[SOLVED] Is Kaby Lake Still Viable in 2019?

[jgricar]

I have been looking into upgrading my PC for a few years now. Luckily, around Black Friday, I snagged an ASRock Z270 Killer SLI/ac. I got it on sale and was happy with the purchase...until I started looking at the prices of the Kaby Lake processors. Both the i5-7600k and i7-6700k are sitting around $300 which is not in my budget.

Having used AMD in my previous builds, I am rather partial to unlocked CPUs and will not make that compromise. I started doing research and the new Coffee Lake CPUs are not only under $300, but also have better performance. I then decided to look into Ryzen after hearing the performance differences between the brands has become much smaller (not to mention the cost aspect of the Ryzen chips).

Ultimately, my final question is this, is Kaby Lake still viable? Or, should I invest in a 300 series mobo and CPU or ditch Intel and go for a Ryzen CPU? Any and all opinions are appreciated.

P.S - Please no fanboys, I want to make an unbiased opinion based on price, performance, and longevity.

 

[velocityg4]

Ryzen gives you more bang for the buck. True a 9700k or 9900k are faster. But those aren't in your budget. When looking at parts in your budget. AMD is the likely champion. If you can wait. Get Ryzen 3000.

Is Kaby Lake viable? Sure if you already have one. Otherwise they are a huge waste of money. I'd return or sell the motherboard. Any loss will be offset by superior AMD pricing. Also Kaby Lake i7 suffer performance losses once patched for Zombieload. Basically turning it into an i5.

Heck if used prices are also high on Kaby Lake. It might be advisable for system owners to sell their CPU and motherboard. Then trade up to Ryzen or Coffee Lake.

 

[junglist724]

I have been looking into upgrading my PC for a few years now. Luckily, around Black Friday, I snagged an ASRock Z270 Killer SLI/ac. I got it on sale and was happy with the purchase...until I started looking at the prices of the Kaby Lake processors. Both the i5-7600k and i7-6700k are sitting around $300 which is not in my budget.

Having used AMD in my previous builds, I am rather partial to unlocked CPUs and will not make that compromise. I started doing research and the new Coffee Lake CPUs are not only under $300, but also have better performance. I then decided to look into Ryzen after hearing the performance differences between the brands has become much smaller (not to mention the cost aspect of the Ryzen chips).

Ultimately, my final question is this, is Kaby Lake still viable? Or, should I invest in a 300 series mobo and CPU or ditch Intel and go for a Ryzen CPU? Any and all opinions are appreciated.

P.S - Please no fanboys, I want to make an unbiased opinion based on price, performance, and longevity.

I would not get a quad core, the 6700k and 7700k really have aged poorly and AAA games are already starting to bottleneck on those. Core counts doubled when Ryzen came out and they're about to double again as soon as the 16 core Zen 2 part comes out. Just wait for Zen 2, it's only a bit more than a month away.

For some reason Intel CPU prices tend not to depreciate with age, instead they appreciate because of scarcity ¯\(ツ)/¯

 

[TCA_ChinChin]

Kaby-Lake has terrible price to performance even used at this point since Intel processors don't ever drop much in price, so don't even consider it. Best bet is an 9th gen i5 or a Ryzen of some kind. You can get an 8C16T R7-2700x for 280USD or an 6C6T i5-9600k fof 250USD both of which are overclockable. If you want to spend less, then an 6C12T r5-2600x is 180USD. If you can wait till 7/7, then I would definitely wait, cause at that point, Ryzen 3000 comes out and you can decide between significantly cheaper Ryzen 2000 or the newer, better performing Ryzen 3000, both of which would have lots of SKUs in your price bracket.

I think the AMD options are better in this case cause they offer better price to performance (on average), unless you are just gaming. In that case the i5-9600k is the only real option from Intel (all others are either 300+USD, locked, don't offer more FPS than Ryzen, or a combination of those).

 

[cryoburner]

I voted Ryzen, but also would suggest waiting a little over a month to see what the Ryzen 3000 series has to offer. If AMD's 15% IPC increase claims are accurate, then between those and the higher clock rates we may be looking at around a 20% increase in performance per core compared to AMD's existing Ryzen parts. It doesn't sound like they will clock quite as high as Coffee Lake, but the IPC improvements would likely put them about on par with one another in terms of performance. So, its very possible that the $199 6-core, 12-thread Ryzen 3600 will perform a lot like an i7-8700 or 8700K for about $100 to $150 less.

For now, I would pass on Coffee Lake, simply because it's too close to the launch of the new Ryzen processors, and if you've already waited a few years, it's probably worth waiting another month or so for reviews to come out for those CPUs.

As for the viability of Kaby Lake, the processors are still arguably fine as far as performance in the vast majority of games and applications goes, but the pricing is a bit questionable. With their 8th-gen processors, Intel finally added more cores to better compete with first-gen Ryzen. As a result, a Coffee Lake i5 generally performs similar to a Kaby Lake i7, only at a significantly lower price. And while I would say 4-cores with 8-threads is still good today, looking to the future, I think 6-cores with 12-threads or more will keep a system relevant longer, at least when it comes to gaming, or other heavy usage scenarios that can utilize a lot of threads.

The first and second generation Ryzen processors have offered more threads at a given price point for better performance at heavily-multithreaded tasks compared to Kaby and even Coffee Lake, but couldn't clock as high, still leaving Intel with a bit of a performance advantage at lightly-threaded tasks. AMD is now moving to a more advanced 7nm manufacturing process though, resulting in performance gains that should make them even more competitive with Intel's current desktop processors.

 

[jgricar]

I voted Ryzen, but also would suggest waiting a little over a month to see what the Ryzen 3000 series has to offer. If AMD's 15% IPC increase claims are accurate, then between those and the higher clock rates we may be looking at around a 20% increase in performance per core compared to AMD's existing Ryzen parts. It doesn't sound like they will clock quite as high as Coffee Lake, but the IPC improvements would likely put them about on par with one another in terms of performance. So, its very possible that the $199 6-core, 12-thread Ryzen 3600 will perform a lot like an i7-8700 or 8700K for about $100 to $150 less.

For now, I would pass on Coffee Lake, simply because it's too close to the launch of the new Ryzen processors, and if you've already waited a few years, it's probably worth waiting another month or so for reviews to come out for those CPUs.

As for the viability of Kaby Lake, the processors are still arguably fine as far as performance in the vast majority of games and applications goes, but the pricing is a bit questionable. With their 8th-gen processors, Intel finally added more cores to better compete with first-gen Ryzen. As a result, a Coffee Lake i5 generally performs similar to a Kaby Lake i7, only at a significantly lower price. And while I would say 4-cores with 8-threads is still good today, looking to the future, I think 6-cores with 12-threads or more will keep a system relevant longer, at least when it comes to gaming, or other heavy usage scenarios that can utilize a lot of threads.

The first and second generation Ryzen processors have offered more threads at a given price point for better performance at heavily-multithreaded tasks compared to Kaby and even Coffee Lake, but couldn't clock as high, still leaving Intel with a bit of a performance advantage at lightly-threaded tasks. AMD is now moving to a more advanced 7nm manufacturing process though, resulting in performance gains that should make them even more competitive with Intel's current desktop processors.

Thank you for all of your insight, it really helped me make my decision and I will be getting a Ryzen CPU. My only question now is which one would be best for price to performance? The Tom's Hardware CPU Hierarchy doesn't include the 2000 series processors, so it doesn't help too much.

 

[cryoburner]

It kind of depends on what you are doing with the processor and how many cores you can make use of, along with whether you are willing to overclock. If you are building a machine for gaming and are fine with overclocking, I would say the Ryzen 2600 might arguably be the best "value" processor available right now, as it provides 6-cores with 12-threads for around $150, at least going by current US online pricing. And if you don't want to overclock, the 2600X offers higher boost clocks out of the box and a better stock cooler for about $30-$35 more. In a mid-range gaming system, the low cost means more money can be dedicated to other components, like the graphics card.

Intel's recently released i5-9400F has been selling in that price range as well, and it's also a decent processor for the money. It has slightly better performance per core, but can't be overclocked, so it misses out on Intel's ability to hit higher clocks that can give their higher-end offerings a bit more of an edge against the current Ryzens at less heavily-threaded workloads. And unlike the Ryzen parts, it lacks SMT (Hyperthreading), so the Ryzens will better handle tasks that can utilize more than 6 threads. Currently, that won't apply to most software, but I suspect games will likely move toward utilizing more threads in the coming years.

The 2700 and 2700X offer 8-cores with 16-threads, and the 2700X also has slightly higher boost clocks than the 1600X, which again is mostly useful if one isn't overclocking. In general, all these CPUs will overclock to provide a roughly similar level of performance per core. For heavily multithreaded tasks like video editing or CPU-based rendering that can utilize those extra cores, it may be worth going with those 8-core parts. For gaming (and most other usage scenarios), the extra cores won't make much of an immediate difference in current titles, unless perhaps one is heavily multitasking at the same time, such as with a streaming setup. Again, they may offer a bit more of a performance benefit in the future as games become more multithreaded though.

The 8th and 9th-gen i7 processors are also fairly good, in general offering somewhat better performance per core than AMD's existing Ryzen parts, along with a good number of cores and threads, however, their prices are not competitive enough with Ryzen anymore, unless one is building a very high-end system, where cost of the processor isn't much of a concern. At the time Coffee Lake came out a year-and-a-half ago, it was reasonably competitive with Ryzen on a price to performance ratio. However, prices of Ryzen processors have since dropped substantially, and now you are looking at paying about twice as much to get that extra bit of performance per thread. If I had to guess, Intel's next generation of processors may again improve on the value front, to better compete with Ryzen 3000, which based on current information will probably remove Intel's current performance-per-core advantage.

Again, I would personally wait for Ryzen 3000 to come out at this point though, since those processors are set to launch in a little over a month. If anything, the prices of other processors might drop a little more by then as well, if you decided to go with one of them instead. If the currently-suggested performance levels hold true, I would rather buy a Ryzen 3600 for $200 than a 2700 for about the same price. You'll get two fewer cores, but if the cores are each around 20% faster, that should make up for much of the performance deficit at heavily-threaded tasks, while offering more performance at more common lightly to moderately-threaded tasks. That feels like it should be a bit more balanced for anyone who doesn't have specific need for running heavily-multithreaded workloads.