising readers correctly when it comes to performance for $.

 

[Intrepid_1]

Firstly, let me address the advertising/revenue bias thing. Our Editorial team and writing staff are expressly, painfully unbiased. There's a massive mile-high wall between Editorial and the Sales/Ads, and never the twain shall meet. Tom's cut its teeth on taking on payola schemes in hardware and the pay-for-play in the tech news scene back in the day, so it would be pretty damned stupid to reverse on that now. For what it's worth, whenever the editorial guys do up an article critical of Brand X, the Brand X fans accuse us of being in the deep pockets of Brand Y, and vice versa. We are simultaneously accused of being corporate shills for Samsung, Apple, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia, and probably both Pepsi AND Coke. It comes with the territory on critical reporting. We tend to take accusations of bias pretty seriously though, because, well, we're one of the few tech news sites where that editorial wall is well-intact. Community (my department) has an awesome working relationship with AMD (see recent AMA with Don who used to work for us) and Intel on contests, giveaways, and forum events, but Editorial often gets the stink-eye because it's stick-in-the-mud about being objective. No joke, the guys treat editorial independence and integrity with near-religious fervor. I would ask that you please refrain from any accusations of bias unless you have evidence to assert on this. Otherwise, it's just a reactionary response and not constructive. We welcome feedback, always, on methodology, testing approach, and even the findings - but knee-jerk "OMG in the tank for Brand X!!" is not helpful, and we legit get it every critical review we conduct.

Secondly, as serious as they are about integrity, they back up their findings with fact and solid evidence. Our guys aren't always necessarily first, but they are the best, and they'll tell you things that aren't necessarily popular, and they'll dig in deeper than a lot of others. Our editorial staff stand by their work and deep dives in performance on hardware. I've been with Tom's for 8ish years now, and I can only remember two times in that entire history where a correction was issued on a faulty testing run. None of the editorial guys are fanboys. Some of my moderators certainly are, (and I have my own preferences), but we try to keep a healthy balance. Editorial doesn't get that luxury, and instead tackles reviews with stern objectivity.

Please try to keep comments here civil, and constructive. Thanks all!

-JP

Are you serious? this thread has completely blown up in your face with 9 out of 10 of its respondents pouring scorn on your conclusions here, you think they are all doing it because they are AMD fanboys? you have got to be taking the ####.

The problem is your conclusions here and to some extent your reviews have no bearing what-so-ever to reality, its blown up like this because your article reads utterly ridiculous, a 2 core 4 thread i3 over a 4 core 8 thread Ryzen with similar IPC, what? there are reviews all over the internet who clearly show how an i5 can easily fall behind a 6 core Ryzen when push comes to shove, IE when you have enough GPU grunt to fully load up the CPU the i5's miserable 4 threads get chocked and the CPU falls way behind exponentially the more GPU headroom you give it, finding that CPU bound bottleneck used to be the art of CPU benchmarking, its still going on, just not here, not anymore, clearly.

Not everyone is a fan boy, and it is everyone, just about... as just about everyone here thinks your conclusions are very very wrong.

A reasonable individual would take that overwhelming amount of feedback on your work 'in whatever way it comes' and think "wow, ok maybe we made some mistakes here with our conclusions"

Do you think maybe, just maybe you did?

 

[Paul Alcorn]

Hi guys, I see a lot of new faces here, so I just want to preface the discussion by stating that I am open to civil discourse on our test methodology and how we derive our recommendations. Fact-based conversations are great. We strive to make data-driven decisions and statements, and I am happy to discuss how I've come to these decisions (though many are already outlined in the text). Also, I would like to state that Intel is not paying me, which should go without saying. I am in no way connected to our advertising department, nor have I ever been involved in any financial discussion or been told by our editorial staff to skew anything in any fashion. In fact, there is a considerable effort to keep us isolated from such things, as there should be. I haven't seen any Intel ads on our site, nor do I care if there are or not. I've been plenty critical of Intel on numerous fronts over the years.

We haven't yet tested the 1600 and 1400, though we are in the process. As stated, we want to make data-driven statements. If the processors merit it, they will make the list in the next monthly update.

Here is a chart outlining the current price vs. performance positioning of the AMD and Intel lineups. We just began posting these charts and are busy working to expand the testing to all models in both families, so it is a work in progress. We've taken the geometric mean of the average FPS in the entirety of our game suite and plotted this against the cost of each relative processor.



http://i517.photobucket.com/albums/u332/paullie1/image008.png

As stated repetitively in the article, this is a gaming-focused set of recommendations. I'm open to feedback, feel free to state your concerns.

 

[DarKknightZ]

I'm a 7700K owner, but why the hell did Toms hardware leave off the Ryzen CPUs? There's little point in getting an i5 now with a 1600X sitting around.

 

[Kaos Sverige]

Seriously ... WTF ? What is this ? 2016 and earlier ? Not a single AMD Ryzen ? Un-freaking-believable . And this comes from an owner of many Apple and Intel based custom build computers .

 

[Supahos]

What a bleeping joke. Any list with a 7100 on it at all, and a 7500 over any ryzen processor on the market is biased beyond belief. No doubt the 4560 is the budget king and no doubt the 7700k is "the king" , I could look past the 7600k being a basic tie with a 1600 but to not mention list any ryzen processor is one of the worst things I've ever seen on this site.

 

[jpishgar]

you think they are all doing it because they are AMD fanboys?

...yes. None of the comments so far have been critical of methodology, approach, findings, or the analysis itself. For the most part, they've been "OMG Tom's how much in the briefcase from Intel? lol" and the like. There was no briefcase. There was no pay-for-play. No check in the mailbox. That's not the way things are done here, and we're one of the few spots left that's actually been able to retain editorial independence and integrity. We do, however, get this variety of reaction on almost every review that is critical of or makes conclusions about certain pieces of hardware, usually CPUs and Graphics Cards. I mean, goodness, the author posted about the Ryzen series in a beaming review earlier in the week, and even in that piece there were some critical comments from Intel fanboys about how "AMD is stealing your money" and questioning the editorial bias of Tom's.

there are reviews all over the internet who clearly show how an i5 can easily fall behind a 6 core Ryzen when push comes to shove

On productivity, not particularly gaming. That's even called out in the review.

Not everyone is a fan boy, and it is everyone, just about as just about everyone here thinks your conclusions are very very wrong.

Explain why. We like feedback. We dig dissent. Hell, we have an entire forum category dedicated to the wars that rage between Intel and AMD in the CPU market, and fiery speculation threads with people tossing molotovs at each other hourly over the course of years. There's absolutely no problem with telling us you disagree with us - our editorial guys are usually pretty super-confident in their findings and have the data and evidence to back it up. But, we also value our reputation, and have to insist that the baseless accusations of bias and pay-for-play accompany some kind of proof. We simply don't do that. Fighting against that crap is how we got our start. That's where our roots are.

-JP

 

[Supahos]

As for that pointless list... Okay so an Intel rig gets 250 fps in some game ryzen gets 175, and it carries a 75 fps lead to average out over the rest of the suite. Better off tossing out any result over 144 fps and redo the average where it matters also is assinine to do testing on sub $250 processors with a 1080/1080ti....

Even more assinine to do any fps tests with a 1080ti at 1080p

 

[semitope]

The simple solution is to not have a single CPU in each category. You call the article "best CPUs", by that title the AMD chips would take all the categories because they are better overall. Avoid getting called out and put up the best in the category for each manufacturer, while pointing out which is faster overall (I don't see why emphasize gaming when the difference is minimal there, dependent on the game and the cases outside of gaming show massive differences that would affect your readers)

 

[Paul Alcorn]

As for that pointless list... Okay so an Intel rig gets 250 fps in some game ryzen gets 175, and it carries a 75 fps lead to average out over the rest of the suite. Better off tossing out any result over 144 fps and redo the average where it matters also is assinine to do testing on sub $250 processors with a 1080/1080ti....

I understand your concern about testing with a 1080, but we are measuring CPU gaming performance without a bottlenecked graphics solution in play. Displaying results with numerous 'ties' due to a graphics bottleneck doesn't do much to quantify performance over time. Many of our readers are rocking five-year old processors, so they expect some sustainability as GPU technology improves.

 

[Guest]

Busted!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/69hcjs/toms_hardware_runs_best_cpus_article_without_a/

 

[Supahos]

The issues with that statement about longevity is go compare 5 year old 8350 vs 2500k benchmarks. They show a 2500k being much stronger however today a 8350 beats a 2500k... Jacked up forced benchmarks don't prove anything about the future.

 

[Guest]

Welp, if you wanted new faces, you certainly got them today, didn't you? If you were looking for long-term ad revenue, this probably isn't the way to go about it. No wonder I haven't bothered visiting this site in years.

 

[Intrepid_1]

Hi guys, I see a lot of new faces here, so I just want to preface the discussion by stating that I am open to civil discourse on our test methodology and how we derive our recommendations. Fact-based conversations are great. We strive to make data-driven decisions and statements, and I am happy to discuss how I've come to these decisions (though many are already outlined in the text). Also, I would like to state that Intel is not paying me, which should go without saying. I am in no way connected to our advertising department, nor have I ever been involved in any financial discussion or been told by our editorial staff to skew anything in any fashion. In fact, there is a considerable effort to keep us isolated from such things, as there should be. I haven't seen any Intel ads on our site, nor do I care if there are or not. I've been plenty critical of Intel on numerous fronts over the years.

We haven't yet tested the 1600 and 1400, though we are in the process. As stated, we want to make data-driven statements. If the processors merit it, they will make the list in the next monthly update.

Here is a chart outlining the current price vs. performance positioning of the AMD and Intel lineups. We just began posting these charts and are busy working to expand the testing to all models in both families, so it is a work in progress. We've taken the geometric mean of the average FPS in the entirety of our game suite and plotted this against the cost of each relative processor.



http://i517.photobucket.com/albums/u332/paullie1/image008.png

As stated repetitively in the article, this is a gaming-focused set of recommendations. I'm open to feedback, feel free to state your concerns.

Well my concern would be what i wrote here....

Are you serious? this thread has completely blown up in your face with 9 out of 10 of its respondents pouring scorn on your conclusions here, you think they are all doing it because they are AMD fanboys? you have got to be taking the ####.

The problem is your conclusions here and to some extent your reviews have no bearing what-so-ever to reality, its blown up like this because your article reads utterly ridiculous, a 2 core 4 thread i3 over a 4 core 8 thread Ryzen with similar IPC, what? there are reviews all over the internet who clearly show how an i5 can easily fall behind a 6 core Ryzen when push comes to shove, IE when you have enough GPU grunt to fully load up the CPU the i5's miserable 4 threads get chocked and the CPU falls way behind exponentially the more GPU headroom you give it, finding that CPU bound bottleneck used to be the art of CPU benchmarking, its still going on, just not here, not anymore, clearly.

Not everyone is a fan boy, and it is everyone, just about... as just about everyone here thinks your conclusions are very very wrong.

A reasonable individual would take that overwhelming amount of feedback on your work 'in whatever way it comes' and think "wow, ok maybe we made some mistakes here with our conclusions"

Do you think maybe, just maybe you did?

So taking a more measured approach... after looking at a lot of reviews around the internet i will agree Ryzen is a mixed bag, mostly its a brand new CPU which had teething problems, problems that are not unusual actually, as a new platform X99 was just as problematic.

Memory and Microcode issues AMD and MB vendors are successful fixing....

Besides all of that and with the latest BIOS's, microcode patching ecte.... Ryzens IPC in games is turning out to be similar to KabyLake, KabyLake has a 20% clock speed advantage yes but that's only relevant to Intel K series chips, if you ignore Ryzen OC potential vs a none K series (less expensive Intel) then yes out of the box Intel looks a little better as just out of the box and in certain situations it can look about 10 or 20% faster, Ryzens OC performance potential should NOT be ignored.

But it gets worse, as i said before when you have a lot more GPU grunt than CPU grunt "that looking for the CPU bottleneck" with games that use more than just one thread.. which are a lot of modern games, then all the mainstream Intel CPU's fall behind the Ryzen 6 and 8 core chips, including the 7700K.

It seems to just about everyone here as far as i can tell that you are just not looking for this, or missing it, or just not reporting on it.....

A lot of others are, and they are reporting saturated threads on the Intel CPU's which does cause performance slowdowns vs the Ryzen CPU's, and another theme that is coming out of all this is that even is situations where Intel do get higher FPS the Ryzen chip being under less stress is resulting smoother performance.

Again is this something you are missing? are you not testing for this?

The concern is your reviews are becoming misleading, a Ryzen 1600 is a better gaming CPU than a 7600K now, in the future that will only lean more toward the Ryzen chip.

Your reviews do not reflect any of that, they do look like a "bluewash"

Edit:

I could spend a couple of hours backtracking everything that i have seen on the internet and post it here, all of it on gaming.... but this one just sums it up as you can actually see what is going on.... watch it, all of it and pay attention to not only the FPS, but also the load on the CPU threads, the i5 is clearly a far worse gamers CPU than the Ryzen 1600X.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlOs_McAVZ0

 

[Guest]

I guess the folks here at Tom's don't think multitasking is important, as it has already been demonstrated by many that Ryzen typically offers a better solution for streamers, or even non-streamers if you have simply a voice chat app or web browser open while gaming.

I guess Tom's staff just live in the past where this stuff doesn't matter.

 

[bulldozer81]

wheres ryzen

 

[Paul Alcorn]

<snip>

There is a reddit thread in r/amd (which another reader graciously posted) that urges readers to come post here. Considering that, and the fact that many many of these comments are from accounts created today with only one post, it's hard to draw a line between the "9/10 respondents" bit. I do value the opinions, though, as everyone is entitled to one.

We are testing for smoothness, a quick trip to our articles will reveal in-depth frame analysis to quantify performance variability. The results speak for themselves. As stated, we are testing the 1600, and if it merits it, we will include it.

We have also quantified Ryzen's overlocking performance, and in fact, that was the key factor that spurred us to give the Ryzen 5 1500X an award and recommended it as a solid alternative to Intel's -7500 and -7400. However, that recommendation is applicable to the entire picture, such as productivity and heavily threaded applications. The recommendations in this article focus strictly on gaming performance, therefore we have a different set of criteria.

 

[Greg_Esq]

I'm actually embarrassed by this article. As someone who really tries to stay even keeled on hardware this article literally makes me to never visit Tom's again. Ironically enough as someone who has friends who work in the industry, I know Intel is paying out the wazzooo for hardware exclusives in games so this really doesn't surprise me.

 

[Supahos]

Things less biased than this list

1) breibart news

2) anything to come out of George Stephanopoulos' mouth

3) Intel's own marketing materials

4) guy saying. The free candy in his van is in fact legit.

Forcing a cpu bottlneck on today's games to try and simulate how future games will perform, and testing only single player modes in games that are 98% multiplayer, and dropping $550-800 GPUs into builds with sub $200 cpus just makes no sense. I understand wanting repeatable results with single player benches... But when multiplayer drastically changes the Dynamics, either test in multiplayer form, or leave the test off entirely.

 

[Intrepid_1]

<snip>

There is a reddit thread in r/amd (which another reader graciously posted) that urges readers to come post here. Considering that, and the fact that many many of these comments are from accounts created today with only one post, it's hard to draw a line between the "9/10 respondents" bit. I do value the opinions, though, as everyone is entitled to one.

We are testing for smoothness, a quick trip to our articles will reveal in-depth frame analysis to quantify performance variability. The results speak for themselves. As stated, we are testing the 1600, and if it merits it, we will include it.

We have also quantified Ryzen's overlocking performance, and in fact, that was the key factor that spurred us to give the Ryzen 5 1500X an award and recommended it as a solid alternative to Intel's -7500 and -7400. However, that recommendation is applicable to the entire picture, such as productivity and heavily threaded applications. The recommendations in this article focus strictly on gaming performance, therefore we have a different set of criteria.

I could spend a couple of hours backtracking everything that i have seen on the internet and post it here, all of it on gaming.... but this one just sums it up as you can actually see what is going on.... watch it, all of it and pay attention to not only the FPS, but also the load on the CPU threads, the i5 is clearly a far worse gamers CPU than the Ryzen 1600X.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlOs_McAVZ0

This one is the 1700 @ 3.9Ghz vs the 7700K @ 5Ghz.... again, pay particular attention to the thread load on the 7700K in BF1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXVIPo_qbc4

 

[Paul Alcorn]

Things less biased than this list

1) breibart news

2) anything to come out of George Stephanopoulos' mouth

3) Intel's own marketing materials

4) guy saying. The free candy in his van is in fact legit.

Forcing a cpu bottlneck on today's games to try and simulate how future games will perform, and testing only single player modes in games that are 98% multiplayer, and dropping $550-800 GPUs into builds with sub $200 cpus just makes no sense. I understand wanting repeatable results with single player benches... But when multiplayer drastically changes the Dynamics, either test in multiplayer form, or leave the test off entirely.

Testing in multiplayer modes introduces far too many other variables into the equation (ping times, variable scenes) to ensure accurate, repeatable testing. That's why you won't find it often.

 

[Supahos]

So perfectly accurate, useless data is better than rather close useful data?

You guys have enough computers in your lab to make a private room a game and make it repeatable.

 

[Darkerson]

I havent commented in years, but I just had to know how much did Intel pay you all for this advertisement disguised as an best of article? Shame you all went down the wrong path...

 

[Guest]

It all makes sense now.

http://www.purch.com/experiences/intel/

 

[Paul Alcorn]

<snip>

many of these comments are from accounts created today with only one post,

I'm somewhat concerned Paul at why after two yrs that your profile still has no avatar?

Sigh, I've just tried to upload one several times, but keep getting an error message. I guess Intel hasn't paid to fix that yet 😛