[SOLVED] With Ampere announced is it worth waiting for Ryzen 4000

Isaiah98

Honorable
Oct 26, 2015
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So I've been planning to build for a few months now to replace a roughly 5-year-old PC. I have been waiting for Ampere to be announced and I intend to buy a 3080. With that in mind, I was wondering if it was worth waiting for Ryzen 4000 rather than get a 3700X. My planned build can be seen in the image below (Pretend there is a 3080 there)

fKxoM8y.png
 
Solution
I will predominately be using a 1440p 165Hz monitor.
Until the benchmarks release this is a bit of a guess. You are looking at a similar setup to me. I currently have a 3700x, 2x16gb and 2080S using a 1440p 144Hz monitor. In more demanding games I’ve been a little underwhelmed by the 2080S so am strongly considering the 3080. For example on COD MW I have to run medium settings with RT off to get an average of 120fps. I am happy with the FPS but I really would like to turn up the settings and have RT on. Therefore as I’m not wanting more FPS I am confident the cpu won’t be a problem for me. At 120fps my 3700x uses 12 threads at approximately 60% usage so should have plenty of headroom for higher FPS.


Apart from FS2020 the most...
I will predominately be using a 1440p 165Hz monitor.
Until the benchmarks release this is a bit of a guess. You are looking at a similar setup to me. I currently have a 3700x, 2x16gb and 2080S using a 1440p 144Hz monitor. In more demanding games I’ve been a little underwhelmed by the 2080S so am strongly considering the 3080. For example on COD MW I have to run medium settings with RT off to get an average of 120fps. I am happy with the FPS but I really would like to turn up the settings and have RT on. Therefore as I’m not wanting more FPS I am confident the cpu won’t be a problem for me. At 120fps my 3700x uses 12 threads at approximately 60% usage so should have plenty of headroom for higher FPS.


Apart from FS2020 the most cpu demanding game I run is COD MW and the 3700x still has plenty of headroom for me.
 
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Solution
I guess it's a good moment to buy it.
4'th gen will be interesting but at that point all other components will age as well, so it will be a waiting loop.
It really boils down to what you are doing.
If you are gaming, then its 100% worth doing now. 4'th gen will be like 5-15% in games, while that gpu is at least 40% better than anything you can get today.
If you are working on it, then it might be worthwhile to wait, if current one is not crying for help when you run your work on it.

btw, build seems ok.
 

Leptir

Reputable
Oct 29, 2019
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I've been at this game for 40 years. There is ALWAYS something great and exciting and allegedly worth waiting for on the horizon. If you fall for it, you'll wait forever.
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
I'd consider a 3900x. A bit more oomph without having to wait for next gen.
I'd save my money for Zen 3. Having "more oomph now" may sound nice but some rather substantial improvements are expected from Zen 3 including the merging of CCD's CCXes which should make them much better for latency-sensitive stuff like most games. Enthusiast gamers with Ryzen-based PCs may end up wanting a 4000-series regardless of what they have now.
 
3900X would a pretty steep price jump (over 3600, 3700X, 3800X) for the essentially unused/unhelpful cores, IMO, unless you also do lots of 'content creation' to leverage those cores, where it can indeed shine. (The 3900X's advantage over the 3700X in gaming currently is almost nil)

Once we know a date that Zen3 4000 desktop (or will it be 5000 to avoid confusion with 4000-series APUs, which are really internally 3000-series tech CPUs with better iGPUs), one can be in a better position to decide if the next gen is worth waiting for, and, if the rumored Zen3 associated 15-18% IPC jump is close to true, that could indeed close the 'AMD gaming frame rate gap' that exists between Ryzen 3000 and 9900k, 10700K and above CPUs. If you play at 4k, it won't matter anyway, ...most likely.

The next few months should be quite exciting times, what with alleged killer performance from RTX3070 at 'only' $499...now throw in hypothetical killer new AMD CPUs matching 10700K, and it'll be great times to be a buyer!
 
Frankly, If you want to play right now, and since RTX 3000 is there you can buy without worries, if you can contain yourself and wait 4000, it wont take much longer now, if you wanna have fun right now, we're still in september after all, go for it, you'll still be playing with attrocious amounts of fps with that card, so no worries at all for years to come.

I'd prefer 2x16 instead of 4x8, its likely that you''ll have to increase the command rate to 2t, theres small performance drop but its there, plus going all 4 , there might, just might be the need to loosen some timings a little bit, imo, i'd stick with the good old dual channel, specially on ryzen, they're a bit picky about ram, so you might want to check on corsair page if they are certified because some are just straightforward problematic with ryzen. other than that, either 3700 or 3900 are golden, you'd be covered core-wise.
 
I'd save my money for Zen 3. Having "more oomph now" may sound nice but some rather substantial improvements are expected from Zen 3 including the merging of CCD's CCXes which should make them much better for latency-sensitive stuff like most games. Enthusiast gamers with Ryzen-based PCs may end up wanting a 4000-series regardless of what they have now.
Zen 3 will be awesome. But I think Zen 2 even now is a great choice. Even this close to Zen 3. The thing is this... Gamers don't really need the extra performance on the CPU side. I mean seriously unless you play at 1080p on a really high end gpu you would never notice a difference. I was stuck with Haswell until sometime last year. A good CPU lasts a while. To tell you the truth I'm not that excited for Zen 3 like I was for Zen 2. And I think that's because Zen 2 performs great and it fulfills my needs. Even still yeah if people wanna wait I'd say go for Zen 3. I'm obviously not going to tell people to get a worse CPU unless it's cheaper and so much so that it's justified.

The 50% more cores in the 3900x is nice to have especially When you wanna do some serious multitasking.
 
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InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
I mean seriously unless you play at 1080p on a really high end gpu you would never notice a difference.
You are aware that the RTX3080 that OP wants to get will be more powerful than the RTX Titan, the absolute most powerful single GPU currently available on the consumer market, right? OP is going super-high-end by pre-RTX3000 standards. That is where you need the absolute best single-core performance backed by the most streamlined support architecture to achieve best results... and Zen 2 losing most game benchmarks to Intel shows that Zen 2 is not it.

You will likely want/need Zen 3 to push an RTX3080 on AMD's side.
 
You are aware that the RTX3080 that OP wants to get will be more powerful than the RTX Titan, the absolute most powerful single GPU currently available on the consumer market, right? OP is going super-high-end by pre-RTX3000 standards. That is where you need the absolute best single-core performance backed by the most streamlined support architecture to achieve best results... and Zen 2 losing most game benchmarks to Intel shows that Zen 2 is not it.

You will likely want/need Zen 3 to push an RTX3080 on AMD's side.
maybe that's true for high refresh rates but what about those people playing 4k60 with ray tracing enabled and running ultra settings?
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
I think at 1440p this card is way overkill anyway. It's akin to in 2018 buying an RTX 2080 ti and playing at 1080p. I'd consider the RTX 3070.
It isn't just 1440p, it is HIGH REFRESH 1440p and the RTX3070 (~RTX2080Ti) may not be able to handle that with RT on, so the RTX3080 makes sense for Ultra+RT at 120+fps - it is the GPU Nvidia is pitching at 4k60 and 4k60 is about the same raw pixel-pushing power requirement as 1440p120.
 
I think at 1440p this card is way overkill anyway. It's akin to in 2018 buying an RTX 2080 ti and playing at 1080p. I'd consider the RTX 3070.
Disagree. I’m currently running a 2080S @ 1440p. For example to average 120fps in COD MW I have to run medium settings with RT off. I am looking seriously at the 3080 as a way of turning up those settings and hopefully running RT at similar FPS.
 
Disagree. I’m currently running a 2080S @ 1440p. For example to average 120fps in COD MW I have to run medium settings with RT off. I am looking seriously at the 3080 as a way of turning up those settings and hopefully running RT at similar FPS.
Maybe those TFlop numbers and cuda core counts are making me think the 3070 is better than it is. I mean it seems almost unreal and the RTX 3080 looks like it's in a whole other league. I know those cuda cores and TFlops don't necessarily reflect the performance compared to last gen in gaming specifically. I have an RTX 2080 Super too. It feels so dated now after seeing these new card's specs. But anyway. I think this has carried on enough. I'll admit I might be a bit out of touch with knowing how more recent games perform. I don't game as much anymore. I do game dev solo in Unity mostly now.