A lot of budget builders like to keep their systems for 5 years sometimes longer.... Especially on intel platforms where the cost of moving to better chips like the 6500k to the 6700k is very prohibitive. intel offering more threads at the low end is a very good thing. A 6 core 12 thread chip for less than 200 is way better than a 6 core 6 thread offering at the same price for people who want to stick with intel. Especially when you start to look at cpu demanding game engines or them wanting to be able to stream and game at the same time at a good quality level.
RTX GPU stream pretty damn good these days without a huge hit to performance so that's a good alternative.
At the same time the majority of people in this price range having potato gpu well under a 2060/5700 class card means it may not matter even if they have a Ryzen 1500X for the life of the platform and at that point you may as well still get the cpu with actual better general performance that a 12 thread cpu will give you especially at the same price.
Am4 is a different animal as amd supports more cpu generations per socket and lower price previous generation offerings giving budget shoppers more choice even if they had to go quad core at the start.
Unlike you and me who will likely ditch their motherboards and systems after 2-3 years if necessary making it irrelevant.
Yeah I get that. In my case, I stuck it out with an Unlocked 970 Zosma (Thuban) based core since 2012.
So that's 2012 to 2020 on the same processor.
I was overjoyed to find that I could actually unlock extra cores. That little bit of "hidden" knowledge and the ability to activate these hidden cores is what makes me value the Phenom II as my favorite processor of all time. I called it my Phenom II X6 1705T, with a 189W TDP.
And believe me, at the time I worked remotely, 7-8 hours a day I was online, the computer was used intensively. Over the years I upgraded parts and continued tweaking to get the most out of it that I could. At first glance, you might see a huge disparity, as in, why the hell would I do something like that? Truth be told, the only thing lacking in a Phenom II is current instruction sets. It's still a stout processor, almost a decade gone by. That's why I held on to it. Because with DDR3 1600, 1T command rate and an overclocked memory controller to 3Ghz really wakes it up - because L3 cache speed runs at the full 3000MHz. The platform is very flushed out and sorted, especially when you compare to LGA775.
So yeah, I held on to this as my main system for way too long. But in the last few years, I was conducting an experiment more to see if the Phenom II hexacore was still competent processor for basic use and even moderate gaming in the modern world. Obviously no "heavy" work loads, but in my world, I value per core performance and lower latency over multi core crunching power. So it's a trade off, and this is another reason I chose the 9600KF over the 9900K. The same gaming performance without the cost. No compromise.
I will be building a dedicated "benching" machine that will be decked out with suitable hardware. So I am very much interested in multi core crunching power, but not needed for my main machine.
There is a reason Phenom II hexacores still sell for well over $100 on eBay.
And yes, in the larger scheme of things, I do agree the gap is too small to favor either one over the other at the same price. Most people do have more purposes for CPUs than gaming.
