[SOLVED] Ryzen 3600 or another CPU for “extreme” office/PowerPoint?

[saudor]

Thinking of building a new system for someone who uses it primarily for online teaching and very complicated /big PowerPoint presentations that have plenty of step-by-step animations that is currently taxing the CPU.

Current CPU is fx 8350 with 16gb RAM. Ideally looking for a CPU that doesnt output as much heat either, which the fx royally stinks at.

What do you guys suggest? would a CPU upgrade help (currently looking at the ryzen 5) or is PowerPoint just poorly optimized and wont take advantage of a newer CPU. Even basic tasks like saving bigger word documents and PPT causes noticeable delays as the CPU is pegged at 100% on a core. Screen sharing apps during lectures like zoom/teams make the room into a mini sauna due to the insane amount of heat coming out of the fx8350

Thanks!

 

[Deleted member 362816]

Any ryzen 5 will be a huge I mean huge step over a 8350. I think the 3600 if the price is right would be a solid choice.

 

[saudor]

Any ryzen 5 will be a huge I mean huge step over a 8350. I think the 3600 if the price is right would be a solid choice.

it's about $269 in Canada right now which is what I paid for my i5 way back in the days. the i5 11400 (the other option i was considering) is sitting around 249

 

[drea.drechsler]

Thinking of building a new system for someone who uses it primarily for online teaching and very complicated /big PowerPoint presentations that have plenty of step-by-step animations that is currently taxing the CPU.

Current CPU is fx 8350 with 16gb RAM. Ideally looking for a CPU that doesnt output as much heat either, which the fx royally stinks at.

What do you guys suggest? would a CPU upgrade help (currently looking at the ryzen 5) or is PowerPoint just poorly optimized and wont take advantage of a newer CPU. Even basic tasks like saving bigger word documents and PPT causes noticeable delays as the CPU is pegged at 100% on a core. Screen sharing apps during lectures like zoom/teams make the room into a mini sauna due to the insane amount of heat coming out of the fx8350

Thanks!

Not sure how 'extreme' your office/power point is. Rendering custom images for highly creative presentation charts, or massaging huge data bases with nested vlookup's in Excel might each have different demands that require specific system optimization. But in general, a 3600 is more than adequate for Office when given 16GB of RAM.

 

[USAFRet]

What do you guys suggest? would a CPU upgrade help

Any current system, Intel or AMD, will be better than that FX8350.

NOTE: this means the whole system, not just the CPU.

 

[geofelt]

What are the recommended requirements for your particular app?
Does it recommend a certain number of threads to run?
You can test to see how many threads you can make effective use of.
Just disable a thread or two and see if it makes any difference.
Is there a graphics requirement?

Whatever you do, use a ssd for anything performance related. They may be some 40x faster than a hdd.

The FX processor have been obsolete for a long time; the cores are simply too slow.
You can compare processors by finding their performance rating.
For example, the FX-8350 has 8 threads and a rating of 5856 when all 8 threads are 100% busy. Does task manager show 100% busy on all threads when running the app?
For most apps, the single thread performance is more important, the single thread performance is 1574.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-8350+Eight-Core&id=1780
The ryzen 3600 rating is a good jump: 12 threads 17850/2581
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+5+3600&id=3481

Do you have a budget?

If your budget for a cpu is in the area of $300, I would look at the latest intel alder lake i5-2600K.
Here is a leaked test:

Intel Core i5-12600K CPU Up To 50% Faster Than Ryzen 5 5600X, Blows Away The Rocket Lake Core i9-11900K Flagship In Leaked Benchmarks

Intel's Core i5-12600K Alder Lake CPU benchmarks have leaked out again, showing an impressive lead over Ryzen 5 5600X & beating i9-11900K.

wccftech.com

 

[saudor]

@geofelt it's hard to tell. The powerpoint process is maxed out 12.5% in task manager which is roughly 100% of a single core. Doesn't look like it's well multi-threaded (except during things like PPT video export). Still, I'm guessing the boost over the fx8350 in single threads performance should help.

Thanks for the heads up on the 12th gen. It looks enticing from early news so will have to consider it (e.g. 12400) And yeah budget hopefully around $300 or so for the CPU only

 

[Karadjgne]

Honestly, I'd be looking at a decent gaming laptop. That'll have ease of use that a desktop won't, has built in gpu, can/will have decent storage capabilities and plenty of ram.

Between what you'd spend on a cpu, motherboard, ddr5 to upgrade the existing pc, the price difference for an 11thgen/Ryzen laptop is negligible.

 

[geofelt]

Be careful how you interpret task manager cpu utilizations.
12.5% might make you think you have cpu to spare.
Windows will spread the activity of a single thread over all available threads.
So, if you had an app that was single threaded and cpu bound on an 8 core/thread processor, it would show up on a quad core processor aa 12.5% on each thread shich is suspiciously like what you have.

CPU-Z has an easy benchmark tab.
Pay attention to the single thread number for your 8350, and compare it to the 750 or so I see for the 12600K

 

[saudor]

Be careful how you interpret task manager cpu utilizations.
12.5% might make you think you have cpu to spare.
Windows will spread the activity of a single thread over all available threads.
So, if you had an app that was single threaded and cpu bound on an 8 core/thread processor, it would show up on a quad core processor aa 12.5% on each thread shich is suspiciously like what you have.

CPU-Z has an easy benchmark tab.
Pay attention to the single thread number for your 8350, and compare it to the 750 or so I see for the 12600K

Yeah I realize that. 12.5% is maxing out a single core (of the 8 in the fx) and looks like PPT isn't optimized for more threads.

@Karadjgne i'm honestly not a fan of laptops at all. They're all so poorly built these days, not to mention extremely hot and loud. Plus nothing can be replaced if any one of them goes wrong. With the new desktop, i can bring over most of the stuff except RAM, mobo and of course the CPU.