Question Which of these CPU's is the best logical choice for my use case (and my case!)?

[pt195]

Hi All,

I’m currently running Ryzen 7 5700X / ASRock X470 Taichi / EVGA RTX2070 XC Ultra Gaming / 32GB DDR4.

I have no pressing need to upgrade from this, but I'm keen to get a MB which supports PCIe 5.0 M.2 to support fast disk performance & transfers so looking at new CPU/MB/RAM options.

My Use case is fairly broad:

Frequent casual gaming

Usually single player, like to be able to play most games on at least medium quality settings. Dont care about every last FPS etc.

Music production

Bitwig Studio DAW, high number of VST plugins / effects, some sample based instruments.

Video editing

Working with 4K footage from GoPro, usually rendering out to 1080p but sometimes 4K.

Photo editing

Photoshop

General

Everyday use, web browsing, documents, printing etc


I’ve been considering the following CPU’s (values taken from www.cpubenchmark.net)

Ryzen 7 9700X 65W TDP / (4,507 / 37,698) / approx. 338 GBP incl. delivery

Ryzen 9 7900X 170W TDP / (4,260 / 51,787) / approx. 310 GBP incl. delivery

i9-12900KF 241W TDP / (4,163 / 41,135) / approx. 259 GBP incl. delivery

i5-13600KF 125W TDP / (4,133 / 37,823) / approx. 230 GBP incl. delivery

i7-13700KF 125W TDP / (4,348 / 46,208) / approx. 290 GBP incl. delivery

i5-14600KF 125W TDP / (4,292 / 39,363) / approx. 264 GBP incl. delivery

i7-14700K 125W TDP / (4,480 / 53,248) / approx. 340 GBP incl. delivery (K is cheaper than KF in this case)


When looking at CPU choices, should I be focusing on a chip with better single core performance or better multicore performance for my use case?

Then obviously there’s the question if I should be considering the last four on the list at all at the moment due to the instability issues. I’m thinking probably not very wise atm until the dust settles.

I currently have BeQuiet Silent Base 601 case which is designed as quiet case and airflow probably isn’t the best, with Thermalright Peerless Assasin 120 CPU cooler. Not sure if this cooling configuartion would be sufficient or not to run the higher TDP options or whether I’d need an AIO (prefer to avoid if possible).

Please help me decide which of the CPU’s above would be the best fit for me.

Thanks,

pt195

P.S An additional question that I've thought of is, if I went the Ryzen route, should I be considering the X3D variants too as I heard they improve single thread performance and have larger cache and have lots of good benchmarks in games, but not sure if they will also be an advantage for Music / Video / Photo.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Honestly, I see no reason whatsoever for you to upgrade. You won't see an appreciable performance improvement in game load times when comparing different types of SSDs. You would barely be able to notice the difference in load time between a SATA SSD and a PCIe5 NVMe because of other system bottlenecks.

Techspot did a really good article about this very thing:
"Why don't games benefit all that much from faster SSDs? Well, it seems clear that raw storage performance is not the main bottleneck for loading today's games. Pretty much all games released up to this point are designed to be run off hard drives, which are very slow; after all, the previous generation of consoles with the PS4 and Xbox One both used slow mechanical drives to store games.

Today's game engines simply aren't built to make full use of fast storage, and so far there's been little incentive to optimize for PCIe SSDs. Instead, the main limitation seems to be things like how quickly the CPU can decompress assets, and how quickly it can process a level before it's ready for action, rather than how fast it can read data off storage.

While choosing an SSD for gaming is easy based on this data, there are some extra elements to consider...
If you are planning to play games off a secondary SSD in your system, so separate from your boot drive, buying an SSD for this task is straightforward. You're better off buying an affordable SSD drive with a high capacity. It's preferable to have more storage space for games than it is to get a slight performance uplift from PCIe."

PCIe5 NVMe drives are shockingly expensive compared to PCIe4 NMVe drives. Here is the least expensive PCIe4 ×4 NVMe 1TB drive I could find:
TeamGroup T-FORCE G50 1TB PCIe4 ×4 NVMe - $52 at Newegg

Here is the least-expensive PCIe5 ×4 NVMe drive I could find:
Crucial T700 (no Heatsink included) - $143 at B&H Photo

The least-expensive Crucial T-Series PCIe4 ×4 NVME drive (just for the nuts who think that brand matters):
Crucial T500 w/Heatsink - $94 at Newegg

So, you're paying $91 (an extra 175%) more than the TeamGroup NVMe or $49 (an extra 52%) more than the Crucial T500 (and it has a heatsink while the T700 doesn't).

There's also the issue of just how shockingly HOT the PCIe5 NVMe drives can get. Some of them require active cooling (which is just insane):
"To be clear, you should use a heatsink on PCIe 5.0 SSDs because they consume lots of power, which turns into heat. This is very different from PCIe 4.0 SSDs, which can also get quite hot or come with heatsinks, so that thermal throttling isn't required to keep the temperature in check. The main difference with PCIe 5.0 drives, at least with ones that exist so far, is that they consume so much power and get so hot that normal operation is impossible without a heatsink. Of course, all this power and heat is necessary for these drives to be the best in the world." - xda-developers.com

Like, sure, you'll get faster file transfer rates but it wouldn't be enough to have a significant impact on anything except for your wallet, your PC's power draw and the amount of heat in your PC's case.

I also can't in good conscience recommend any of your listed CPUs. With the exception of the i9-12900KF, the Intel CPUs have all earned a reputation for self-destruction. What I think that you're not taking into account is that the most hardware-intensive tasks in your list are video editing and gaming. The other tasks are child's play for pretty much every CPU sold over the past twelve years. Your money would be better spent elsewhere.

For both gaming and video editing, your video card does the heavy lifting and two video card generations have been released since your RTX 2070, a card that's only about as potent as an RX 6600 in gaming and is probably choked in video editing by its rather paltry (by today's standards anyway) 8GB of VRAM.

An Arc A770 with 16GB of GDDR6 would probably have a far more significant impact on your PC's performance in your list of tasks than a new CPU or PCIe5 NVMe drive. The Arc A770 is also 13% faster than an RTX 2070 in gaming (which may or may not matter to you):
Sparkle Arc A770 ROC OC Edition 16GB - £294

Now, I won't lie to you, there are issues with the Arc series of cards, specifically that they have issues with several games. They're FAR better now than they ever used to be but there's no question that their gaming stability is still outmatched by Radeon and GeForce. There's also the fact that Arc cards are very inefficient when it comes to power use, something that might be of consequence to someone in the UK because of the atrocious electricity costs there.

There is another option at this price point to consider and that would be the Radeon RX 6750 XT. This card is massively more potent in gaming than your RTX 2070. The Arc A770 may be 13% faster than the RTX 2070 but the Radeon RX 6750 XT is 27% faster than the Arc A770 and a whopping 44% faster than the RTX 2070. When it comes to video editing, Radeon cards are still quite competent. While not as efficient as Ada Lovelace (RTX 4000-series) RDNA3 (RX 6000) is more efficient than both Turing (RTX 2000) and Ampere (RTX 3000). While it doesn't have 16GB of VRAM, it does have 12GB which is more than enough to not slow down video editing.

The price of the RX 6750 XT is especially attractive, considered by many to be the best video card deal on the market today:
XFX Radeon RX 6750 XT Speedster QICK 319 Core 12GB - £287.30

A YouTuber named "Vex" tried out an RX 6700 10GB in video editing (DaVinci Resolve I believe) and found it to be perfectly smooth. That's all I really have to go on for it because while I do on occasion edit videos, the performance of an RX 7900 XTX is completely irrelevant to cards at this price point.

Unfortunately, the only GeForce card with more than 8GB of VRAM at this price point is the RTX 3060, a card that is only 2% faster than the RTX 2070 (which is within margin of error) so it would be a complete waste of your money. Thus, at this price point, there are no GeForce cards that I can recommend.

For your purposes, your system is probably good enough as it is but if you must upgrade it, your video card stands out as being most in need of an upgrade, not your main platform.

I apologise for posting this in two separate instances but I'm at work and can only give tech advice when I've nothing else to do.