abrandt
1748
$300 7700X from Newegg with checkout code. Comes with the Star Wars Jedi Whatever bundle too. I bit.
mono
1749
That’s a good deal. The 7600X for $249 w/ the bundled game is pretty sweet as well.
CPUs seem like they’re pretty much win/win these days. I wonder why the GPU market is so different.
abrandt
1751
Some combination of the crypto gold rush and NVIDIA?
It means I have a CPU now but still waiting on a GPU to go with it. And I’ll sit on buying a motherboard until that GPU happens too since AM5 motherboard pricing should keep heading in the right direction.
Yeah, I was planning on a new X3D for my next build, gifting my 5900X/3080 to my kid whose build is 7 years old. Unfortunately, the GPU market is still insane and I’m contemplating waiting until the next gen because of it.
7950X3D reviews out. I think Hardware Unboxed are saying the Windows Scheduler is not necessarily choosing the cores with the extra cache correctly yet.
Yeah, because that seems slightly underwhelming.
Quaro
1755
TLDR the 7950X3D is a mixed bag and sometimes a real headache when games run on the wrong CCD. The 7800X3D is probably going to be lot cheaper and just as fast. For gaming you might end up disabling 8 of your 16 cores anyway on the 7950 unless Windows can sort out the scheduler.
From Digital Foundry’s review:
Apart from the CPU’s raw performance, I was impressed by AMD’s software solution, which worked perfectly with Windows 11 to assign workloads to the correct cores (higher cache vs higher frequency) right out of the box.
The only thing that might trip up some users is the rather long list of requirements for this core parking functionality, requiring an updated BIOS, freshly installed chipset drivers, a recent Windows 10/11 OS, Game Mode on, an updated Game Bar app, and so on. Even as a reviewer, it required consulting a 47-page document to check that each requirement was fulfilled, and there’s no simple check box somewhere to say ‘yup, everything is definitely working’.
So perhaps some reviewers didn’t check all the boxes, which is why Windows wasn’t assigning the correct cores?
Regardless though, once the pieces are in place and you boot up a game that really does need that extra cache, the performance improvements can be astonishing - a 40 percent boost in Flight Simulator 2020 was the highlight for us, but other titles that stand to benefit massively are surely out there, most likely amongst sims, racing games and heavily-modded titles.
40 percent performance boost to Flight Sim! Wow.
That sounds more like the exception, not the rule. From the EG article, where they confirm they followed up the procedure properly:
Cyberpunk 2077
Far Cry 6
Right, it’s going to help physics-heavy/simulation games the most.
stusser
1759
Those averages aren’t particularly impressive, but the improvement in 1% low frametimes definitely is. Doesn’t matter a whole bunch if you have a VRR display of course unless the framerate dips below the VRR window of your monitor, often around 48Hz. Although even then LFC should just double the refreshrate and show each frame twice. So more about input lag than smoothness, really.
I presume this core parking software thing is only for current gen CPUs/chipsets?
rei
1761
Before long we’ll have to park hard drives again
mono
1762
This isn’t that difficult to achieve. Anyone buying an X3D part can probably figure it out.
Tim_N
1763
Something else I read is that HU had the wrong setting for the power plan, it should be set to balanced or something.
Even if HU screwed up, it does show how these new cpus are dependent on software fiddling to provide any value at all, which is a disappointment for lazy me.
Whatever happened to set and forget? Nowadays watching for new BIOS drivers is not unusual, nor is undervolting because these companies push the power limit as high as possible (even on extremely efficient parts!) just to eke out the last couple of % in benchmarks.
Tim_N
1764
My wishlist for X3D benchmarks (please let me know if anyone happens to find any of these in reviews):
- Performance in late game Dwarf Fortess / Factorio / Stellaris
- Performance in DCS
- Performance in heavily modded Minecraft / Skyrim
- Performance in Paradox games using time skip 2-4x
- Performance in 4k for games that aren’t too taxing in 4k and hence less GPU-intensive. If you have a 4k 144hz monitor, it is worth knowing whether a CPU can bring your 100fps 4k game up to 120fps say.
- Demanding emulation
- Python numpy / scipy
Soma
1765
From technological point of view 7950x3D sounds like a… waste of potential. The Eurogamer review and Tech Jesus review all mentioned that when Windows detected a game is being used, it parked the chiplet/cores without the extra L3 cache, and uses the cores with the extra L3 cache for the game. So for gaming, a 16 cores 7950X3D (8 cores normal, 8 cores with extra L3 cache) effectively becomes a 8 cores system (effectively a 7800X3D??), which is… odd. Why not use the other normal cores for background tasks like Intel do with P-core and E-core? Why park them and not utilise them?
Or maybe there is some misunderstanding on my part?
Especially from a pricing perspective, vanilla 7950X may be a better proposition with mixed workload, especially given the new SKU, the old SKU price probably will go down. For a new build I’m still deciding whether to go AMD or Intel, and which chip specifically. These different SKUs are really making the decision really hard, especially when factoring in price.
It also means the 7900X3D is a worse gaming CPU than the 7800X3D, as it only has 6 cores that have the extra cache, as opposed to the 7800X3D’s 8.
Tim_N
1767
So I just realised that the Techpowerup review does a bunch of these:
Interesting observations:
- It is not hard to find 4k games that benefit strongly from these new CPUs. Games like Age IV and Borderlands 3 just from this review. It seems like if you have a GPU good enough to get a game past 90 fps in 4k rez, then these CPUs can add 40-50fps relative to say a 5800x.
- Demanding emulation benefits
- Using deep learning models benefits (not training which is almost always done using a gpu)
Anecdotal evidence I have seen so far indicates a very strong uplift with CPU intensive sim strategy games, like with the 5800x3d. I am sure there are other user cases that people won’t discover until they are in people’s hands, again like with the 5800x3d.
My biggest two concerns:
