How to Buy the Right CPU

[jim.therafirst]

I totally agree with those above who correctly bring up the total void response so far from both AMD and Intel with new designed chips. As I understand it, the chip flaws were discovered and reported the chip makers almost a year before "we" got told, bringing us to almost 2 years (or more) in time. Why aren't we seeing new "fixed" chips already. Wouldn't a imbedded fix to the current chips fix these problems?

 

[Gillerer]

Designing and bringing a new CPU to production is a long, multi-year, process and you can only make minor tweaks at the end - if you're not willing to push the release back significantly.

 

[ds_tomshrdwr]

How can you write this article without mentioning Meltdown & Spectre?!?

 

[YoAndy]

How can you write this article without mentioning Meltdown & Spectre?!?

Here you go..5/21/18..https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/security-updates

Spectre Variant 4 Disclosed, Mitigations to Result in Another Performance Hit
Another variant of Spectre was disclosed this week by Microsoft, Google, AMD, ARM, Intel, and Red Hat. Variant 4, labeled "Speculative Store Bypass," allows hackers to read older system values in a CPU stack or other memory locations. Intel’s microcode fixes will result in a performance hit of 2-8%, and the company’s hardware-based safeguard, "virtual fences," will not protect against Variant 4 at all.

Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, said that Variant 4 would be much harder to "fix" architecturally than V1, V2, or V3a. "You either have to turn memory disambiguation on or off, which will be a BIOS setting," he told Threatpost in an email. "It’s important to note that browsers have already included mitigations and that from a severity standpoint, has been flagged as ‘medium’ severity, compared to V1, V2, and V3, which were flagged as ‘high.'"

4/10/18 (Updated 5/8/18 to reflect Microsoft release of Windows Server 2016)

Today, AMD is providing updates regarding our recommended mitigations for Google Project Zero (GPZ) Variant 2 (Spectre) for Microsoft Windows users. These mitigations require a combination of processor microcode updates from our OEM and motherboard partners, as well as running the current and fully up-to-date version of Windows. For Linux users, AMD recommended mitigations for GPZ Variant 2 were made available to our Linux partners and have been released to distribution earlier this year.

As a reminder, GPZ Variant 1 (Spectre) mitigation is provided through operating system updates that were made available previously by AMD ecosystem partners. GPZ

 

[ET3D]

Not a great article. For example, for gaming, I'd say that once you decide on a budget, you should typically get the best GPU you can even if you skim on other stuff. That's not 100% true, but I think it's a much better advice than what's given here. For example, you'd do better getting a $200 GPU with a $60 CPU and $40 HDD than if you get a $100 GPU with a $100 CPU and $100 SSD.

I'd say that the advice should go something like this:

Basic work: Get the lowest cost Pentium Gold. It's good enough for most tasks. Getting an SSD will make the PC more enjoyable to use.

Gaming: For basic gaming a Ryzen 3 2200G is the most cost effective. If you need more than what its integrated graphics can provide, get the GPU which is enough for your needs before considering the CPU. $100-$150 CPUs can be perfectly perfectly adequate for gaming.

Content creation: More cores are typically more important than higher single core speed. The sky is the limit.

Overclocking: If you want to overclock, what are you doing looking at an article for noobs?

 

[darrenpatraotech10]

I plan to buy Ryzen 5 1600 will it pair well With a GTX 1060 (6GB)????

 

[Olle P]

I plan to buy Ryzen 5 1600 will it pair well With a GTX 1060 (6GB)????

That's what I use, and it works well.
If I were to buy today I'd rather go for the Ryzen 5 2600X instead though, and not bother to overclock it, but if the older CPU is considerably lower priced I see no reason for you to not buy it.