# Single rank vs dual rank memory



## Solid State Soul ( SSS ) (Jul 25, 2021)

Whats the difference between them ? 

And do dual rank increase performance over single rank as shown is past LTT and Gamers nexus videos ? 

I have a singe rank ram in my laptop with 8 ICs, but i do have a spare dual rank module with 16 memory ICs, should i swap to that one ?


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## Ja.KooLit (Jul 25, 2021)

why dont you try. if you have the stick. 

I would try but I dont have stick. wanted after i saw ltt video about it


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## quanash (Jul 25, 2021)

You can watch those videos. Those are a bit more technical than people used to listen, so I hope those will be enough to understand what are the differences and how effects the performance.


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## freeagent (Jul 25, 2021)

Fast single rank is nice, really nice actually.. Some of my best benchmarks came from running fast dual rank. It’s something you can notice in everything.. its smooth..


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## quanash (Jul 25, 2021)

BTW, I forgot to ask and add.

For what system you are asking? If you can give the system specs. We can be much more helpful. The reason I'm asking is, if you have an older system that use DDR4 memory, even if it supports Dual rank 16GB memory, it might not support single rank 16GB memory ( no post nor seeing it 8GB instead of 16GB, due to addressing limitations ).

Also, this Single / Dual rank memory thing is not new, It was there from DDR to DDR4 ( and even before DDR ) memories. Because CPUs and iGPUs performance increased so much and more sensitive to memory performance people start to realize / see performance changes.

If you aren't looking a memory module from;

Samsung, Kingston, Micron, HK Hynix, Nanya ( memory chip manufacturers in short ) you can't find a definitive answer if the memory you are buying is single or dual rank unless you check it visually ( manufacturers like G.Skill, Corsair, Team Group etc. - who are supplying their memory chips from third party manufacturers ) or know what their PCB version numbers means ( like Ver. No: written on Corsair memory's product sticker ).


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## FreedomEclipse (Jul 25, 2021)

1:1 swap in a laptop? I dont think it matters. Run whichever one you want. There wont be any difference in real world performance between the two if both are rated at the same speed as each other. If one module is faster - say 3200 compared to 2400 then go with the faster ram obviously.


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## GorbazTheDragon (Jul 25, 2021)

The number of memory ICs on the stick is not always an indication of the number of ranks... It isn't uncommon to see 16 x4 chips on OEM laptop and server memory (add more for ECC if present), 16 x4 chips increases density per rank, so you can get higher capacity without increasing the rank count and therefore the memory controller loading. (For a 64 bit DIMM you in theory can do anything from 4 x16, 8 x8, or 16 x4 for each single rank, it's just up to the manufacturer to choose which makes more sense for the application in terms of cost, density, and memory controller loading)

It is also very important to distinguish between the performance effects caused by single vs dual rank and those caused by x16 vs x8 or x4 operation. The latter only occurs with DDR4 for example but not with DDR3, DDR2, and from what I've seen it will not happen with DDR5 either. The former can occur in any system which can operate multiple memory ranks and has rank interleaving enabled. Both effects are independent of each other and should produce measurable performance differences in all four permutations.

Dual rank operation provides two main benefits:
- Improved bandwidth/throughput on back to back operations due to rank interleaving (being able to start operations on another rank while the previous is still busy)
- Improved latency under load due to lower probability of bank conflicts (repeated accesses to the same bank) which is enabled by having more independent banks.

These benefits are both bigger when timings are longer, so dual rank generally will have more performance uplift with ICs that do not tighten down well and where JEDEC or slow XMP timings are used.

The downside is higher memory controller load, this can often mean that JEDEC and XMP dual rank kits will have longer timings out of the box than single rank versions of the same stuff, this can offset the performance gains of dual rank somewhat (but will barely ever overcome those gains and cause a performance loss).

The following is an example of the performance benefits of dual rank with XMP and tuned timings.


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## quanash (Jul 25, 2021)

FreedomEclipse said:


> 1:1 swap in a laptop? I dont think it matters. Run whichever one you want. There wont be any difference in real world performance between the two if both are rated at the same speed as each other. If one module is faster - say 3200 compared to 2400 then go with the faster ram obviously.


You might wanna watch those videos. Those can change your mind.


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## Solid State Soul ( SSS ) (Jul 25, 2021)

quanash said:


> You might wanna watch those videos. Those can change your mind.


These are the exact videos that made me aware of single rank vs duel rank matters, it shows that, swapping a single rank dimm with a dual rank one yeilds performance gains!


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## freeagent (Jul 26, 2021)

I saw this one shortly after I built my rig.. I had no plans of running 4x8 until this video..

AMD Ryzen: 4 vs. 2 Sticks of RAM on R5 5600X for Up to 10% Better Performance - YouTube


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## mechtech (Jul 30, 2021)

ya seems Ryzen specifically like 4 ranks total.  so either 4 sticks of single or 2 sticks of dual.

Anyone try 4 sticks of dual for 8 ranks total?


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## tabascosauz (Jul 30, 2021)

mechtech said:


> ya seems Ryzen specifically like 4 ranks total.  so either 4 sticks of single or 2 sticks of dual.
> 
> Anyone try 4 sticks of dual for 8 ranks total?



Optimal is still 4 x SR or 2 x DR. The speed hit you suffer from 4 x DR is rather disproportionate, and in any case 2x32GB Ballistix should be the obvious choice as it's 2 x DR if you get Rev.B.


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## R-T-B (Jul 31, 2021)

mechtech said:


> Anyone try 4 sticks of dual for 8 ranks total?


I'm running this right now due to ram requirements.  My 64GB kit is actually Samsung C-Die (thought it was b-die, is not) so not a good straight comparison to high end kits, but I can do DDR4-3200 no prob and from there to 3600 is like a 1% benchable difference so... might be worth it with a good kit and some luck?  Dunno.


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## GorbazTheDragon (Aug 3, 2021)

mechtech said:


> ya seems Ryzen specifically like 4 ranks total.  so either 4 sticks of single or 2 sticks of dual.


Basically every modern (at least to the beginning of DDR3) platform wants 2 ranks per channel because of interleaving.

Although it depends on the platform and motherboards, usually 1 2R (dual rank) DIMM per channel is better than 2 1R DIMMs per channel, this is just down to the electrical properties of using 2 DIMMs being less favourable.



mechtech said:


> Anyone try 4 sticks of dual for 8 ranks total?


Avoid 2x 2R DIMMs per channel on all platforms, especially DDR4. You get very little gains from interleaving more than 2 ranks and the memory controller load and electrical properties are far worse so you end up losing a lot of performance due to lower frequency or worse timings.

I'd avoid talking about "total ranks" because different platforms have different numbers of channels. With memory ranks the important stuff is what the configuration within each channel is, and then you want to set up every other channel on your platform with that same configuration.


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## The red spirit (Aug 13, 2021)

Dual rank has always been faster, it just depends on platform how much. Here's the difference:








Zen 3 - not much of difference in total performance, but for memory alone that's quite big impact. 









General analysis - makes overall small difference, dual rank is faster at same clock speed and same timings, but single rank is seemingly more tunable leading to better performance.









General analysis - makes a tiny difference, but not always, even smaller difference.









						What is memory rank
					

The concept of memory rank applies to all memory module form factors, though in general it tends to matter primarily on server platforms, due to the larger amounts of memory they manage.




					www.crucial.com
				



Crucial says that more ranks are like more RAM sticks, so I guess each rank has access to CPU, thus more ranks may mean potentially more timely access to data.









						Single Rank Memory vs. Dual Rank Memory (vs Quad Rank Memory) - OEMPCWorld
					

Single Rank Memory can be memory with chips on only one side of the memory module (stick of memory) or chips on both sides of the module as long as the chips are in one rank that is accessed while writing to or reading from the memory. Dual Rank Memory is basically like having two …



					www.oempcworld.com
				



This website says that you get more bits to work with.









						AMD Ryzen RAM scaling - performance effect in games
					

The impact of memory timings and frequency on AMD Ryzen 3000 systems in games has been a topic of discussion. In this artilcle we'll zoom in on specifically that. See, AMD made a change in 3rd gener... Games performance – Two or four DIMMs




					www.guru3d.com
				



Guru3D noticed some performance gains from dual rank RAM









						DIMMs: Single vs. Double vs. Quad Rank
					

What difference does the 'Rank' of DIMMs make to server memory? For example, when looking at server configurations I see the following being offered for the same server:  2GB (1x2GB) Single Rank PC3-




					serverfault.com
				



Server forums says that it depends which is better






						Memory rank - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org
				



Wikipedia has a great article about that, unless you overclock, more ranks are better, due to increased open pages and ability to access ranks independently. 

I guess that's all.

In reality, it really doesn't matter much. Many manufacturers don't even specify how many ranks their stuff has and even same model RAM can have variating ranks.


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## GorbazTheDragon (Aug 13, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> rank is seemingly more tunable leading to better performance.


Well tuned dual rank b die beats well tuned single rank b die in just about anything that isn't absurdly latency sensitive like superpi... Games almost universally gain more from rank interleaving than they do from the frequency (and small timing) advantages you get from single rank.

Also on Ryzen you are capped at 4000 or so with frequency, at those speeds on modern boards the timing gains are next to nothing for single rank...

But as you say it's relatively small at the end of the day, and it's basically irrelevant when you are GPU bottlenecked... End user needs to evaluate whether it is worth pursuing or not.


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## The red spirit (Aug 14, 2021)

GorbazTheDragon said:


> But as you say it's relatively small at the end of the day, and it's basically irrelevant when you are GPU bottlenecked... End user needs to evaluate whether it is worth pursuing or not.


It's not that can pursue that either. In my country no shop even specifies how many ranks memory has. Many manufacturers don't say that either (like Corsair, Patriot, Team Group). It's one of those things that you really don't know until you get. Some people mentioned that you can look under heat spreader to see if both sides have chips, but that's not great strategy as some RAM can be dual rank and have all chips on one side (and probably vice versa). Maybe for server buyers, more data is given, but generally, manufacturers don't say how many ranks their RAM has. Even worse some brands don't even specify number of ranks on modules either (like Corsair). So you need some software like AIDA64 to actually know how many ranks memory has. So there's a lot of pain for small gains.


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## GorbazTheDragon (Aug 14, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> In my country no shop even specifies how many ranks memory has. Many manufacturers don't say that either (like Corsair, Patriot, Team Group).


The only manufacturer that specifies whether kits are dual or single rank on XMP kits is Kingston, *everyone* *else* does not do it for XMP kits (JEDEC memory basically always specifies it). Irrespective of that, b-die bin 16GB sticks are always dual rank because there is no IC that can match the primary timings (there is an exception in that crucial does have some high bin 16gb sticks that would appear to be b-die from the XMP timings but are actually micron 16gbit rev b so are single rank).

IMO if you are actually interested in the performance offered by dual rank you should automatically fall into the category of people for whom the performance offered by b-die is also interesting. So if you don't want b-die you shouldn't bother with dual rank either (unless ur looking to collect something specific)...


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## The red spirit (Aug 14, 2021)

GorbazTheDragon said:


> The only manufacturer that specifies whether kits are dual or single rank on XMP kits is Kingston, *everyone* *else* does not do it for XMP kits (JEDEC memory basically always specifies it).


That's not entirely true. Crucial sort of does that too, but they are describing that in more technical way:








						Crucial Ballistix MAX 32GB Kit (2 x 16GB) DDR4-4000 Desktop Gaming Memory (Black) | BLM2K16G40C18U4B | Crucial.com
					

Buy Crucial Ballistix MAX 32GB Kit (2 x 16GB) DDR4-4000 Desktop Gaming Memory (Black) BLM2K16G40C18U4B. FREE US Delivery, guaranteed 100% compatibility when ordering using our online tools.




					www.crucial.com
				




They describe it as 2048Megx64. 2GB in 64 bits, so you get total of 16*64 and you end up at 1024 bits per stick. I'm pretty sure that can determine rank count from that somehow. And more than that, you know actual density and data width of cheap memory chip on stick, which may or may not be useful. 




GorbazTheDragon said:


> Irrespective of that, b-die bin 16GB sticks are always dual rank because there is no IC that can match the primary timings (there is an exception in that crucial does have some high bin 16gb sticks that would appear to be b-die from the XMP timings but are actually micron 16gbit rev b so are single rank).
> 
> IMO if you are actually interested in the performance offered by dual rank you should automatically fall into the category of people for whom the performance offered by b-die is also interesting.


Not at all. I still don't get the obsession with those B-Dies. People talk about them, but I still haven't bothered to check why. It likely only matters for overclockers anyway. And I'm not sure if I like overclocking. I both like it and dislike it at the same time. 




GorbazTheDragon said:


> So if you don't want b-die you shouldn't bother with dual rank either (unless ur looking to collect something specific)...


I'm not here to buy RAM.


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## Solid State Soul ( SSS ) (Aug 14, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Dual rank has always been faster, it just depends on platform how much. Here's the difference:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


wow, you made a lot of efforts to gather as much information for a very informative answer, thank you very much ♥


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## freeagent (Aug 14, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> And I'm not sure if I like overclocking


Its not for everyone, and not everyone can do it, so don't feel bad. Its a hobby within the hobby.


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## Solid State Soul ( SSS ) (Aug 14, 2021)

freeagent said:


> Its not for everyone, and not everyone can do it, so don't feel bad. Its a hobby within the hobby.


The thing about overclocking is, in the old days it started as a hobby, but then companies started to put it front and center in their marketing materials for many years that even first time builders think its bad to build a non overclock able system which is not true, overclocking is always going out of spec, and you always lose a layer of stability when you do so, i personal find the hassles of overclocking for such small gains is not worth it, especially with the scummy tactics the overclocking marketing has gone to where, vendors will enable multi core enhancement on stock bios to sneakily overclock you processor, leading to users question high power draw and temps at 'stock"  cogh cogh Asus cogh 

i think a small bit of memory overclocking is fine, like if your platform supports 2133mhz DDR4, then buying a 2400mhz and enabling it trough XMP overclocking is ok, other than that i only buy H and B boards with non K processors knowing happily o can plug it and play on it from the get go


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## freeagent (Aug 14, 2021)

Solid State Soul ( SSS ) said:


> The thing about overclocking is


I totally agree with you. I used to find it very satisfying, now its boring  And by "now" I mean since X58 died, that was the last hurrah. Overclocking has become so mainstream these days, its almost sickening. But, that is what has become.. I almost bought a prebuilt.. back to my roots 

I was into software before I got into hardware lol.. 

Also with todays pricing it is hard to want to support the industry. Manufacturers and customers have lost their way.. or maybe its just me getting old haha. Either way, its not what it used to be, and its getting harder for me to want to support them,


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## GorbazTheDragon (Aug 14, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Crucial sort of does that too, but they are describing that in more technical way:


Crucial does not do it reliably, those 2x16 kits initially used dual rank rev E and later switched to single rank rev B, but always had single rank in the spec sheets. You can still occasionally run into the dual rank variants in stores...



The red spirit said:


> They describe it as 2048Megx64.


x64 just refers to the width of the whole stick (64 bits, standard DDR4 channel width). 2048M refers to the size of each chip as you point out, so this module would have 8 chips to make 16GB, in general for XMP kits you can assume from that it runs in single rank mode since each IC is normally run in x8 width. If you had dual rank this would mean you need 8x8 chips on each rank, and as such 16 in total. There are some caveats here with running x4 and x16 width chips, but those are generally nonfactors with these XMP kits.



The red spirit said:


> People talk about them, but I still haven't bothered to check why. It likely only matters for overclockers anyway.


Beyond overclockers who are just looking for better rankings on hwbot I would say the biggest practical benefits can be had by (competitive) gamers playing CPU limited titles: Warzone, WoW, and Overwatch are good examples among others. These games can still benefit greatly in smoothness by using a well configured system, part of which is running well tuned memory such as dual rank b die.

In general as has been reiterated throughout this thread the performance advantages are relatively small and not everything benefits from it, but these advantages add up (in the case of some games, RAM alone can net you 20-30% performance when going from 3200 XMP to a well tuned set of dual rank b-die).


The red spirit said:


> m not here to buy RAM.


It's a general statement for hypothetical RAM buyer.



Solid State Soul ( SSS ) said:


> core enhancement on stock bios to sneakily overclock you processor


I mean the reason for this is entirely down to certain sites benchmarking motherboards just by out of box performance with a CPU... Scummy tactic I agree but it's just about them wanting the motherboard perform the fastest possible out the box... The funny thing is also that based on Intel's spec it isn't even overclocking so it's still running in warranty when doing that.


Solid State Soul ( SSS ) said:


> i think a small bit of memory overclocking is fine, like if your platform supports 2133mhz DDR4, then buying a 2400mhz and enabling it trough XMP overclocking is ok, other than that i only buy H and B boards with non K processors knowing happily o can plug it and play on it from the get go


Everyone is looking for different requirements, for a productivity workstation or home server I would generally not recommend going over JEDEC and would say to consider ECC. For most gamers I would say XMP is fine because most people don't play CPU limited, but there are a subset of people looking for the best fps and smoothest experience, and those can still benefit quite a lot from overclocking memory.

Of course it is still an involved process, so for some people it's just not worth it. But a well configured overclock should always be stable.


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## Chomiq (Aug 14, 2021)

Speaking of ranks:



It is tempting, even given the high odds of it being single rank Rev B kit.

Same kit goes for €220 over here.


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## GorbazTheDragon (Aug 14, 2021)

They are decent value and good overclockers normally, timings are kinda mediocre because it's a 16 gig IC but in general they are good, consistent kits.


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## The red spirit (Aug 14, 2021)

freeagent said:


> Its not for everyone, and not everyone can do it, so don't feel bad. Its a hobby within the hobby.


It's not about that, I'm just not sure if I like it much. If I overclock something, I just clock kit as high as possible without thinking about long term usage and then a day or two later, I just use defaults again. That's for CPU overclocking only. Memory overclocking is entirely another beat. It has a single clock speed, but so many timings, that honestly are impossible to truly stress test them. I just checked out RAM tightening myself. Just adjusting primary timings with stress testing takes 3-4 days. And there are much more secondary and tertiary timings, testing them all out could easily take a month. All this work and you can achieve impressive memory performance, but those gains usually don't translate to anything much tangible. Those guys at JEDEC lay out some decent specifications and that's what boards and CPUs are engineered around. RAM makers and rebranders put XMP profiles, so that you can just press on it and you will get stable faster memory with nearly no pain. It doesn't yield more performance for system overall, but even cheapest of the cheap RAM has XMP profiles, so it's hard to avoid it (and there's no reason to do that). And it's only recently, mostly due to Ryzen that memory performance beyond JEDEC spec truly started to matter a bit, before Ryzen it was just a waste of time. To this day I'm not sure if Ryzen is that good to benefit from faster memory or if it's just typical poor engineering from AMD that nearly necessitates faster RAM (due to way too many cache misses and slow Infinity Fabric).


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## GorbazTheDragon (Aug 14, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> I just checked out RAM tightening myself. Just adjusting primary timings with stress testing takes 3-4 days. And there are much more secondary and tertiary timings, testing them all out could easily take a month.


The big timesink in memory overclocking is just learning it in the first place, once you are more or less familiar it primaries is an evening (1-2h+overnight stress test) and subtimings is another evening. If you are experienced and have an IC you know how to work with it can all be done in one evening.

It just has a long learning curve because there are a vast amount of dependencies between the timings and behaviours you need to keep track of. Also getting practice in with pulling down a timing and knowing how to quickly get to a value that is almost certain to be the highest stable one is something that can only be learned with a lot of fiddling.


The red spirit said:


> before Ryzen it was just a waste of time.


This was mainly down to pre ryzen CPUs having big OC headroom on the cores. Memory overclocking has always given around the same performance relative to JEDEC (since memory manufacturers tend to use similar margins relative to JEDEC) and relative to XMP (due to XMPs using around JEDEC subtimings and usually pretty tame voltages).



The red spirit said:


> To this day I'm not sure if Ryzen is that good to benefit from faster memory or if it's just typical poor engineering from AMD that nearly necessitates faster RAM (due to way too many cache misses and slow Infinity Fabric).


Memory does more for intel (refreshlake at least) chips due to them having very tight internal latencies thanks to the ring bus. AMD has better cache hitrates, especially in L3 so that reduces the number of memory accesses taken and then the IF has longer latency so it means the total memory latency is composed more of internal SoC latency rather than IMC-DRAM latency. 

One of the things you do need with Ryzen is memory speed, as that allows higher IF clock


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## eidairaman1 (Aug 14, 2021)

freeagent said:


> I totally agree with you. I used to find it very satisfying, now its boring  And by "now" I mean since X58 died, that was the last hurrah. Overclocking has become so mainstream these days, its almost sickening. But, that is what has become.. I almost bought a prebuilt.. back to my roots
> 
> I was into software before I got into hardware lol..
> 
> Also with todays pricing it is hard to want to support the industry. Manufacturers and customers have lost their way.. or maybe its just me getting old haha. Either way, its not what it used to be, and its getting harder for me to want to support them,


AM3+ was fun to OC, its why my sig rig is where its at, i had a goal and I achieved it, it is not as hot as a 9370 or 9590 lol

Back to memory, Zen 1 required Single Rank for best performance. Not so much with Zen2+


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## GorbazTheDragon (Aug 14, 2021)

eidairaman1 said:


> Back to memory, Zen 1 required Single Rank for best performance


Yup, weak IMCs combined with immature BIOSes and sometimes T top boards does that... Same with a lot of T topology Z370/390 boards, they generally hate dual rank sticks.


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## The red spirit (Aug 14, 2021)

GorbazTheDragon said:


> The big timesink in memory overclocking is just learning it in the first place, once you are more or less familiar it primaries is an evening (1-2h+overnight stress test) and subtimings is another evening. If you are experienced and have an IC you know how to work with it can all be done in one evening.


That sounds way too good to be true. I never really had quick overclocking sessions, memory or not, you really have to sink a lot of time into learning stuff at first. BTW keeping PC running stress test overnight sounds awful. Think about it. It is pushed beyond spec and running at higher speed and tighter timings than before. It certainly heats up more. You don't trust it, so you stress test it. It really sounds a lot like it could cause a house fire when you are asleep. I wouldn't even trust a completely stock computer for overnight operation at home. I'm pretty sure that servers have some materials to stop fire quickly and stuff, but at home you really don't have that. 



GorbazTheDragon said:


> It just has a long learning curve because there are a vast amount of dependencies between the timings and behaviours you need to keep track of. Also getting practice in with pulling down a timing and knowing how to quickly get to a value that is almost certain to be the highest stable one is something that can only be learned with a lot of fiddling.


So in short, it's takes a lot of time anyway since we aren't born with any of that knowledge.




GorbazTheDragon said:


> This was mainly down to pre ryzen CPUs having big OC headroom on the cores. Memory overclocking has always given around the same performance relative to JEDEC (since memory manufacturers tend to use similar margins relative to JEDEC) and relative to XMP (due to XMPs using around JEDEC subtimings and usually pretty tame voltages).


I disagree. In past all we had was this:




__





						Memory Scaling on Core i7 - Is DDR3-1066 Really the Best Choice?
					






					www.anandtech.com
				




There was next to none scaling of performance and nowadays you can actually hope in some tasks to get a 10% speed increase. I remember that AMD FX didn't benefit from faster memory much if at all. And now more than ever single channel memory setups reduce performance. I really think that modern systems are far more sensitive to memory/latency. And about big OC headroom, well that's partially true. Only in one specific time it was true. It was during FX, Richland APU (other APU cores were poor overclockers), Sandy and Nehalem core era. Ivys and Haswells ran way hotter and often didn't clock so well. Before that, Phenom II, Phenom I, Athlon 64 didn't really have much headroom and had some clock speed walls. Certain Core 2 Duo and Quads were good at overclocking, but those were lower end model that could have been more expensive models. Before that Pentium 4 was a complete overclocking disaster and you needed aftermarket cooling at stock speed. Pentium D/Celeron D were complete poo and not worth buying and overclocking. And then we go further and we have Athlon XP, Athlon, Pentium 3. Pentium 3 wasn't great overclocker, Athlon XP was popular to overclock, but it didn't clock really that much higher. Athlon (not XP) was clocked so high that upper end models often didn't have enough voltage for stable operation (same deal with top tier Pentium 3). And if we look at more current times, Ryzen was a complete trainwreck in terms of overclocking, hell it was hard to make it work dependably at all, before Zen+ and Zen 2. Broadwell was quite good overclocker and overall nice (it likely even beat Skylake, due to L4 cache). Skylake came clocked rather high and to meaningfully increase performance, you more or less needed some really beefy cooling, so I dunno. You could OC it further and at high cost, it scaled well, so I guess that's a moderately good overclocker. The real deal for overclockers was only Pentium Anniversary Edition G3258, which was dual core clocked at 3.2GHz without HT. Those chips went to nearly 5GHz on stock cooler and with any decent cooler could have been clocked past 5GHz barrier. Unfortunately, since they didn't have HT and only two cores, they soon became e-waste, so the whole situation was similar to AMD FX. Same Devil's Canyon i7 was just higher clocked Haswell and that means next to none overclocking headroom. So all in all, only certain chips actually had tons of overclocking headroom and surprisingly often those chips that overclocked a lot, often were chips that performed rather poorly at stock (FX, Richland APUs, G3258, Nehalem era anything i3 and bellow, Core 2 Duos). 



GorbazTheDragon said:


> Memory does more for intel (refreshlake at least) chips due to them having very tight internal latencies thanks to the ring bus. AMD has better cache hitrates, especially in L3 so that reduces the number of memory accesses taken and then the IF has longer latency so it means the total memory latency is composed more of internal SoC latency rather than IMC-DRAM latency.
> 
> One of the things you do need with Ryzen is memory speed, as that allows higher IF clock


So it was AMD misjudging market and at first failing to make actually functional memory controllers on chip. Yet another fail from AMD. They should have knew better, that the whole reason why caches exist is because memory can't go as fast as CPU and it has been a big challenge since then to make systems perform well. That's just some really basic computer knowledge, pretty crazy that AMD seemingly didn't know that. But the big question is, why IF wasn't made faster with lower latencies?


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## GorbazTheDragon (Aug 15, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> BTW keeping PC running stress test overnight sounds awful. Think about it. It is pushed beyond spec and running at higher speed and tighter timings than before. It certainly heats up more. You don't trust it, so you stress test it. It really sounds a lot like it could cause a house fire when you are asleep.


Personally I find that borderline paranoid. I expect my PC to be safe enough to run overnight for starters, I wouldn't punch in any settings that I expect would damage the hardware... Memory overclocks barely generate any perceptible amount of heat... In the case that those settings do damage the hardware I don't see additional risk caused by running it overnight, the chances of an electrical fire being caused by an overclock are no more likely than an electrical fire happening during stock operation. And if that risk was substantial enough to even consider I would never run it inside in the first place. If there was anything in my house that I was worried could cause a fire, it's batteries, the chances of those causing a fire vastly outweigh anything else, particularly anything plugged into a wall.


The red spirit said:


> I disagree. In past all we had was this


The quality of these benchmarks would never fly by todays standards, honestly it's debatable whether those fast configs are even memory overclocks compared to the stuff that is run today... The knowledge gap between XOCers who actually ran those systems properly back then and typical users was much bigger than it is today, especially when it came to memory.

The nice thing is that hardware is still around and you can play all you want and see for yourself how much it matters... I have plenty of experience myself with Haswell and Broadwell and several of my friends have with 1366 and 1155 too such that I can confidently say it mattered as much then as it matters now, if not more.

The difference is that Broadwell and back you could get a good 20% or more off a core overclock, and that sped up the majority of workloads, memory has ~20% performance gains in good cases but in many cases smaller or none at all. The thing is now you basically can't get a 10% overclock out of your cores, even 5% is a stretch, most of the extra headroom you can grab just by raising power limits since the boost algorithms are very evolved nowadays and are able to get most of the frequency the cores can do by themselves.


The red spirit said:


> So it was AMD misjudging market and at first failing to make actually functional memory controllers on chip.


Don't really see how you come to this conclusion, X99 was also basically broken and is still broken when it comes to memory. Yet another fail for intel I guess?


The red spirit said:


> They should have knew better, that the whole reason why caches exist is because memory can't go as fast as CPU and it has been a big challenge since then to make systems perform well. That's just some really basic computer knowledge, pretty crazy that AMD seemingly didn't know that.


Dunno where this comes from either...


The red spirit said:


> But the big question is, why IF wasn't made faster with lower latencies?


IF was designed to be far more scalable than Ring bus, Ring bus runs into trouble as you get towards 10-12 core stops. When it is too big, the single ring gets congested and it takes too many jumps to get around it for one package, the longer distance also results in longer occupancy on the ring for single packets which also increases contention. Multi-ring systems were a solution to this scaling problem but also run into their own limits (relatively high latency when using multiple rings, complex circuitry and buffering for inter-ring communications, non-uniform latency). Then intel went to mesh which also has its own problems due to the relatively naive routing/pathing used in Skylake causing inefficient use of the available bandwidth, it also suffers from non-uniform latency and is difficult/impractical to scale beyond single-die configurations.

IF sacrifices latency for versatility and is also designed around being used in multi-chip processors, and in zen2/3 it has enabled consistent performance over a very wide range of scalability. This requires some increases in complexity of the signalling infrastructure and some more work in terms of the packet handling which together incur some latency penalty. Furthermore, the use of chiplets necessitates driving signals through the PCB substrate, these signal lines have higher capacitance and therefore require more complex drive circuitry (and are somewhat longer) than in-silicon interconnects (hence why you see some latency gap comparing Renoir vs Matisse or Cezanne vs Vermeer.

The required sacrifices in memory latency were designed around by using larger caches, in fact IF arguably enabled larger caches on processors because of the use of chiplets making the cost of extra die size lower and the impact of these larger caches on overall latency (due to area bloat) smaller.

These are not good vs bad, these are all solutions with various engineering tradeoffs... If you want to look at bad design go take a computer architecture course and then delve into AMD Bulldozer and CMT...


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## freeagent (Aug 15, 2021)

Everything benefits from faster memory. Even older hardware.

Edit:

A tuned dual ranked setup is the way to fly with Zen 3. I run a dual rank setup with my intel.


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## GorbazTheDragon (Aug 15, 2021)

freeagent said:


> A tuned dual ranked setup is the way to fly with Zen 3. I run a dual rank setup with my intel.


Tuned dual rank does wonders on just about anything... Nice thing back with early DDR3 was that just about everything good was dual rank, but with DDR4 single rank became the norm.


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## freeagent (Aug 15, 2021)

GorbazTheDragon said:


> Tuned dual rank does wonders on just about anything... Nice thing back with early DDR3 was that just about everything good was dual rank, but with DDR4 single rank became the norm.


I did not know that about ddr3, all of my ddr3 is like 11-12 years old now I think lol


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## The red spirit (Aug 15, 2021)

GorbazTheDragon said:


> Personally I find that borderline paranoid. I expect my PC to be safe enough to run overnight for starters, I wouldn't punch in any settings that I expect would damage the hardware... Memory overclocks barely generate any perceptible amount of heat... In the case that those settings do damage the hardware I don't see additional risk caused by running it overnight, the chances of an electrical fire being caused by an overclock are no more likely than an electrical fire happening during stock operation. And if that risk was substantial enough to even consider I would never run it inside in the first place. If there was anything in my house that I was worried could cause a fire, it's batteries, the chances of those causing a fire vastly outweigh anything else, particularly anything plugged into a wall.


In my country, there is a push to turn off as many things when you can't supervise them. I have no idea, but it would seem like it is a major reason for house fires. Once when I was on holiday and in rented house, there was a sticker asking to not leave anything on without supervision. But it was a wooden house in a forest, so maybe that is more relevant in that specific location. Anyway, I don't really have any reason to leave my computer on anyway, so I turn it off for a night. And since I often like to walk away from it and forget about it running, I set up it to go to sleep after 20 minutes. 



GorbazTheDragon said:


> The difference is that Broadwell and back you could get a good 20% or more off a core overclock, and that sped up the majority of workloads, memory has ~20% performance gains in good cases but in many cases smaller or none at all. The thing is now you basically can't get a 10% overclock out of your cores, even 5% is a stretch, most of the extra headroom you can grab just by raising power limits since the boost algorithms are very evolved nowadays and are able to get most of the frequency the cores can do by themselves.


I frankly, don't like boost. It's not base clock speed and thus it's not 100% guaranteed speed. And another problem is that those intelligent boosting algorithms are likely overvolting CPU way more than it actually needs to be. 



GorbazTheDragon said:


> Don't really see how you come to this conclusion, X99 was also basically broken and is still broken when it comes to memory. Yet another fail for intel I guess?


I didn't really know about that, well then a fail for Intel too. I'm just going hard on AMD, because I am very disappointed in FM2 platform and how much shit they did to it. And another reason for me being sour is that Ryzen 1 was just plain bad, everyone had a ton of issues with it and it couldn't be trusted to just work. And final reason, is that AMD marketing and bean counting departments are infuriating. They produce so much propaganda, that even Stalin would be intrigued. Particularly nowadays, AMD is just straight up unbearable. They are so full of shit nowadays, that it's both infuriating and sad at the same time. They did so much bad stuff, that I can't help but perceive them as almost completely untrustworthy. Their K10 era reputation went completely downhill. 

I don't have the same feelings about their engineering department, but since they don't steer AMD, I'm just disappointed that AMD in many ways is getting worse. And current AMD fanboys that like Lisa Su, I think, will get burned badly soon. RX 6600 XT was just one of the AMD fails and fanboy burns, mark my words, it's not going to be the last one and I'm certain that AMD will compromise their reputation as far as they can for any increased profitability. I wouldn't be surprised that AMD will become even bigger dicks than nVidia in 5-10 years, once Lisa won't have to deal with legacy of previous AMD leaders.




GorbazTheDragon said:


> IF was designed to be far more scalable than Ring bus, Ring bus runs into trouble as you get towards 10-12 core stops. When it is too big, the single ring gets congested and it takes too many jumps to get around it for one package, the longer distance also results in longer occupancy on the ring for single packets which also increases contention. Multi-ring systems were a solution to this scaling problem but also run into their own limits (relatively high latency when using multiple rings, complex circuitry and buffering for inter-ring communications, non-uniform latency). Then intel went to mesh which also has its own problems due to the relatively naive routing/pathing used in Skylake causing inefficient use of the available bandwidth, it also suffers from non-uniform latency and is difficult/impractical to scale beyond single-die configurations.
> 
> IF sacrifices latency for versatility and is also designed around being used in multi-chip processors, and in zen2/3 it has enabled consistent performance over a very wide range of scalability. This requires some increases in complexity of the signalling infrastructure and some more work in terms of the packet handling which together incur some latency penalty. Furthermore, the use of chiplets necessitates driving signals through the PCB substrate, these signal lines have higher capacitance and therefore require more complex drive circuitry (and are somewhat longer) than in-silicon interconnects (hence why you see some latency gap comparing Renoir vs Matisse or Cezanne vs Vermeer.
> 
> The required sacrifices in memory latency were designed around by using larger caches, in fact IF arguably enabled larger caches on processors because of the use of chiplets making the cost of extra die size lower and the impact of these larger caches on overall latency (due to area bloat) smaller.


Wow, that's some great knowledge here. Despite these advantages, I still don't think that something like that is correct in consumer market. It seems more suitable for HEDT market than consumer market. As much as I have read about CPU design, consumer chips should be designed to have high single core performance, keep core count minimal, be clocked higher (somewhat past high efficiency point, but bellow really poor efficiency point). I guess using same stuff for all chips and chip tiers is cheap for AMD, but that doesn't make their CPUs very suitable for consumer market (in theory). There really wasn't much reason to go with chiplets as consumer software doesn't need many cores, it needs few fast cores. If you need many weak cores, there is GPU for that or server chips. It makes it look like AMD a) doesn't understand consumer market b) tries to push high core count chips for more money, because gamerz are a bit stupid and bigger is better c) they are waiting for some future tech that will make high core count chips way more useful (but that often backfires, because once that becomes true, those chips already have IPC too low and clock speed to low to remain actually usable). It's probably a bit stupid to ask you why AMD did what they did, but all these choices just don't seem like they are consumer friendly and benefit enterprises more. I wonder if there is any other reason other than cost savings, why AMD made Ryzen the way it is.




GorbazTheDragon said:


> These are not good vs bad, these are all solutions with various engineering tradeoffs... If you want to look at bad design go take a computer architecture course and then delve into AMD Bulldozer and CMT...


Sorry, won't do that. I already read a lot about all that and yeah Bulldozer seems like it was made for servers and then quickly AMD realized, oh shit we can't sell Phenom IIs no more, you (pointing to manager or engineer) come quick and save our arses. It wasn't great, but they did some things right. They made them really cheap (small cores, shared resources, old 32 nm node) and they made them the most fun CPUs to overclock. There is overclocking and there is FX overclocking. That feeling of cranking it past 5GHz on cheapo motherboard and budget cooler is just something else. Intel had nothing on that, their locked chips were just running at 3GHz somethings. It was so much fun, there really isn't anything else like it so far, absolutely nothing. Performance may have sucked, but if you love overclocking, FX was the chip to have. Sure there was Celeron 300A, Core 2 Duos that clocked really high, but they didn't have multiplier and some other things that made overclocking nice and easy. And since I mention price, AMD was in great market position with FX. They sold you a lot of slower cores, meanwhile Intel sold you few and fast cores. AMD FX was overall cheaper to buy, but not cheaper to run. You see, AMD did pretty much everything opposite of what Intel did and thus we had two very different chips. Today difference is much smaller and AMD is nearly interchangeable with Intel stuff, the only difference is price. It's really boring this way, but in FX and Sandy era, it really wasn't. It was a proper competition of two very different design philosophies. Intel won big time then, but you know, I somehow can't help but like FX chips. I'm just happy that FX happened. They didn't have a performance crown, but they were cool in their own way. And funny thing is that FX chips slightly underclocked were seriously efficient. They needed a lot less voltage. As I remember, FX failed hard both in consume rand in server market, but in theory FX architecture seemed great for servers. Think about, it has lots of small cores, that are inexpensive to manufacture. If they just make some interconnect and connect 4 4 module dies, you have rather cheap 32 ALU, 16 FPU server or datacenter CPU. Intel back then probably only had 16 cores. Even if they were faster, AMD may have overpowered them with just sheer core count in heavily parallel workloads. Not only that, but since cores are made on 32 nm tech, they are easy to cool down, as transistor density is much lower. If you wanted a cheap server or data center, eh Opterons with FX cores might have been a great budget solution, compared to more expensive Intel alternative, that isn't even necessarily faster. And if that worked out as well as marketing consumer FX chips as good enough and cheap worked out well, it doesn't seem like AMD was entirely wrong with what they did. The only wrong thing was making claims about 5GHz and then releasing FX 9370 and FX 9590, two completely unnecessary releases, that often had worse quality silicon than FX 8 series (they often needed less voltage for 5GHz and ran a bit cooler). And since chips like FX 6300 were criminally cheap, I think that they had a lot of value for enthusiasts and for people looking to upgrade from say Athlon X2 chips, but wanting Phenom II X6 performance cheaper. I think it was great opportunity for us, unfortunately no OEM liked them (they literally burned motherboards) and they failed at server, not to mention that a typical gamer was also not intrigued by any of this either. Those sure were dark times for AMD, but great times for hobbyists. 

I personally had FX 6300 myself. It was a really fun CPU to own. It's a lot like a sports card. It's fun to go fast and throw it around corners, but it has almost no practical value. If AMD made something like FX 6300, cheap and extremely tunable on inexpensive platform, I would buy it. I guess that's clearly irrational, but I like CPUs like that, but before that AMD should really fire and restructure their PR and bean counting departments. Else it will be Intel making FX 6300 modern equivalent.


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## GorbazTheDragon (Aug 15, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> I frankly, don't like boost. It's not base clock speed and thus it's not 100% guaranteed speed. And another problem is that those intelligent boosting algorithms are likely overvolting CPU way more than it actually needs to be.


There is a lot of ambiguity it adds to performance I agree... When it comes to giving the CPUs more voltage than needed, it's something that has to be done from the factory anyway on any component... Take an old core 2 duo and leave it at the stock voltage and you will often have close to 1GHz of headroom before it becomes unstable, that's done to keep them stable under poor operating conditions and for a long period of time.


The red spirit said:


> I still don't think that something like that is correct in consumer market. It seems more suitable for HEDT market than consumer market. As much as I have read about CPU design, consumer chips should be designed to have high single core performance, keep core count minimal, be clocked higher (somewhat past high efficiency point, but bellow really poor efficiency point). I guess using same stuff for all chips and chip tiers is cheap for AMD, but that doesn't make their CPUs very suitable for consumer market (in theory)


The difference at the end of the day is small and IMO at least the ability to scale it up to 16 cores and maybe higher in the near future on a consumer desktop design is a bigger advantage for consumers than marginal performance benefits in hard to cache workloads. Also with "normal" memory (JEDEC) the advantages of larger caches will outweigh the latency advantages of the CPU interconnects due to the memory latency being more dominated by IMC-DRAM latency.

Intel is also having to accept longer latency on the interconnects with Tiger Lake and Rocket Lake because of the increasing complexity required to get the versatility they want (E.g in TGL making the L3 feed the iGPU as well). Overall these systems sacrificing "far" memory performance and trying to capitalise on "close" caches are more forward thinking as the memory power footprint due to moving data very far is slowly starting to become more and more dominant, and faster cores are simply running away from memory at even faster rates than they did in the last 2-3 decades.

GPUs and other dedicated coprocessors which are starting to emerge are also relying on the same interconnects that the traditional, general purpose CPU cores are relying on. Shipping work away over PCIe to a GPU or some other accelerator is all well and good if there is a lot of work for the amount of communication the GPU needs to do with the CPU, but is not viable if the amount of accelerator work is small before it turns back to the CPU, so really you want to put them close together. This is why close distance interconnects are so critical, modern systems are trying to put everything closer together so the processing can be done on the best accelerator for the task without incurring big penalties for moving the data around.


The red spirit said:


> Sorry, won't do that. I already read a lot about all that and yeah Bulldozer seems like it was made for servers and then quickly AMD realized, oh shit we can't sell Phenom IIs no more, you (pointing to manager or engineer) come quick and save our arses. It wasn't great, but they did some things right


The basic idea is that the CMT design is flawed from the start because it can't balance work between the two integer units of the module. Basically if one of the threads on the module stalls, the whole half of the module stalls, whereas with SMT when one thread stalls the other thread can use most of the execution resources left open by the stalled thread. That combined with very weak caches made that series of microarchitectures power hungry and slow. The intricacies of why this is are something you could write a pretty big book about but I think that gives an adequate summary.

It's a fun platform to toy around with but, in a similar fashion to Pentium 4, design flaws based on incorrect premises were introduced at a very low level and as such it never could have matched traditional SMT designs.


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## The red spirit (Aug 15, 2021)

GorbazTheDragon said:


> There is a lot of ambiguity it adds to performance I agree... When it comes to giving the CPUs more voltage than needed, it's something that has to be done from the factory anyway on any component... Take an old core 2 duo and leave it at the stock voltage and you will often have close to 1GHz of headroom before it becomes unstable, that's done to keep them stable under poor operating conditions and for a long period of time.


Well there's Core 2 Duo and there's FX. For some reason FX chips were heavily overvolted from factory. You can likely reduce voltage of any of them by 0.3-0.4 volts below default value. That's shit ton of volts for nothing. The worst offenders were FM2/FM2+ CPUs, that were by factory set to nearly 1.5V. I can tell you that they didn't degrade that fast nor they needed that much for poor conditions. 

As for turbo, there are many reasons to don't like it. It doesn't matter if it's AMD or Intel either. Its performance can be affected by tons of various and often unexpected factors and from gen to gen, behavior is inconsistent. It's also PITA to troubleshoot if it doesn't work right. And it might be just my machine, but boost is always disabled after computer wakes up from sleep and I don't know why. I would always prefer to have high base clock, rather than high boost. And it's not only ambiguity that makes turbo unpleasant, it's also AMD and Intel not telling how it works and how to properly troubleshoot if it doesn't. 




GorbazTheDragon said:


> The difference at the end of the day is small and IMO at least the ability to scale it up to 16 cores and maybe higher in the near future on a consumer desktop design is a bigger advantage for consumers than marginal performance benefits in hard to cache workloads. Also with "normal" memory (JEDEC) the advantages of larger caches will outweigh the latency advantages of the CPU interconnects due to the memory latency being more dominated by IMC-DRAM latency.
> 
> Intel is also having to accept longer latency on the interconnects with Tiger Lake and Rocket Lake because of the increasing complexity required to get the versatility they want (E.g in TGL making the L3 feed the iGPU as well). Overall these systems sacrificing "far" memory performance and trying to capitalise on "close" caches are more forward thinking as the memory power footprint due to moving data very far is slowly starting to become more and more dominant, and faster cores are simply running away from memory at even faster rates than they did in the last 2-3 decades.
> 
> GPUs and other dedicated coprocessors which are starting to emerge are also relying on the same interconnects that the traditional, general purpose CPU cores are relying on. Shipping work away over PCIe to a GPU or some other accelerator is all well and good if there is a lot of work for the amount of communication the GPU needs to do with the CPU, but is not viable if the amount of accelerator work is small before it turns back to the CPU, so really you want to put them close together. This is why close distance interconnects are so critical, modern systems are trying to put everything closer together so the processing can be done on the best accelerator for the task without incurring big penalties for moving the data around.


Why not introduce L4 cache again?




GorbazTheDragon said:


> The basic idea is that the CMT design is flawed from the start because it can't balance work between the two integer units of the module. Basically if one of the threads on the module stalls, the whole half of the module stalls, whereas with SMT when one thread stalls the other thread can use most of the execution resources left open by the stalled thread. That combined with very weak caches made that series of microarchitectures power hungry and slow. The intricacies of why this is are something you could write a pretty big book about but I think that gives an adequate summary.
> 
> It's a fun platform to toy around with but, in a similar fashion to Pentium 4, design flaws based on incorrect premises were introduced at a very low level and as such it never could have matched traditional SMT designs.


Gee, people really write a lot about FX. Everyone knows that it sucked, but nonetheless architecture itself is very intriguing. Same deal with Pentium 4. For some reason people forget about Athlon 64,  even if it was cheaper, faster, more power efficient.


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## The red spirit (Aug 16, 2021)

@GorbazTheDragon Oh never mind, FX seems to be somewhat better than we thought it was:









Unfortunately, I had FX 6300, so it had worse framerate, so I guess that video doesn't apply to it much, but nonetheless remember I mentioned that FX is very intriguing? I may go as far as saying that it is the most interesting architecture of decade (2010-2020). If you weren't an enthusiast before, then after owning FX you become one. There's so much fun in owning those chips.


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## GorbazTheDragon (Aug 16, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> Why not introduce L4 cache again?


More layers of cache doesn't necessarily help. The problem with caches is that you need to check every level starting at the L1 (or whatever is closer) before checking memory, so adding more layers drives up the memory latency. It comes down to an engineering tradeoff at the end of the day, L4s will probably return at some point, but for the time being the cost/performance is not worthwhile.



The red spirit said:


> Gee, people really write a lot about FX. Everyone knows that it sucked, but nonetheless architecture itself is very intriguing. Same deal with Pentium 4.


I'll add IA-64/Itanium to that list... Analysing why stuff doesn't work out as planned is always interesting imo.



The red spirit said:


> @GorbazTheDragon Oh never mind, FX seems to be somewhat better than we thought it was:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Not really surprised the i3 is losing this... It comes basically entirely down to context switching... the FX has twice the number of cores (based on the front ends) so it has to deal with a lot less time swapping from one thread to the next whenever it needs to do a background task. This was something I remember testing extensively with some OCN members back around the G3258 launch, which back then already suffered from stutter caused by background tasks. 

Doesn't really make the FX any better imo, it's a large die, a power hog and was only priced like it was because otherwise nobody would have bought it... And even at those prices, at the time I always would have recommended trying to go up to an i7 wherever possible, even if it meant going back a few gens to haswell or even sandy bridge... All the CPUs of that time were really killed off anyway by the time that zen+ and especially zen 2 came about as the larger caches and continuing increase on reliance of background processes caused even 4c8t to start to struggle juggling the thread counts...


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## The red spirit (Aug 16, 2021)

GorbazTheDragon said:


> More layers of cache doesn't necessarily help. The problem with caches is that you need to check every level starting at the L1 (or whatever is closer) before checking memory, so adding more layers drives up the memory latency. It comes down to an engineering tradeoff at the end of the day, L4s will probably return at some point, but for the time being the cost/performance is not worthwhile.


I think that Broadwell did well with it, it wasn't any more expensive than other i7s and it the only i7 to often beat a newer i7. It was also notoriously efficient, probably the least power consuming i7 to date. L4 seemed like a future and it is certainly more useful than AVX512 so far, which tends to take up a lot of die space and produce more heat than the rest of chip. I think that it would rational to split L4 into two parts. One part for bigger than L3 CPU cache and other part as overgrown cache or boosted VRAM for IGP. Broadwell was way too good to be just a tech demo, it clearly showed that L4 cache is beneficial.




GorbazTheDragon said:


> Not really surprised the i3 is losing this... It comes basically entirely down to context switching... the FX has twice the number of cores (based on the front ends) so it has to deal with a lot less time swapping from one thread to the next whenever it needs to do a background task. This was something I remember testing extensively with some OCN members back around the G3258 launch, which back then already suffered from stutter caused by background tasks.


I would really like to say that blaming background tasks is one of the lamest excuses for poor performance. Unless you have some rogue tasks or bunch of crap working when it shouldn't, it's a problem, but in any non abusive usage, Windows just doesn't have that much overhead. And I have managed to tweak my older PC to be ultra consistent in benchmarks. So much that even in memory latency benchmark, it doesn't variate by more than 1 ns. Something like Cinebench only variates by point or two. CPU-Z variates by a 2-5 points in multithreaded bench. And that's with really lame hardware:
Athlon X4 760K@4GHz (stock 3.8GHz 
Single stick of 4GB 1866 MHz (stock 1333MHz) Hepatitis B ( I have more DDR3, but one RAM slot died, so yeah fun)
Some cheapest of the cheap Gigabyte A68H board without heatsinks
1TB Toshiba P300 7200 rpm HDD
GTX 650 Ti 1GB
Creative SB Audigy X-Fi HD
Some rando Asus DVD drive

It's not Windows cruft, as I understand, it's just games are made to use higher threaded CPUs. Imagine a code that is primaly intended to be parallelized and since you don't have enough cores, it gets crushed down to 4 thread CPU to run. Obviously that's painful and makes low core count CPUs perform poorly. Also newer games do scale with high core count CPUs well, due to letting games extend parallelization and thus sometimes offloading some tasks to otherwise idle cores. And that's why you can see somewhat improved FPS in most games here:









And i7 is running at lower clock speed, meanwhile i3 has the highest sustained clock speed. Also there might be an argument made for more cache on higher core count chips, but I'm not so sure if it affects gaming much yet. It's really not some Windows garbage tasks, but rather complicated, unevenly difficult and complex code of game, that makes game perform not as well. And if game is made for 8 threads, then depending on game engine code can be crushed really badly and sometimes not so much. And you had those cores on FX, but you didn't on i7. i7 has threads, so they act like logical cores, but only are functional if pipeline isn't utilized well. It doesn't always work really well and if pipeline of core is already well utilized, code in thread just stays there and doesn't get executed. Even something as lame as Vishera core (more specifically ALU), is better than thread. And FX should never be compared with i7. AMD never did that and market pricing never hinted that either. FX 4 core was priced as Pentium-i3, FX 6 core was priced as i3, FX 8 core 8 series were priced like i3-i5. Only FX 8 core 9 series were priced like i7. Ignoring FX 9000 series fail, you got a lot more value for your cash with FX. So at almost any tier you got more cores than going with Intel and thus suffered less from lack of cores. And that suffering would have been present since day one as many older games from like 2007 were already 4 threaded in code. If you played Red Faction Guerilla or Racedriver:Grid, you really got nearly two times less fps on dual core. Those games only run right on quad core, on dual core, Red Faction would run like complete garbage and it was a time when Core 2 Duo became quite obsolete. And that was only 2009. You would suffer in Grid too, but you will be able to complete it. Still, it was launched in 2008. So something like dual core only made sense in brief period of 2005-2008, which is only 3 years. Imo that more or less means that dual cores never truly made any sense in gaming, unless you got one in 2005, it was cheapest Core 2 Duo and you overclocked it to over 3 GHz on stock cooler. Then maybe, but never ever afterwards. You simply lost way too much fps, made some titles unplayable and then finally couldn't even launch some games as they put locks on dual cores. Buying any i3 over FX was plain dumb and buying i5 over FX wasn't really great. You often got less fps, but you saved a tons of power, but that also cost you any tweakability and overclocking. And finally buying i5 over 8 core FX was again plain poor choice. 



GorbazTheDragon said:


> Doesn't really make the FX any better imo, it's a large die, a power hog and was only priced like it was because otherwise nobody would have bought it...


It was a big die, yes it consumed a lot more power (but it actually was mostly by brutal overvolting from AMD), but don't knock it on price. It was priced fairly and AMD some cash from it. Due to much bigger lithography die size was bigger, but process was more mature and much cheaper than Intel's, thus less defects and much lower manufacturing cost. AMD lied about transistor count, so in reality FX had less transistors than Core i. They likely could have shrank a die, but I guess 32 nm chips were cheaper to make, so they didn't do that, even if more dense die would be smaller. I'm pretty sure that AMD made some decent profit from each FX sold, but the problem was that they didn't sell many of those. And on top of that, ironically FX chips ran cooler than any Core i chip due to lower 62C initial temperature limit (later it was changed to 72C). Technically it wasn't any cooler, but it was better at transferring that heat to heatsink. So despite consuming much more power, they ran at lower temperature. Core i chips ran hotter and kept heat longer in core without transferring it to heatsink. Deliding wasn't a thing until Skylake.




GorbazTheDragon said:


> And even at those prices, at the time I always would have recommended trying to go up to an i7 wherever possible, even if it meant going back a few gens to haswell or even sandy bridge... All the CPUs of that time were really killed off anyway by the time that zen+ and especially zen 2 came about as the larger caches and continuing increase on reliance of background processes caused even 4c8t to start to struggle juggling the thread counts...


Maybe, but recommending i7 is just poor strategy. It cost nearly twice of FX 8350 and more than twice than FX 8320. You could overclock those FX chips and get nearly the same performance for less cash. Obviously, if you have cash to burn, then you often have much better solutions, but important thing is that FX delivered a lot for much less money. And if you were overclocking, ruining FX is less expensive than i7. 

But look at this:









FX 8350 180-190 USD
i7 2600K 320-350 USD
And since FX 8320 and FX 8300 were exactly the same chips as FX 8350 and clocked as well, then pricing of Intel looks even more awful:
FX 8320 130-155 USD
FX 8300 100-110 USD

So by that recommendation, you have have made people spend twice or thrice for 10-20% performance increase, sorry mate, but that's just awful value. Not to mention, that your recommendation also includes people, who might have been better served by i5 or FX 6300. That makes i7 a completely awful choice. Not to mention, that regarding frametime graphs, i7 did a little bit worse than FX.


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## freeagent (Aug 16, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> It's not about that, I'm just not sure if I like it much. If I overclock something, I just clock kit as high as possible without thinking about long term usage and then a day or two later, I just use defaults again. That's for CPU overclocking only. Memory overclocking is entirely another beat. It has a single clock speed, but so many timings, that honestly are impossible to truly stress test them. I just checked out RAM tightening myself. Just adjusting primary timings with stress testing takes 3-4 days. And there are much more secondary and tertiary timings, testing them all out could easily take a month. All this work and you can achieve impressive memory performance, but those gains usually don't translate to anything much tangible. Those guys at JEDEC lay out some decent specifications and that's what boards and CPUs are engineered around. RAM makers and rebranders put XMP profiles, so that you can just press on it and you will get stable faster memory with nearly no pain. It doesn't yield more performance for system overall, but even cheapest of the cheap RAM has XMP profiles, so it's hard to avoid it (and there's no reason to do that). And it's only recently, mostly due to Ryzen that memory performance beyond JEDEC spec truly started to matter a bit, before Ryzen it was just a waste of time. To this day I'm not sure if Ryzen is that good to benefit from faster memory or if it's just typical poor engineering from AMD that nearly necessitates faster RAM (due to way too many cache misses and slow Infinity Fabric).


That's the difference between you and I. I do like it, I enjoy it. I don't clock it as high as possible and then put it back to default the next day. I also don't do defaults. Those timings you are afraid of aren't impossible to test, its quite easy, and fairly quick depending on the amount you have. The gains are there, you just have to work for it, but it starts with educating yourself first. Watching YouTube reviews.. not much of an education there. Yes, Ryzen does benefit from faster memory. Everything does. I get the feeling you don't really like AMD too much.. and that's ok too.  But from your posts in this thread so far, I get the feeling you are reading old review material, and putting that into your own words and experiences. I wont be extrapolating on that though.


----------



## The red spirit (Aug 16, 2021)

freeagent said:


> That's the difference between you and I. I do like it, I enjoy it. I don't clock it as high as possible and then put it back to default the next day. I also don't do defaults. Those timings you are afraid of aren't impossible to test, its quite easy, and fairly quick depending on the amount you have. The gains are there, you just have to work for it, but it starts with educating yourself first. Watching YouTube reviews.. not much of an education there. Yes, Ryzen does benefit from faster memory. Everything does. I get the feeling you don't really like AMD too much.. and that's ok too.  But from your posts in this thread so far, I get the feeling you are reading old review material, and putting that into your own words and experiences. I wont be extrapolating on that though.


I have never really benefited from faster RAM or felt a reduction of performance from slow RAM. Only that 1T command rate does increase CPU performance in Cinebench a bit. And the only timing that does make a significant difference in memory benchmarks is tCL. In real world, there's perhaps only a tiny benefit from them both. I even have overclocked DDR3 from 1333 MHz to 1866 MHz once and it was underwhelming. In theory that's 40% increase in memory performance, in reality, it's not even 5% increase in anything else. I actually tweak DDR3 system further to see if there's anything interesting. It seems to be somewhat more responsive in desktop. And I also noticed that if you want to increase AIDA64 memory latency scores, it's more beneficial to set power plan from balanced to ultimate performance and overclock CPU. You can also unlock "Disable idle states" in power plan hidden settings to help a bit, but depending on CPU, that means a massive CPU wattage increase. 

As to reading old benchmark material, dude I own many AMD chips and have tons of first hand experience with them. Currently I own:
AMD Sempron 2800+ (s754)
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (s754)
AMD Sempron 3000+ (S1G1)
AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 (S1G1)
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (s754)
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ (s754)
AMD Phenom II X6 1055T 125W 
AMD A4 6300
AMD A4 7400K
AMD Athlon 760K
AMD Athlon 845
AMD Athlon 870K
AMD FX 6300

That's all AMD stuff, if I'm not forgetting something. In terms of Intel, I only have:
Core 2 Duo T7200
Core i5 10400F

Do you really think, that I need some review to tell me how AMD chips performed? I have my own reasons to dislike certain AMD CPU lines. I really dislike Ryzen and am not a fan of FM2(+) stuff, but maybe it's just a board that I have, which sucks. Particular reason for me disliking FM2 platform is this:








						Weird CPU temperature reporting (solved)
					

Hello  I'm having a weird CPU reporting problem with my computer. What happens is that CPU is misreporting temperature. I found this problem while I was monitoring PC with HwInfo64 software. Even during idle, what software reports as CPU package is very high. Usually around 45-50C. During OCCT...




					www.overclock.net
				




Guess what, it turned out that 760K didn't solve my initial problem. It just ignores first "overheat", but tanks performance on second one. And since it runs cooler, it masks throttling better. What a poo.

I also wrote a review about A4 6300 and wrote a long sort of blog about my computer called Athlonium 64, which explains why I have so many socket 754 and some FM2+ chips. Unlike you, I used FX and derivatives for a long time.


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## freeagent (Aug 16, 2021)

Sorry about that last comment, I had a wave of darkness wash over me lol.

When I left AMD I said I would only go back if they were beating Intel again. It took awhile..

If you get the chance, check out a new AMD system, they will be sure to impress you that's for sure.


----------



## The red spirit (Aug 16, 2021)

freeagent said:


> Sorry about that last comment, I had a wave of darkness wash over me lol.
> 
> When I left AMD I said I would only go back if they were beating Intel again. It took awhile..
> 
> If you get the chance, check out a new AMD system, they will be sure to impress you that's for sure.


Ryzen has already failed in my eyes. Only first gen Ryzen was intriguing, but it's likely ass to actually own it and use it. Way too many bugs and stability issues. Later Ryzens completely failed at delivering value. Ryzen 5000 launch was infuriating. I still remember Lisa Su saying that Ryzen delivers the best value on the market and then released 5600X, by far the worst value consumer chip ever made. At launch it cost over 300 Euros, meanwhile i5 10400F was only 155 Euros. That's literally twice less. Sure it is somewhat slower, but considering how cheap it was and how overall Intel platform was cheaper, I couldn't find a single reason to go AMD, neither a single excuse why 5600X was so overpriced. And for that matter, Ryzen 3600 was also poor value buy. It cost about 200 Euros and it was a bit faster in games, but if you increase i5 power limit, then they are even, also Ryzen boards were more expensive and Ryzen needed faster RAM, which increased cost of platform. I would also need some beefy cooler to replace that stock e-waste, because Ryzen doesn't run cold. Looking back at AMD it's just painful how shit Ryzen is at providing any value for buyer. FX 6300 was 90-120 Euro chip. Ryzen 1600 was never cheaper than 140 Euros, even when 3000 series launched. But if I needed an upgrade, I likely would have been interested in 1600. But when AMD had core count and cost advantage, Intel just put more cores and outpriced them completely. Not to mention, that those value i5s also were more power efficient and somewhat tweakable. 3000 Ryzens were almost as tweakable as locked Intel parts, because they hit clock speed wall fast. Without fast memory, Ryzen didn't really perform all that well. With same memory, Intel was faster. All in all, I have nothing to be impressed at. Sure Ryzen will outbench my i5, but they both offer more than 60 fps in games and difference isn't that big. AMD will have to make something better than Ryzen to impress me or finally release 5600 at no more than 180 Euros, otherwise they can shove their "superior value" in their arse. 180 euros would be only enough to close the gap with Intel, if they want to beat Intel here, they absolutely have to make it at 140 Euros. But I guess Lisa has no reason to do that, when everyone is overhyped with Ryzen and buy them almost regardless of merit. Profit margins on those Ryzens are likely astronomic. On FX chips, AMD was already making a 40 Euro profit at least, which is 30-40% of price (for FX 6300 and 8320 chips). I have no doubts that with Ryzen AMD is likely charging profit margin measured in times, rather than percents. AMD - the way it's meant to be ripped off. Anything higher end on AMD is even worse rip off. People say that i5 10600K was bad and is kinda rip offy, AMD is even worse. I'm not a charity and I'm not going give them my money. Intel is no saint either, their stuff still isn't cheap and more expensive than it should be and their K series stuff is overpriced, but at least they managed to make some relatively good value chips.


----------



## freeagent (Aug 16, 2021)

I don't know what to tell you man. Both my 5600 and 5900 are awesome. Expensive yes, but I knew that when I bought them. I have no bugs, no glitches, no errors, no instability. Its just like running an Intel system, but better because my Intel systems are old lol. I could have bought a spiffy Intel rig, but at the time AMD was the better value, from a performance standpoint.. thanks to Covid. To each their own though right?

Edit:

5600X is now 243 euros. Thats a big drop compared to when I bought mine, by well over a hundred bucks with tax.


----------



## The red spirit (Aug 16, 2021)

freeagent said:


> I don't know what to tell you man. Both my 5600 and 5900 are awesome. Expensive yes, but I knew that when I bought them. I have no bugs, no glitches, no errors, no instability. Its just like running an Intel system, but better because my Intel systems are old lol. I could have bought a spiffy Intel rig, but at the time AMD was the better value, from a performance standpoint.. thanks to Covid. To each their own though right?
> 
> Edit:
> 
> 5600X is now 243 euros. Thats a big drop compared to when I bought mine, by well over a hundred bucks with tax.


I only said that first gen was stability hell. Later versions were better, but then AMD blew value. I have checked out local stores right now from which I would be willing to buy (some stores have really awful reputation and rude staff) and here is what I found out:

Store 1:
Ryzen 1600 AE - 126 Euros
Ryzen 3600 (not retail version, so no cooler) - 212 Euros
Ryzen 2600X - 257 Euros
Ryzen 5600G (probably only 8 PCIe lanes) - 272 Euros
Ryzen 3600X (not retail version, so no cooler) - 275 Euros
Ryzen 3700X - 279 Euros

Intel i3 10105F - 98 Euros
Intel i3 10100F - 134 Euros
Intel i5 10400F - 165 Euros
Intel i5 11400F (not retail version, so you don't get e-waste) - 203 Euros
Intel i5 10600KF - 214 Euros
Intel i5 10600K - 230 Euros 

A clear win for Intel

Store 2:
Ryzen 1600 (unknown if AE or AF) - 126 Euros
Ryzen 2600 - 164 Euros
Ryzen 3700X - 290 Euros
Ryzen 5600X - 300 Euros

Intel i3 10100F (not retail version, so no e-waste) - 86 Euros
Intel i3 10105F - 89 Euros
Intel i5 10400F - 168 Euros
Intel i5 10600KF - 215 Euros

Very obvious win for Intel

Store 3:
Ryzen 1600 (unknown if AE or AF) - 128 Euros
Ryzen 3700X - 280 Euros
Ryzen 5600X - 304 Euros
Ryzen 5600G (probably 8 PCIe lanes) - 324 Euros

Intel i5 10400F - 176 Euros
Intel i5 10600KF - 216 Euros
Intel i5 10600K - 276 Euros

Poo poo deals for both, but I would go for i5 10400F

Store 4:
Ryzen 1600 (unknown variant) - 133 Euros
Ryzen 2600 - 181 Euros
Ryzen 3600 - 249 Euros
Ryzen 2600X - 260 Euros
Ryzen 1800X - 278 Euros
Ryzen 5600X - 288 Euros
Ryzen 3600X - 297 Euros
Ryzen 5600X (from second supplier) - 298 Euros

Intel i3 10100F - 98 Euros
Intel i5 10400F - 165 Euros
Intel i5 10400 - 215 Euros
Intel i5 10400 (from second supplier) - 219 Euros
Intel i5 10600K - 231 Euros
Intel 10400F (another supplier) - 251 Euros
Intel i5 11600K - 281 Euros

Bunch of poo poo deals, but at least first i5 10400F looks decent.

I don't know where you saw that, but in my country Ryzen is complete no go nowadays. There are some okay deals with i5 10600KFs, there are good deals with i5 10400Fs, there are great deals for i3 10100F/10105F. For budget system i3 at 86 Euros is great deal. For more upscale system i5 10400F at 165 Euros is great. For enthusiast system i5 10600KF at 215 Euros seems okay. I fail to see the value of Ryzen so far. I should note that the only Ryzen quad core available today is 1200, which is ancient and not worth it even for pittance. i3 completely blows Ryzen 1200 away. There are no 3100/3300X Ryzens anywhere, neither Ryzen APUs, except super overpriced high end APUs, that make zero value sense (RX 550 2GB could be found for 86 Euros at one store, so I would rather have that). i5 11400F is also nowhere to be found at any price. Even before availability issues, situation wasn't much different. i5 10400F was a bit cheaper (140-160 Euros), i3s went to 130 Euros (fail), I5 K models were more expensive by 50 Euros, Ryzen 2600 was going for 180 Euros, Ryzen 3600 was going for 210 Euros, Ryzen 5600X was going for 300-340 Euros, i5 11400F was available for 180 Euros. 

I should say it again, that Ryzens are generally okay, but their price doesn't make any sense. Intel undercut them so much that even minor performance reduction is worth it. Ryzen 1 and stability have been enemies for a long time, here's what JayZ had to put up with when he went Ryzen:









And another video, first argument for Intel is stability:









Well, considering his experience with Ryzen, I'm surprised that he didn't give his editors Intel rigs as he probably was losing money from all lost work.

Offtopic:
You can even see Ryzen system dying in background or somebody put 5700XT there


----------



## freeagent (Aug 16, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> I only said that first gen was stability hell. Later versions were better, but then AMD blew value.





> Ryzen has already failed in my eyes. Only first gen Ryzen was intriguing,


That was not the first time you were bashing them, its just right there.



The red spirit said:


> don't know where you saw that, but in my country Ryzen is complete no go nowadays.


I just used a currency converter.. I paid 449 plus tax and shipping for my 5600x, which brought the total to 477.73. It is now 369. Don't forget that Intel dropped their prices quite a bit too.. those weren't always their price, at least not here in Canada. But I have said more than once in other threads that Intel is the better deal if you are looking to build a gaming machine. When I built mine, it would have been cheaper to build with Intel 10th gen, 11th wasn't out yet.


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## The red spirit (Aug 16, 2021)

freeagent said:


> That was not the first time you were bashing them, its just right there.


True, but Ryzen 1st gen was a lot worse than later gens. It's surprising that media accepted Ryzen even in that super flawed form. I would have said that it plainly doesn't function and be done. FX not even initially had such problems. Phenom II was solid, Phenom I wasn't perfect, but still better than Ryzen. And then we go to past, Athlon 64, Athlon XP, Athlon MP, Athlon, K6... No Ryzen was their least functional release to date. A complete disgrace.



freeagent said:


> I just used a currency converter.. I paid 449 plus tax and shipping for my 5600x, which brought the total to 477.73. It is now 369.


Well those prices are with already calculated Lithuanian taxes, shipping is like 2-4 Euros or you can pick them up yourself at their physical store. You can also get them in parcel machine:





						Private » Omniva - parcel machines
					






					www.omniva.lt
				




My condolences to you for having a poor deal. Should have got that cheap i5.



freeagent said:


> Don't forget that Intel dropped their prices quite a bit too.. those weren't always their price, at least not here in Canada.


That's not entirely true, their price rose. I paid for my i5 156 Euros, not it's going for 165 or more. i5 K skus got a bit cheaper. i3s were going for 120-130 Euros.



freeagent said:


> But I have said more than once in other threads that Intel is the better deal if you are looking to build a gaming machine. When I built mine, it would have been cheaper to build with Intel 10th gen, 11th wasn't out yet.


Then tell me, why would you pay more than two times more for AMD? I just can't come up with any reasonable reason or excuse. Perhaps you have some software that requires AMD only tech, otherwise AMD is a waste of cash.


----------



## GorbazTheDragon (Aug 16, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> I would really like to say that blaming background tasks is one of the lamest excuses for poor performance. Unless you have some rogue tasks or bunch of crap working when it shouldn't, it's a problem, but in any non abusive usage, Windows just doesn't have that much overhead. And I have managed to tweak my older PC to be ultra consistent in benchmarks. So much that even in memory latency benchmark, it doesn't variate by more than 1 ns. Something like Cinebench only variates by point or two.


I do this on my benching systems, you can get great consistency if you kill everything, but most games have launchers which run in the background, I often play while on voice call over discord (wish it was as light as teamspeak was...), closing all browsers and stuff is a pain (most people want to be able to switch quickly from one thing to another, and in some cases it's useful to have a browser window open to refer to something while you are playing), windows services are a thing, drivers required to play the game normally spawn their own threads which the CPU needs to switch to. These are not some RGB or antivirus junkware which hogs a third of your CPU and should never have been installed to start with, these are tasks that are useful to the user or critical to the normal operation of the device in the given workload (think managing network packets of an online game). I can cull down an OS very well to run cinebench and take a screenshot for a hwbot sub, but that is very distant from any practical use case.


The red spirit said:


> Maybe, but recommending i7 is just poor strategy. It cost nearly twice of FX 8350 and more than twice than FX 8320. You could overclock those FX chips and get nearly the same performance for less cash. Obviously, if you have cash to burn, then you often have much better solutions, but important thing is that FX delivered a lot for much less money. And if you were overclocking, ruining FX is less expensive than i7.


I dealt with many threads of people popping VRMs on average tier AM3(+) boards when they overclocked 8320s... Overclocking a powerful CPU takes a good motherboard, this is the same case now with AM4 Vs LGA1200, you need much more motherboard to get good OC mileage with comet/rocket lake than you need for a 5800x or even 5950x. The doubling of the CPU only price was offset by savings you could make elsewhere on the rig and when considering the overall costs getting a used sandy/ivy i7 ($200 or so in 2015) and a passable motherboard was only $50-100 or so more than going with an 8350.

You also have to be careful with modern benchmarks using the spectre/meltdown/MDS security patches on those intel CPUs, those patches were only made around 2018-2019 and are not representative of the performance at the time. Also, consider the games being benchmarked and the relevance to different groups of users.



The red spirit said:


> I have never really benefited from faster RAM or felt a reduction of performance from slow RAM. Only that 1T command rate does increase CPU performance in Cinebench a bit. And the only timing that does make a significant difference in memory benchmarks is tCL. In real world, there's perhaps only a tiny benefit from them both. I even have overclocked DDR3 from 1333 MHz to 1866 MHz once and it was underwhelming. In theory that's 40% increase in memory performance, in reality, it's not even 5% increase in anything else. I actually tweak DDR3 system further to see if there's anything interesting. It seems to be somewhat more responsive in desktop.


You are not testing things which benefit substantially from memory overclocking. I play a number of games that get good returns from memory so it is relevant to my use case. This is something I always try to consider when making recommendations about memory overclocking, CPU overclocking, and even CPU choices in builds. If you are planning on playing games in a very GPU limited fashion and/or are not particularly sensitive to worse performance, don't bother with OCing those parts that aren't the bottleneck, in fact skip a 5600x or 5800x and go with a 3600/3700x or 10400F... But there are many people like me who do play games where performance is strongly tied to memory, games which are naturally CPU bound, and games where performance matters for competitive reasons.


freeagent said:


> 5600X is now 243 euros. Thats a big drop compared to when I bought mine, by well over a hundred bucks with tax.


This, not to mention AM4 boards are substantially cheaper than comparable LGA1200 ones so you recoup a lot of the cost gap there as well. If the prices don't make sense don't buy it, but the global market is in a very dynamic situation at the moment, many low end intel chips for example were not in stock in many places earlier this year, and intel also had their supply shortages with 14nm...

I don't see any reason to be emotional about these products and write them off because you are irritated at a change in price tiers, they are tools for a task and because of these kinds of fluctuations at certain times some are going to be better than others.


The red spirit said:


> JayZ


He is the last person on this planet you should be taking serious advice on when it comes to computers... In one of his videos he has a pre production AM4 board with a beta (never publicly released) BIOS on it, and when it doesn't run properly he makes a video blaming AMD for it without bothering to do any troubleshooting or cross checking with the board vendor or AMD about why the hardware was behaving as it is.

It's close to the equivalent of getting an ES intel CPU and then making a rant about how all Asus motherboards suck because it didn't work in your motherboard.


freeagent said:


> Don't forget that Intel dropped their prices quite a bit too..


Intel prices were actually lower a few months ago, they have gone back up since then which made many of the intel parts questionable value again, especially with the dropping ryzen pricing...

Personally at least, the only place I put real value in intel CPUs at the moment is for competitive gamers who want to run a very well tuned (heavily overclocked) system, in which case they should get a 10900k(f), good 2 DIMM motherboard (apex for example), and a kit of dual rank b-die. In any other case, ryzen 5000 provides better value than intel at every price point except the 10400f which is a questionable product compared to the 3600 due to the dead end platform.

I personally run rocket lake and the only reason is shits and giggles, which is a perfectly valid reason to use any hardware, but I'm definitely not going to go out and tell people it's good...


----------



## The red spirit (Aug 17, 2021)

GorbazTheDragon said:


> I do this on my benching systems, you can get great consistency if you kill everything, but most games have launchers which run in the background, I often play while on voice call over discord (wish it was as light as teamspeak was...), closing all browsers and stuff is a pain (most people want to be able to switch quickly from one thing to another, and in some cases it's useful to have a browser window open to refer to something while you are playing), windows services are a thing, drivers required to play the game normally spawn their own threads which the CPU needs to switch to. These are not some RGB or antivirus junkware which hogs a third of your CPU and should never have been installed to start with, these are tasks that are useful to the user or critical to the normal operation of the device in the given workload (think managing network packets of an online game). I can cull down an OS very well to run cinebench and take a screenshot for a hwbot sub, but that is very distant from any practical use case.


That doesn't seem like it would be real. My daily system doesn't have much variation either and I barely did anything special to Windows 10. Rogue task at best would reduce fps slightly, but it wouldn't cause massive fps drops or awful spikes. Obviously, you can load your PC with junk, but it takes effort and makes no sense. So any normal Windows installation should be reasonably tame. This is not single core era, where everything mattered.

I just checked my systems' RAM latency variance. With web browser and torrent client on, I saw variation of only 1 ns and my RAM latency is 60.8-61.8 ns. And that's mostly just lame Windows 10 and I use Windows Defender. That latency variation could be simply due to CPU boosting 100MHz more for a moment.  With notepad, file explorer, torrent client, AIDA64, I ran Cinebench R23 3 times to see variance of results. And it was just 55 points and average score was 8160 points. That's basically meaningless variation and it wouldn't cause any stuttering or actually noticeable reduction of fps. During benchmarking, there's no bunch of shit open and only Windows is might interfere, so this variation would be even lower. It's so tiny, that it's almost irrelevant. I highly doubt that Windows cruft is really having much effect on those i3s. I would suspect code that isn't meant for low thread count, that is ruining their performance and making gaming stuttery.




GorbazTheDragon said:


> I dealt with many threads of people popping VRMs on average tier AM3(+) boards when they overclocked 8320s... Overclocking a powerful CPU takes a good motherboard, this is the same case now with AM4 Vs LGA1200, you need much more motherboard to get good OC mileage with comet/rocket lake than you need for a 5800x or even 5950x. The doubling of the CPU only price was offset by savings you could make elsewhere on the rig and when considering the overall costs getting a used sandy/ivy i7 ($200 or so in 2015) and a passable motherboard was only $50-100 or so more than going with an 8350.


One line, Gigabyte 970A-UD3P. 




GorbazTheDragon said:


> You also have to be careful with modern benchmarks using the spectre/meltdown/MDS security patches on those intel CPUs, those patches were only made around 2018-2019 and are not representative of the performance at the time. Also, consider the games being benchmarked and the relevance to different groups of users.


Patches came latter sure, but you wouldn't use those chips without them. RA tech actually benchmarked i3 without patches and it barely gained any performance. Framerate was still not smooth.




GorbazTheDragon said:


> You are not testing things which benefit substantially from memory overclocking. I play a number of games that get good returns from memory so it is relevant to my use case. This is something I always try to consider when making recommendations about memory overclocking, CPU overclocking, and even CPU choices in builds. If you are planning on playing games in a very GPU limited fashion and/or are not particularly sensitive to worse performance, don't bother with OCing those parts that aren't the bottleneck, in fact skip a 5600x or 5800x and go with a 3600/3700x or 10400F... But there are many people like me who do play games where performance is strongly tied to memory, games which are naturally CPU bound, and games where performance matters for competitive reasons.


In that case, you gain more from CPU overclock or power limit increase, or even setting power plan to ultimate.




GorbazTheDragon said:


> This, not to mention AM4 boards are substantially cheaper than comparable LGA1200 ones so you recoup a lot of the cost gap there as well. If the prices don't make sense don't buy it, but the global market is in a very dynamic situation at the moment, many low end intel chips for example were not in stock in many places earlier this year, and intel also had their supply shortages with 14nm...
> 
> I don't see any reason to be emotional about these products and write them off because you are irritated at a change in price tiers, they are tools for a task and because of these kinds of fluctuations at certain times some are going to be better than others.


That was never a case where I live.




GorbazTheDragon said:


> He is the last person on this planet you should be taking serious advice on when it comes to computers... In one of his videos he has a pre production AM4 board with a beta (never publicly released) BIOS on it, and when it doesn't run properly he makes a video blaming AMD for it without bothering to do any troubleshooting or cross checking with the board vendor or AMD about why the hardware was behaving as it is.


While he may fail at being objective, I'm pretty sure he got some experimental Intel boards too. He also mentions that some problems were never fixed. His arguments are quite realistic too, come on first gen Ryzen certainly had issues with memory compatibility and stability. And Ryzens definitely had issues with USB. It's also true that OEMs had to do tons of BIOS patchworks to make it as stable and reliable as it is today. I remember his video about APU, where he bought brand new cheap board, APU and the rest. Graphics drivers were glitchy. So far Ryzen could be best described as fat (those latencies) bleeding patient, who is patched up, but still occasionally bleeds. So all in all, Ryzen 1 was poor, Ryzen 2 was improved, but still had issues often. Ryzen 3 became rather decent. Ryzen 5 still can have USB issues, but is good, unfortunately overpriced and not available. That might not be catastrophic, but since Nehalem, Intel didn't have nearly as many problems with any of their consumer platforms.  And certainly no disaster like Ryzen 1st gen. Their biggest fails so far were melting motherboards in Pentium D era, dying Northwoods due to electromigration, PL shenanigans that murder cheap boards. That's it. I hear of some SATA issues with Sandy Bridge, but I think it was HEDT platform only. 




GorbazTheDragon said:


> Personally at least, the only place I put real value in intel CPUs at the moment is for competitive gamers who want to run a very well tuned (heavily overclocked) system, in which case they should get a 10900k(f), good 2 DIMM motherboard (apex for example), and a kit of dual rank b-die. In any other case, ryzen 5000 provides better value than intel at every price point except the 10400f which is a questionable product compared to the 3600 due to the dead end platform.


Why not 10600KF? Games still poorly benefit from more cores. And AM4 is dead end too. There won't be any AMD CPU made for AM4 anymore, AMD is moving to AM5. LGA1200 at least got one lame refresh for Celerons-i3s. And anyway if you are are in that market segment, one gen update doesn't matter to you. You won't upgrade Ryzen 3600 soon and when it will be inadequate, you will need entirely new platform anyway. Honestly, Ryzen 3600 must last 8 years since launch, there's no reason why it should. Now it has plenty of power and runs games way above 60 fps. It will take a long time until it will not be able to maintain 60 fps or acceptable framerates. Then there will be much faster, much power efficient and overall better chips. Also motherboards will be massively upgraded and there will be at least DDR5, if not DDR6. That minor upgrade to say 5800X just won't make sense, even if it is cheap. Not to mention that after all those years you hardware is to certain extent worn out, who knows, maybe motherboard won't last much longer. So it only makes sense to replace CPU, board, RAM and likely SSD. 




GorbazTheDragon said:


> I personally run rocket lake and the only reason is shits and giggles, which is a perfectly valid reason to use any hardware, but I'm definitely not going to go out and tell people it's good...


But why not. It's a rather decent platform and your i9 certainly doesn't lag and it performs well. The only disadvantages are heat and questionable value, but if you get i7 instead, value is much better and there is PL tuning to contain that CPU, so... It's a bit worse than Ryzen, but it's also so similar that they are basically equivalents and it doesn't really matter that much which you have. And then there is i5 11400F, which is just plain good value that murders Ryzens.


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## GorbazTheDragon (Aug 17, 2021)

The red spirit said:


> My daily system doesn't have much variation either and I barely did anything special to Windows 10.


It's a 6c12t part, it won't suffer from performance loss due to context (thread) switching with any at this time reasonable amount of background tasks. Go below 12t and it will quickly start to become worse though.


The red spirit said:


> saw variation of only 1 ns and my RAM latency is 60.8-61.8 ns.


This looks about normal. Even on a benching OS most memory latency tests have around this variance.


The red spirit said:


> And it was just 55 points and average score was 8160 points.


This is much higher variation than on a benching system... I don't run r23 much but on r15 and r20 you should get around a quarter of a percent variation on a good benching OS.


The red spirit said:


> I would suspect code that isn't meant for low thread count, that is ruining their performance and making gaming stuttery.


There isn't really a way to code for high thread count without actually saturating many cores, if you run lots of threads which do a little work, as long as your context switching overhead is not becoming dominant, it is actually beneficial to have them on the same cores because usually they have shared data which will end up just staying in the private caches (L1/L2) of the CPU cores, rather than having to go to L3 to retrieve it.


The red spirit said:


> Patches came latter sure, but you wouldn't use those chips without them


I wouldn't now, but I was talking about FX Vs intel in pre zen era so they should not be considered in the comparison because even if you wanted to run them back then you couldn't have.


The red spirit said:


> Why not 10600KF?


Loses to AMD, maybe not on an apex with dual rank b die, but if you are running that setup a) money isn't a problem so you can just go the 10900k(f) and b) value is thrown out the window. 



The red spirit said:


> And AM4 is dead end too. There won't be any AMD CPU made for AM4 anymore


AMD has said they will be making consumer products with 3d cache zen3, these will almost certainly be drop in replacements for existing zen 3 designs.


The red spirit said:


> You won't upgrade Ryzen 3600 soon and when it will be inadequate, you will need entirely new platform anyway.


I think this argument only applies to drop in replacements and where the performance uplift on the platform is small. A 5800x in 2-3 years time (or a 3d cache zen3) will be quite a lot cheaper than they are now.



The red spirit said:


> But why not


Zen 3 does everything RKL does, but better... CML does performance and tuning better...



The red spirit said:


> And then there is i5 11400F, which is just plain good value that murders Ryzens.


Until you account for the higher motherboard and cooling costs. The 10400F runs away with the value game compared to the 11400F.


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## The red spirit (Aug 17, 2021)

GorbazTheDragon said:


> It's a 6c12t part, it won't suffer from performance loss due to context (thread) switching with any at this time reasonable amount of background tasks. Go below 12t and it will quickly start to become worse though.


While those parts are more sensitive, my quick testing still shows variation so tiny that it's almost not a variation. And most of that variation can be due to different boost step, if particular tested core was in C state. That's enough to sway score as much. On the other hand, my other system has near zero variation. In latency test, variation is no more than 0.2 ns. Cinebench R15 score variation is 2 points max. CPU-Z variation is 4 points only. One thing is that it doesn't use any boost and other is that CPU is always ("FSB" still variates a bit) at same speed. Other than that, it's just cleaned up Windows 7 installation on spinning rust with Bitdefender free 



GorbazTheDragon said:


> This looks about normal. Even on a benching OS most memory latency tests have around this variance.


But that's with background tasks or in other words needlessly bloated OS (kinda). And to me that doesn't look good. My memory has 5 ns lower latency normally, variation is also smaller up to 0.5 ns. 



GorbazTheDragon said:


> This is much higher variation than on a benching system... I don't run r23 much but on r15 and r20 you should get around a quarter of a percent variation on a good benching OS.


Sorry, but that's unrealistic. If you test CPUs with turbo boost and C-states on, there will be variation and certainly more than quarter percent. And since CPUs now have far more power saving features (EIST, Ring to core offset, Race to halt, energy efficient turbo, real time memory timing just to list some, more high end BIOSes may have more options available and on Zen, there are other features). I will mention that C-states are particularly not great for benchmarking with balanced power plan. They reduce CPU cache performance, ruin SSD IOPS and access times, make random cores asleep. Depending on power limit selected (Intel spec for i5 10400F is PL1 - 65 watts, PL2 - 134 watts, CPU performance will also variate. You also can't turn off C-states as those are mandatory if you want to let CPU to reach higher non all core boost states. You also need Speedshift on, because boost is somewhat broken without it.

Let's not forget that this is with junk in background. For that, it's not bad and it certainly wouldn't cause stuttering or massive frame drops. That can only reduce framerate by 1-2 fps. Unless you try to run something on Intel Atom or AMD E something, then yeah maybe that will matter then.



GorbazTheDragon said:


> There isn't really a way to code for high thread count without actually saturating many cores, if you run lots of threads which do a little work, as long as your context switching overhead is not becoming dominant, it is actually beneficial to have them on the same cores because usually they have shared data which will end up just staying in the private caches (L1/L2) of the CPU cores, rather than having to go to L3 to retrieve it.


In other words you just said what I said.



GorbazTheDragon said:


> I wouldn't now, but I was talking about FX Vs intel in pre zen era so they should not be considered in the comparison because even if you wanted to run them back then you couldn't have.


Oh well:









Situation isn't much different even those years ago. 









						AMD FX-8350 Review: Does Piledriver Fix Bulldozer's Flaws?
					

Last year, AMD launched its Bulldozer architecture to disappointed enthusiasts who were hoping to see the company rise to its former glory. Today, we get an FX processor based on the Piledriver update. Does it give power users something to celebrate?




					www.tomshardware.com
				



Even in Skyrim at worst, FX got 85 fps, ivy i7 got 114 fps. Performance difference is 34%. Perhaps spectre and meltdown patches did affect some Intel part, but that was 25 second benchmark. So it's dubious at best. In many other benchmarks difference is non existent or at worst 35%. In gaming benchmarks difference has been quite small overall. Fun thing is that FX often beat ivy i5, which was considered to be higher end chip than FX. In some benches FX also managed to beat i7 and often it beat i5.









						AMD FX 8350 processor review
					

We review the AMD FX 8350 processor. Also known as the Vishera generation with PileDriver cores, today  FX 8300 series is tested. It is AMD's most high-end and processor series to date, yet will remain an affordable processor series.  Game performance - Far Cry 2 | Crysis 2




					www.guru3d.com
				



I have found one bench where FX sucked hard. Far Cry 2 benchmark. It was bottlenecking GPU really badly there. i7 was nearly two times faster at low resolution. That's it, other benches showed that FX still decently competitive and in SHA1 hashing bench FX actually was faster than i7 and for that matter, it was the fastest CPU they had. It even beat i7 3960X, a Sandy Bridge behemoth with tons of cache, 130 watt TDP, quad channel memory, 6 cores and 12 threads.   

So, once games were updated to utilize more cores, FX started to shine. But before that, FX gave performance good enough anyway. Is it really any wonder that FX aged well? Back in 2012 people said that FX will age better. Pretty much everyone knew that. And that became reality. FX doesn't beat i7 in gaming, but it didn't have to. It was priced much lower and did quite well. FX was doing quite well in productivity benches too. 

Also that benchmark video was with both CPUs at 4.5GHz, which is quite a handicap for FX and big boost for Intel.




GorbazTheDragon said:


> Loses to AMD, maybe not on an apex with dual rank b die, but if you are running that setup a) money isn't a problem so you can just go the 10900k(f) and b) value is thrown out the window.


Does it really lose? 









The difference is small, i5 is actually overclockable. And no if you buy i5, money is still a problem. You still save a ton with i5. Argument about board and cooling doesn't work either, you need beefy VRMs and good cooler, both run hot (Ryzen runs hotter) and if you don't want you board throttling or kicking the bucket fast, you need to spend more on it anyway. Applies to both Intel and AMD. You can also put some of that gamer RAM on i5 and you will see AMD being beaten. Otherwise spending premium on RAM is stupid, get a better cooler and clock CPU higher, far better gains.



GorbazTheDragon said:


> AMD has said they will be making consumer products with 3d cache zen3, these will almost certainly be drop in replacements for existing zen 3 designs.


So why would they make that new 1700 pin socket then? Anyway, it's still same old Zen 3, it's just one refresh left on AM4 at most. It's dead end. AMD may also pull the same you need another board since BIOS chip is too small, so buy into dead end AM4 again.



GorbazTheDragon said:


> I think this argument only applies to drop in replacements and where the performance uplift on the platform is small. A 5800x in 2-3 years time (or a 3d cache zen3) will be quite a lot cheaper than they are now.


Upgrade from 3600 to 5600X would only make sense if it was truly cheap, no more than 50 USD. Otherwise, it's just not worth it. And there will be faster and better CPUs by then. 5600X will not look so hot anymore.



GorbazTheDragon said:


> Zen 3 does everything RKL does, but better... CML does performance and tuning better...


Comet Lake isn't meaningfully better at tuning and certainly not at performance. At 6 core tier, Rocket Lake is better. AM4 is even better, but it costs too much to make any sense.



GorbazTheDragon said:


> Until you account for the higher motherboard and cooling costs. The 10400F runs away with the value game compared to the 11400F.


They are virtually identical. 11400F is same 10400F, but with better memory support and AVX512. That's it, there aren't any other changes. So you realistically buy almost same board (just update it to B560) and same cooler. New i5 isn't hotter. New i5 runs colder than older one:








						Intel Core i5-11400F Review - The Best Rocket Lake
					

The Core i5-11400F is Intel's most affordable Rocket Lake processor. While its multiplier is locked, you can still adjust the power limit. Once we did that, the CPU ran over 15% faster and almost matched the Core i5-11600K. We also made an interesting discovery regarding Gear 1 vs. Gear 2.




					www.techpowerup.com
				




By as much as 9C.


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