[SOLVED] The old vs. the new... What has truly changed?

[maverick3n1]

I grew up going from XT to 286, 386, 486 SLC and DX2, 586, 686, Pentium and so on. In each step, there was a fairly dramatic difference in performance.

Over the years, I've found that now, the focus no longer seems to be on performance, but power draw. Processors are getting smaller and smaller, drawing less power and generating less heat. That works great for the mobile community, but for the world of Platform PC's, it seems like we are at a state of idle.. Upgrading, at least when it comes to processor means reducing power draw, but not much else. Am I wrong?

I'm currently running an I7- 4790K processor. I'm pretty sure I've been running it for at least 6 years now. I've considered upgrading, but the only benchmark info I could find on it was "Android" numbers, which basically tells me it's benchmarking on mobile devices. Mobile devices typically modify the chipset for their use and reduce core numbers/access to them if they are un-needed to cut power costs.

So realistically, is there much of a point in upgrading my computer/building a new one? It seriously feels like, from specs alone, that building a new computer today, may speed up my data transfer rate, but outside of that, processing power is fairly similar. Sure, I could get a better graphics card, but I feel that I could get a similar level graphics card on the MB/Processor I have now, that won't cap out substantially different than a modern day processor, or at least the bottleneck will be minimal and therefor not very noticeable unless I'm trying to squeeze every last drop of performance and graphics out of the top of the top game.

Am I wrong?

 

[Mr.Spock]

think you missed the fact that multi-core has improved significantly 6, 8 and 10-core - not to mention NVMe support. so maybe not so much for playstation minds but workstation use cases.

 

[Furzumz]

I've considered upgrading, but the only benchmark info I could find on it was "Android" numbers

cpubenchmark.net has a lot of processors benchmarked. Tho I'm not sure how reputable it is.

If you check out their high end processors list, yours is on there which you can compare to the rest on that list. It has the becnhmark score listed along with the price, although the prices may be a bit inaccurate sometimes. But it should give a general idea as to how far processors have come since 2012 in terms of cost and performance.

In my opinion I don't think its as stagnant as you may think, and if you're looking to upgrade there are certainly processors that are a massive leap in processing power compared to what you currently have.

 

[rgs80074]

I know how you feel. I don't really trust those benchmark sites in the fact I can't relate to real world experience.

for my everyday stuff i do my 11 year old system is still over kill for my needs. i don't do much other than surf the web, play videos etc and the 2600k intel chip is still able to do that no problem (not that I use if for that now, its my plex server).

I have the pc i use currently built in i want to say 2017-2018 its an intel 8700k and for everyday stuff i do i would be hard pressed to notice any real difference from my 2600k.

I also recently built a new pc which i hee hawed on, but figured in the long run it would pay for itself in hard drive space (on the plex by taking everything to x265). its an amd 3800x and its still doing the encoding full time, i noticed virtually no difference between it and my couple of year old 8700k, in fact the 8700k is encoding too even while i do my stuff and both pc's encode at roughly the same speed.

now i believe if I was a hard core gamer (not even really a light gamer) i'd notice a difference but then i'd probably have much better graphic cards too. or if i used heavy intensive programs like cad or so, the encoding program (unless standard def files, using all the cpu) but does not cause my everyday pc to suffer when doing my normal stuff.

of course soon i'll have all of it done and just doing maintaining coding which will be nice.

so i think you notice a difference mainly depending on what your doing. I had expected the new pc 8 core 16 threads to be faster than my 6 core 12 thread cpu but that might be the amd vs intel deal.

now other things have gotten faster over time but I think thats not so much dependent on the cpu and such like better grpahic cards for gamers, faster internet my first pc had the new high speed 2400 baud modem of course really had nothing to connect too back then except bulletin boards the internet was just beginning and at that time was still more dos like than the nice user interface of today.

 

[Third-Eye]

So realistically, is there much of a point in upgrading my computer/building a new one?

If your 4790K is working fine and fast enough for your tasks or games, you probably don't need to upgrade just yet and should wait for Intels new lineup hopefully early next year and for AMD to restock their Ryzen 5000 series. Depending on the GPU you have and if you play PC games, a new faster GPU would be a better overall upgrade first if playing at 2560x1440 or higher resolution, than a full platform change to use a faster CPU.

 

[cryoburner]

Over the years, I've found that now, the focus no longer seems to be on performance, but power draw. Processors are getting smaller and smaller, drawing less power and generating less heat. That works great for the mobile community, but for the world of Platform PC's, it seems like we are at a state of idle.. Upgrading, at least when it comes to processor means reducing power draw, but not much else. Am I wrong?

That's not exactly accurate, at least for desktop processors. In fact, Intel's CPUs have been becoming more power hungry with each generation in recent years, largely because they are still using the same architecture and 14nm process node as they were using for their Skylake processors over 5 years ago, while getting performance improvements primarily by ramping up clock rates and increasing core counts.

It is accurate that on a per-core basis, the current processors are not all that much faster than what you have though, since again, this is more or less the same processor design Intel was using over half a decade ago. Each core of an i7-10700K, for example, isn't much more than 20% faster than the cores in an i7-4790K. What did improve more significantly was the core counts, as the 10700K is now an 8-core, 16-thread CPU, whereas the 4790K only had half the cores and threads. However, most applications won't actually make use of all cores. Some demanding games are beginning to see a benefit from higher core counts though. For example, Tom's recently tested the performance of various CPUs in Cyberpunk, and 4-core, 8-thread models were shown to limit performance, at least when paired with a very high-end graphics card. Look at the i3-10100 results, as they should be pretty close to the performance of an i7-4790K, due to their limited clocks and identical number of cores and threads...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cyberpunk-2077-cpu-scaling-benchmarks

In most current games though, the performance differences will be quite minor, as 4-cores with 8-threads still tends to hold up relatively well. That is likely to change as games shift to targeting the new generation of consoles over the coming years though. Of course, unless you have a fast enough graphics card for the resolution you are running games at so that the CPU is the limiting factor, the performance differences between different CPUs will tend to be much smaller. For now, it's probably only worth upgrading to a newer CPU, motherboard and RAM if you are also pairing it with a relatively high-end graphics card.

It's also probably worth pointing out that AMD's processors have actually been providing notable efficiency improvements over Intel with their last couple of generations, as they are built on a more efficient 7nm process, and a newer architecture. And their new 5000-series processors are highly competitive with, and often slightly faster than Intel's at gaming, and are generally faster by a somewhat wider margin in applications, all while drawing notably less power. So they have the potential to be the better choice at the moment, though their availability is quite limited right now, and prices of Intel's processors have been getting reduced a bit to remain competitive at many price levels.

 

[maverick3n1]

I'm currently running an NVidia Geforce GTX 660 with 2gb onboard memory, running a dual monitor setup. One is running 1920x1080. Other is 1920x1200 (my old nearly 20 year old Dell monitor that only has DVI in, that looks so much better than a newer modern monitor.. that's about a year old go figure).

I'm also still running on Windows 7, because.. well, I like it I have a laptop on Windows 10, but still like this software better.

When I first built this computer, supposedly video games were "just starting to take advantage of multicore". It feels like they are still "just starting"... Most games seem to use single or dual core that I've seen. This means that once again, I wouldn't notice much of an improvement on games from this processor vs. another.

That said, am I seriously bottlenecking myself with Windows 7 64 bit, considering that is what was out when I first built this computer.

Oh, and 16gb of RAM. I don't recall the speed of it. I believe I have it in 4 - 4gb sticks so I could share the busses evenly.

 

[Nemesia]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbTYSwQKr34

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skSdJ03ykLE

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSWXSbT1rnU

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHTP_V8qkAA

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfL8_VHVQ_w

 

[Nemesia]

You can literally see 50% improvement and more on some titles.

Faster RAM. More cores. Faster single core performance. Faster multi core performance. More efficient.

Not considering the workstation stuff you can do like encoding which is like 2 hours on a 4790k and like 5 minutes on a 12 cores CPU.

Switched from a 4770k to a 3900X. The difference is night and day. Thinking about getting a Ryzen 5000 for that 19% Single core performance increase.

 

[maverick3n1]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbTYSwQKr34

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skSdJ03ykLE

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSWXSbT1rnU

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHTP_V8qkAA

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfL8_VHVQ_w

Looking at least at the first video on your list, the majority of the speed comparisons were on FPS, which is also especially taxing on the video card. That said, 99fps vs 120fps is not really noticeable. I mean movies have advanced to 1080p/60fps, and 4k, the same. Seeing the difference between 99fps to 120 fps in my opinion, is like someone saying they can hear a dramatic difference between a $4,000 pair of speakers and a $100,000 pair of speakers, and trying to tell me that the $100,000 speakers are far superior and well worth buying... and I'm an audiophile. I call BS on that! If I showed you two videos back to back, of the same footage, one being 99fps and the other being 120 fps, you probably couldn't tell me which was which, especially if I didn't tell you what I was testing you on, and merely asking me to tell me which video you thought looked better.

 

[xravenxdota]

I grew up before 286 even.The jump generation to generation are noticeable.2 years ago i was still rocking a FX4170.Not really fair comparison to my R5 2600 but some games are starting to use more than 4 cores in newer titles .If it runs every game/app you want then there's no real reason to upgrade.The 4790k are still a beast by today's standards.The time intel actually released a cpu worth getting.
If you have some time to wait before making a decision and your set on intel then it may be good to wait for next gen intels to come out.It will most prob be early 2021 or they may wait for amd to release new cpu's.

 

[Karadjgne]

First pc was a Commodore Vic20 with the 5k ram extension... 1000+ times slower than the average smart phone.

Processors are getting smaller and smaller, drawing less power and generating less heat.

Depends on your point of view. 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th Gen Intel are all the same 6th Gen Skylake cpus at heart, with some tweaks and improvements, but you are also looking at top-line cpus that can easily top 250w thermally, with nothing more than locking the all core turbo. That's a very long way up from the 77w a 3rd Gen i7 would put out, or the 150(ish) watts with a 1GHz OC.

So far AMD is the only one really chopping the nanometers, coming from 32nm/28nm with the 8 core FX to 7nm on the 5 series Zen3, while Intel has been stuck at 14nm for years, finally catching up to AMD core/thread counts to be competitive there, but at the expense of power/heat. Even AMD's monster 5950x will not hit its 142w PPT allotment at stock, requiring PBO +OC to get close.

So there's a lot determined simply by which angle you approach things.

 

[Third-Eye]

Looking at least at the first video on your list, the majority of the speed comparisons were on FPS, which is also especially taxing on the video card. That said, 99fps vs 120fps is not really noticeable. I mean movies have advanced to 1080p/60fps, and 4k, the same. Seeing the difference between 99fps to 120 fps in my opinion, is like someone saying they can hear a dramatic difference between a $4,000 pair of speakers and a $100,000 pair of speakers, and trying to tell me that the $100,000 speakers are far superior and well worth buying... and I'm an audiophile. I call BS on that! If I showed you two videos back to back, of the same footage, one being 99fps and the other being 120 fps, you probably couldn't tell me which was which, especially if I didn't tell you what I was testing you on, and merely asking me to tell me which video you thought looked better.

What do you actually need the CPU upgrade for if you are actually looking to upgrade? Are you going to be playing games only or are you looking to speed up encoding or other computational tasks that require a faster CPU? If your main concern is power usage, just get a Ryzen 5 5600X when they're in stock again. This gamers nexus video may be more relevant to you than just gaming benchmarks.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43pa3Y4Nqa8


As I suggested before, if the CPU upgrade is for gaming, you probably don't need to upgrade your 4790K just yet while waiting for CPU stock levels to increase. Since you are running such an old GPU (GTX 660), a GPU upgrade would get you far higher fps than a CPU upgrade. A GTX 1650 would give 100+% higher performance and use half the power for $150-160, but for pairing with a 4790k, I wouldn't get anything slower than a GTX 1660 Super/TI, RTX 2060 Super or RX 5700 XT. With the high possibility of the RTX 3050/TI releasing sometime in the next 1-2 month, you may want to hold off on a GPU upgrade.

 

[drea.drechsler]

...
So realistically, is there much of a point in upgrading my computer/building a new one?
...

The way I see it: if your current system does everything you want it to do and doesn't leave you frustrated there's no reason to upgrade.

The only problem you'll have then is figuring out how to spend the money you just saved.

 

[Karadjgne]

Keep saving, while the pc might be good now, it is getting long in the tooth. Mobo's don't last forever, neither do gpus. It's not going to be too much longer before something breaks/dies and having the resources to replace everything instead of trying to save a pc on its last leg, piecemeal, will be a blessing.

Rainy-day fundage.

 

[wyliec2]

CPUs along with other components have and continue to make significant performance improvements. I don't game - I do photographic processing and video transcoding. The vast majority of what I do is not dependent upon GPU or I/O speeds (I've tested network storage vs SSD vs NVMe and PCIE gen4 NVMe). These tasks are CPU and to a lesser degree RAM speed driven. For Handbrake benchmarking, I've used a specific video file and the same software version. Earlier this year I upgraded a couple of PCs - I benchmarked both the old and new systems. Controlled measurements yielded these results:

I7-4770K - 6:19 (6 hours, 19 minutes) - de-lidded and overclocked; not hugely different than OP's 4790K.
I7-5960X - 3:21 - significantly improved performance with the HEDT platform but very expensive.
I5-10600K - 3:30 - today's mid-range CPU virtually equivalent to older HEDT CPU.
I7-10700K - 2:29 - today's $350 CPU is much faster than 2015 5960X which was $1000 at the time.
Ryzen 3950X - 1:30 - 16 cores/32 threads is fantastic in this workload.

These are all single instances of an encode with nothing else running on the PC. The real story with the 3950X is that I can run simultaneous encodes - they run about 20% slower than a single encode but I'm getting 100% more work done! In terms of power use, AMD is in another league compared to Intel today.

From my perspective, there has been and continues to be, huge strides in price/performance/power efficiency....Moore's law has maybe slowed but is still marching on.

 

[the_real_D3V]

Am I wrong?

Yes. Single-thread performance and IPC have improved SO much since Haswell, as have clock speeds. The upgrade from a 4xxxK CPU to a current 6 core AMD or Intel CPU comes with a shockingly large performance uplift. (source: upgraded a client's 4670K system to R5 3600 recently: the performance increase was so massive that I now consider that old Intel CPU to be trash)

 

[maverick3n1]

First pc was a Commodore Vic20 with the 5k ram extension... 1000+ times slower than the average smart phone.



Depends on your point of view. 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th Gen Intel are all the same 6th Gen Skylake cpus at heart, with some tweaks and improvements, but you are also looking at top-line cpus that can easily top 250w thermally, with nothing more than locking the all core turbo. That's a very long way up from the 77w a 3rd Gen i7 would put out, or the 150(ish) watts with a 1GHz OC.

So far AMD is the only one really chopping the nanometers, coming from 32nm/28nm with the 8 core FX to 7nm on the 5 series Zen3, while Intel has been stuck at 14nm for years, finally catching up to AMD core/thread counts to be competitive there, but at the expense of power/heat. Even AMD's monster 5950x will not hit its 142w PPT allotment at stock, requiring PBO +OC to get close.

So there's a lot determined simply by which angle you approach things.

Ha! I had an 8086 mainframe with 2 workstations. One has I think 16k memory, the other had 8k. The thing sounded like a turbine spooling up when you turned it on!

 

[Deleted member 2838871]

I grew up going from XT to 286, 386, 486 SLC and DX2, 586, 686, Pentium and so on. In each step, there was a fairly dramatic difference in performance.

So realistically, is there much of a point in upgrading my computer/building a new one? It seriously feels like, from specs alone, that building a new computer today, may speed up my data transfer rate, but outside of that, processing power is fairly similar. Sure, I could get a better graphics card, but I feel that I could get a similar level graphics card on the MB/Processor I have now, that won't cap out substantially different than a modern day processor, or at least the bottleneck will be minimal and therefor not very noticeable unless I'm trying to squeeze every last drop of performance and graphics out of the top of the top game.

Am I wrong?

Maybe a little? I grew up in the same era. My first computer was a Commodore Amiga 500 in 1988 running something like a Motorola 68000 at 7mhz... Most recently I built an i7 7700k with 1080 Ti system in April 2017... and a couple days ago I upgraded to a i9 10900k with 3090.

My decision to upgrade was because I did notice a bottleneck from both the CPU and GPU when trying to run MSFS2020 and CP2077. I also do things like video encoding for my photography work and the new processor will speed that up too.

think you missed the fact that multi-core has improved significantly 6, 8 and 10-core - not to mention NVMe support. so maybe not so much for playstation minds but workstation use cases.

Yep... I've had mine running 2 days and I can definitely notice the difference between the 4/8 7700k and 10/20 10900k. It's night and day.

CPUs along with other components have and continue to make significant performance improvements. I don't game - I do photographic processing and video transcoding. The vast majority of what I do is not dependent upon GPU or I/O speeds (I've tested network storage vs SSD vs NVMe and PCIE gen4 NVMe). These tasks are CPU and to a lesser degree RAM speed driven.

These are all single instances of an encode with nothing else running on the PC. The real story with the 3950X is that I can run simultaneous encodes - they run about 20% slower than a single encode but I'm getting 100% more work done! In terms of power use, AMD is in another league compared to Intel today.

From my perspective, there has been and continues to be, huge strides in price/performance/power efficiency....Moore's law has maybe slowed but is still marching on.

I considered AMD but the scalpers made that a hard no... so I went with the 10900k. No regrets, it's an amazing chip coming from a 7700k. As said I also do encoding (with Handbrake) for my photography and video work and as you said they are CPU (and ram) driven.

I'm looking forward to encoding some files this week. My 7700k would take 2 hours to encode a 2 hour movie. I have a feeling the 10900k is gonna be just a bit faster.

You can literally see 50% improvement and more on some titles.

Faster RAM. More cores. Faster single core performance. Faster multi core performance. More efficient.

Not considering the workstation stuff you can do like encoding which is like 2 hours on a 4790k and like 5 minutes on a 12 cores CPU.

Switched from a 4770k to a 3900X. The difference is night and day. Thinking about getting a Ryzen 5000 for that 19% Single core performance increase.

That's what I want to hear having just upgraded.

 

[Karadjgne]

Ha! I had an 8086 mainframe with 2 workstations. One has I think 16k memory, the other had 8k. The thing sounded like a turbine spooling up when you turned it on!

I had to use an external cassette player/recorder (Panasonic portable, seen 100's in those 70/80's movies, the little black box) as the load input. Literally took 15 minutes to load Spaced Invaders and God forbid you have dirty heads or someone bump the table. And a green monochrome monitor...

 

[maverick3n1]

I had to use an external cassette player/recorder (Panasonic portable, seen 100's in those 70/80's movies, the little black box) as the load input. Literally took 15 minutes to load Spaced Invaders and God forbid you have dirty heads or someone bump the table. And a green monochrome monitor...

Oh, your MFM drive locked up? Open the case, uninstall it, drop it on your table from 3 feet, reinstall it, and problem solved!

 

[maverick3n1]

Keep saving, while the pc might be good now, it is getting long in the tooth. Mobo's don't last forever, neither do gpus. It's not going to be too much longer before something breaks/dies and having the resources to replace everything instead of trying to save a pc on its last leg, piecemeal, will be a blessing.

Rainy-day fundage.

That's kind of where I'm at, ATM. I'm looking at it from the standpoint of this computer is ancient, and it never turns off (It runs 24/7 with occasional reboots as needed). I've never OC'd the processor or the GPU, but I always buy quality products, so the Mobo is a quality MoBo with likely insane OC ability, a way oversized CPU fan, as growing up in the early era's of 486, 586, and 686, you could never have too large of a heat sync/fan. I also have a case with quite a bit of cooling. That said, it's still 10 years old, which is ancient for a computer. I just want to be prepared for when it finally starts to fail, and not have to spend a few weeks researching when it fails vs. just having a "must buy list" and activating it on Newegg or something. If my computer dies, I need one ASAP to replace it, but I also don't want to buy stuff without researching it. I hate being put in a situation where I don't have time to do the research needed.

I built a new computer for someone else over a year ago, and thankfully, through research and some guidance from others who have kept more up on tech, I learned that standard SSD SATA drives are nowhere near as efficient as the newer stick versions (Can't remember what they are called.. NVME I think...). It's that kind of stuff that's crucial when building a new computer without much time, that can make a mistake from building a modern PC and a modern PC with old tech that's already outdated, but you don't know any better because.. it's SSD and it's current, right?... Who knew there was a new connector type for the same thing?... Just trying to be in the know!

To be honest, this computer is the first Intel I've owned prior to a 486. All systems after my 486 SLC 40 were AMD until this one, as AMD started to fall behind.

 

[Karadjgne]

Well, NVMe is faster than a standard Sata3 SSD for sure, in large file transfers that's a serious bonus. I'm talking about 1Gb and up size. Games however are very, very tiny files, most are only several Kb in size, so the time savings from that kind of speed are extremely minimal to moot. Loads are almost identical.

The 'stick' is M.2, and thats a form factor, a m.2 ssd and a 2.5" ssd are exactly the same except in form. NVMe just happens to be m.2.

Preventative maintenance, totally get that concept, so having another pc up and running 'before' the old one kicks the bucket is smart thinking. But will take some adjustments. Overkill cooling helps, but is honestly unnecessary for AMD, all you'll need is stock+. They have power limits and are self conscious about them, even the biggest don't exceed their 142w PPT allotment without some serious OC manipulation, unlike Intel which seem to care less about wattage/thermals and are really only governed by voltage limits. No such thing as overkill cooling for Intel, especially in the upper end cpus.

Intel might have a very slight edge, in gaming fps, but to get that will cost you plenty, AMD really is better value overall, all around.

 

[Deleted member 2838871]

Intel might have a very slight edge, in gaming fps, but to get that will cost you plenty, AMD really is better value overall, all around.

When hardware is in stock maybe? My recent build came down to...

10900k =$500
5950x = $1300+ scalper price

Decision was super easy. I'm not a fanboy of either one... I'd have probably went AMD if I could have gotten it at retail price. Given the fact that might not happen for at least 6 months I went with Intel. Back in 2017 when I built my i7 7700k system it came down to going with the proven Intel chip or the new Ryzen chips that were just coming out... so I went with Intel then. I had a few AMD systems prior to these two Intel systems.

This build really came down to Intel stock and the lack of AMD stock... and that's fine. I'm quite happy with the hardware.

No such thing as overkill cooling for Intel, especially in the upper end cpus.

LOL... truer words have never been spoken.

 

[maverick3n1]

With my given setup, would I see much of a difference "upgrading" from Windows 7 Professional 64 bit to Windows 10? Is there a substantial difference in how Windows 10 utilizes the multiple cores than Windows 7, or is the change merely Microsoft trying to push people away from the new? From my understanding, this OS supports 100% of the features of the hardware I have, but I wasn't sure if there would be an obvious difference moving to Windows 10.