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.
https://www.techspot.com/review/211...:text=Why don't games,elements to consider...
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.
https://www.techspot.com/review/211...:text=Why don't games,elements to consider...
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:
"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."