New PT Data: i9-9900K is 66% Pricier While Being Just 12% Faster than 2700X at Gaming

[Dave65]

The big difference between comparing the 9900k and 2700x at stock speeds is the Intel option can OC to another 500mhz minimum, while the 2700x is basically running at its max frequency already. So take that 12% advantage and make it around 20% after tweaking.

Ryzen at 4.2ghz all core vs Intel at 5.3 is a bit more than 12% I think.

And that's going with 8700k levels of OC. It's entirely possible the 9700/9900 can do 5.5.

Trying to put a square peg in a round hole... Try harder next time!

 

[GreiverBlade]

"There is no bad hardware. Only bad prices."

unless AMD ... price aren't "that" bad, with them ...

oh well confirmed either next Ryzen gen or a 2700X, the 9900K is not worth it, and i doubt the 9600/9700 will do better ... in term of price and well 12% faster is a joke

perf report oh well as long as the 2700X isn't under 60fps it's all right (ashes of singularity? crazy? mah that one is a joke too ... and 55 to 35 is not that horrible ) and it isn't in any of the game i play
no stomping no overwhelming domination (7 month later ... ) except in price (for overwhelming domination) and "look at our benchmark we are better" (for stomping their feet on the ground)

 

[Deleted member 178884]

For me, this should be the price of a top-level quadcore

Well that's a joke.

AMD screwed the market with Ryzen, and now people expect too much for too little, IMHO.

Amd fixed the market*

I paid $1250 CAD for my QX9650. That was a 3.0 GHz quad with 12 MB of cache, and a 130W TDP, a decade ago.

Great job for intel ripping you off - that's when they had no competition.

 

[notb]

https://www.techpowerup.com/247799/...uirements-revealed-8-threads-8-gb-ram-minimum

You know this is not true, right? A clickbait title, that's all.

 

[R0H1T]

Well, you know, I'm just looking at the big picture since I left being an enthusiast buying these top-end chips to being a reviewer/writer that gets them for free, and how the market has shifted since then, as I've recently returned to being that enthusiast, and not a reviewer. So now that I have to buy my hardware again, what do I have to spend? Less for more? I mean, yeah, sure those AMD chips are great, and I don't knock that at all, but the shift in people's perceptions of what's needed, and what they expect, to me, is grossly exaggerated, and a big part of why is that $250 8-core, yep.

You've only proved my point.

Now, I'm not saying you are wrong, at all, but man, how things have changed... boy how they have changed.

I've got my mITX 7980XE CPU on my desk in front of me. It's crazy how much more I am getting now for what to me, is so little, both in size, and power use.

Alright so does Intel need to charge $500 for an 8 core part, when they own their fabs & pretty much have an iron grip on supply chain & OEM, ODM like HP, Dell, ASUS et al? Do you think it's a coincidence that their supply chain is facing shortages when consumer chip prices are going through the roof, are people still buying overpriced stuff only because it's Intel? What about the enterprise sector, does the coupon code "EPYC" work anymore?

You sound like someone who'd be fine with Intel overcharging for small or some times non existent upgrades. Do you realize how the consumer market is aiding & abetting this greedy company, or Nvidia ~ like the Dells, HPs did in the past ~ even if unwittingly?

 

[newtekie1]

Yet, few seem to understand multi-threaded compute or how doing so can reduce latency. Like @newtekie1 and DMC... latency of all that's going on, and syncing all those data streams properly to a specific FPS cap (and why there are FPS caps) seems unimportant, and cache amounts are unimportant. People tend to look at raw performance in interesting ways these days, and maybe don't understand the benefits things outside the CPU core can offer.

Finding ways to show this properly might be very difficult though.

It isn't that I don't understand multi-threading or how it can help latency. I just don't believe that 8 threads is needed to achieve the types of latencies needed for any game, even DMC.

 

[JalleR]

sooo what i´m reading is..

Gaming on (ry)Zen

Gaming on Intel

 

[notb]

And your z370/90 board becomes useless next gen, at this stage your paying as much as a HEDT platform.

To be honest, there's most likely just one Zen generation coming to AM4. AMD said they'll replace the platform in 2020, AFAIR.
Just a tiny part of the market replaces CPUs every generation. This means if you buy into an either system today, you'll most likely have to replace the mobo next time.

5-10% typical gains is puny in terms of high refresh rate gaming

5-10% is the performance increase we get every year (not including occasional core count increase). In other words, 9900K is a year or more before the competition. Not bad, right?

And now get the real-life usage of a 1080Ti which is minimum 1440P, maybe more often 4K, both of where the difference shrinks to about zero. Moreover, what can you do with 400 fps when the maximum is a 240 Hz monitor?

There's a good reason why low-res tests are important. Read about it.
I precisely said the >200fps results aren't interesting, but they give you some idea about CPU performance nevertheless (and how well it copes with high fps).

TPU's Gaming Performance Summary will show a gap under 10% I am betting.

It's hard to say what TPU review will show, looking at what's happening lately. But you may be surprised by results at least from some reviewers.

That's certainly a weird thing to say and with an elitist allure to it. But what market exactly did they screw ? There were no 8 cores in the mainstream to begin with or anything of the sort.

The CPU market, obviously. You think that pushing prices down is good for the consumer? Have you ever heard or experienced a phenomenon called "price war"?
It's never good for consumers in the long term. But enjoy your cheap gaming CPU if that's all you care for...

 

[dj-electric]

Intel is selling the 9900K CPU for 499$ because it does not want to participate in said price war. It is purely by Intel's choice and has a very clear (seems like at least to some of us) what the intention is behind it

 

[Shatun_Bear]

For me, this should be the price of a top-level quadcore, not a 6-core or an 8-core. AMD screwed the market with Ryzen, and now people expect too much for too little, IMHO.
I paid $1250 CAD for my QX9650. That was a 3.0 GHz quad with 12 MB of cache, and a 130W TDP, a decade ago.
That wasn't HEDT.
So today, a decade later, we got a chip with twice the cores, capable of 166% the speed, with similar cache, for $600? I call that not bad, really.
This new CPU isn't the ever-popular E6600 replacement... It DIRECTLY replaces that old QX9650. It SHOULD cost $1250 CAD.
See above. we've gone from $1000 USD top-level chips to $600. That's fine by me. In the grand scheme of things, we're getting a deal as of late, and that deal was in place in order to grow the market. That didn't work that well, so now they've been forced to increase those margins a bit again. At least they didn't jump back to what they did a decade previous. I don't blame Intel one bit.

This has got to be the most stupid thing I've read on here in a long time. Intel should charge more and AMD 'screwed the market' by offering more value to us consumers?!

 

[dgianstefani]

Exactly. A very basic point so many here seem to be missing. You're not going to be CPU bottlenecked even with a 8600k OC, let alone an 8700k, 9600k, 9700k or a 9900k. People just like to quote apples to apples gaming performance as if average FPS is all that matters.

Fact: Intel 99th percentile low FPS are generally higher than Ryzen average
Fact: An OC'd 8350k (£150) or even a i5 8400 stock (£160) can and will do better than a Ryzen 2700x (£300) in 1080p gaming.
Fact: Intel doesn't give a f**k about your perceived injustices, they make the fastest products and can charge what they like. Considering Intel is beating a 12nm Ryzen with twice the cores/threads against a 14nm+ quad core, 2 year old 7700k in gaming and believe it or not, a lot of Adobe software, I don't really think they're that bothered by your opinion on their latest flagship.
Fact: Ryzen CPU's are great, they're just not as great as Intel ones if a hundred pounds or so surcharge doesn't matter to you.
Fact: AMD is not your lord and saviour, and neither is Intel, buy logically and trust benchmarks that are relevant.
Fact: Being a fanboy and beating on people that disagree with you is not very mature.

 

[Upgrayedd]

For me, this should be the price of a top-level quadcore, not a 6-core or an 8-core. AMD screwed the market with Ryzen, and now people expect too much for too little, IMHO.

I paid $1250 CAD for my QX9650. That was a 3.0 GHz quad with 12 MB of cache, and a 130W TDP, a decade ago.


That wasn't HEDT.

So today, a decade later, we got a chip with twice the cores, capable of 166% the speed, with similar cache, for $600? I call that not bad, really.

This new CPU isn't the ever-popular E6600 replacement... It DIRECTLY replaces that old QX9650. It SHOULD cost $1250 CAD.



See above. we've gone from $1000 USD top-level chips to $600. That's fine by me. In the grand scheme of things, we're getting a deal as of late, and that deal was in place in order to grow the market. That didn't work that well, so now they've been forced to increase those margins a bit again. At least they didn't jump back to what they did a decade previous. I don't blame Intel one bit.

Was this a commissioned comment?

 

[efikkan]

5-10% is the performance increase we get every year (not including occasional core count increase). In other words, 9900K is a year or more before the competition. Not bad, right?

Sure, but I still would consider that a "gross oversimplification". Firstly as you know, pretty much all Skylake CPUs >4 GHz are performing close to the same in gaming, so even the i5-9600K($262) will be more than sufficient for gaming.

Even if we assume your 5-10% annual gain, it's not like current AMD CPUs are where Intel's CPUs were one year ago when it comes to gaming. The good news for AMD is that for gaming the CPU only have to be fast enough not to bottleneck the GPU, any performance beyond that might help other workloads, but there are diminishing returns gaming. Even with more demanding games, this is not going to change much for the worse. The bad news is that games represent some of the least scalable types of CPU load. Even just talking about IPC will be too simplified here, since that's more a measurement of throughput across a wide range of workloads, and have many nuances, which pretty much require an engineering degree in software and hardware design to fully grasp. You can put in more resources like ALUs or FPUs, it will help a lot for computational intensive workloads, but does nearly nothing for workloads bottlenecked by cache misses and branch mispredictions. On the other hand, improving the prefetcher will do a lot for such workloads, including gaming. Bumping clocks to compensate for this is not a solution either, since it will not help with the bottlenecks of a prefetcher. So to put it simply, a new hypothetical CPU which may get 10% more single thread performance in average, even through a mix of IPC and clock speed improvements, might still just see a 2% improvement in games.

AMD does have a lot of good design choices in Zen, but they still have a long way to go for their prefetcher. This will probably take several iterations to close the gap almost completely, and it will require a lot of die space, but I do expect them to eventually get there. Probably not next year, but maybe in 3-5 years. I would love for AMD to exceed my expectation, but that would require major improvements in their prefetcher.

 

[Xzibit]

 

[Vya Domus]

I find it interesting how this turned into an argument about how Intel should keep charging more and how that's actually great for us.

Quite astonishing.

 

[GoldenX]

sooo what i´m reading is..

Gaming on (ry)Zen

View attachment 108620



Gaming on Intel

View attachment 108622

I'm a first gen. Ryzen user, to set the memory just right I enabled XMP and then changed frequency to 3333MHz, that's it, same as Intel. After that, happy gaming.
You never overclocked before? Or just a bad troll.

 

[R-T-B]

Was this a commissioned comment?

Nope, I can tell you Dave is using his own thoughts here. For better or worse.

 

[cadaveca]

Great job for intel ripping you off - that's when they had no competition.

They didn't rip me off; I was into benchmarking under LN2, and I wanted the CPU with the best benchmark capabilities. Just so happens that the CPU I got was #3 or #4 out of all qx9650, ever. As someone that benchmarks, that cost isn't something you let stand in the way of trying to get a record spot.

That's when Intel's good chips had a "T" next to the s-spec batch number for their really good ones. I found one at the local PC store and dropped cash in an instant. It was totally worth it.

Alright so does Intel need to charge $500 for an 8 core part, when they own their fabs & pretty much have an iron grip on supply chain & OEM, ODM like HP, Dell, ASUS et al? Do you think it's a coincidence that their supply chain is facing shortages when consumer chip prices are going through the roof, are people still buying overpriced stuff only because it's Intel? What about the enterprise sector, does the coupon code "EPYC" work anymore?

You sound like someone who'd be fine with Intel overcharging for small or some times non existent upgrades. Do you realize how the consumer market is aiding & abetting this greedy company, or Nvidia ~ like the Dells, HPs did in the past ~ even if unwittingly?

You bet I'm fine with it. I don't mind paying top dollar for excellence. I'm not part of the "I'm entitled to the best no matter what" generation. I want top dollar for my own work, too, so to me, if I ask for top dollars, then it is only fair that others do the same. Of course, if you want to be underpaid, then your stance makes sense, to me.

A top-level CPU of any generation should be considered a luxury, and priced accordingly. They should be rare, and not mass-produced. They should NOT be in everyone's computer. Nobody REALLY needs that in their personal PC, anyway. Work PC, depending on that work, sure, it might be required, but for home users... totally not required. Considering the number of people that say you don't need 8 cores or 16 threads for gaming, then yep... I really do think Intel is undercharging, and although many don't want to admit it, their stance is quite close ot mine in that it's excessive.. so excessive price is warranted, in my books.

You all and what I view as your "overly-entitled" opinions is part of why I don't do reviews any more. It's very hard for me to relate to your thinking. I guess I'm just old.

Was this a commissioned comment?

I wish. I know it says staff next to my name, but that'll change soon enough. I have no part in this industry any more. I'm just a normal user, just like you.

I'm sorry my opinion is different than yours, but its truly how I feel. Great things need high prices. I don't buy cheap stuff, either... I wait and save my pennies.

It isn't that I don't understand multi-threading or how it can help latency. I just don't believe that 8 threads is needed to achieve the types of latencies needed for any game, even DMC.

I don't think 8 threads is required either, but the added cache and overall core design offered by that CPU (not at max speed) does help for sure in keeping those latencies low. Note that it's a 65W i7-4770 (3.4 GHz), and not a 95W i7-4770K.

Nope, I can tell you Dave is using his own thoughts here. For better or worse.

Well, you know I demand perfection, and expect to pay for it. Not everyone can understand this line of thinking, but then, not everyone can afford to. Oh well. Different mindsets, but that's cool. I appreciate that popular opinion differs than mine, for sure.

I'm a first gen. Ryzen user, to set the memory just right I enabled XMP and then changed frequency to 3333MHz, that's it, same as Intel. After that, happy gaming.
You never overclocked before? Or just a bad troll.

You know full well you got the right memory to work with Ryzen, and that Ryzen was rife with memory issues at launch, and while they improved over time, are still not exactly perfect. I mean, my TR-1950X has ZERO problems running 3600 MHz, so clearly some of the CPUs are capable of high memory speeds, but not all are, and many boards have poor BIOSes for memory clocking.

 

[Xaser04]

I'm a first gen. Ryzen user, to set the memory just right I enabled XMP and then changed frequency to 3333MHz, that's it, same as Intel. After that, happy gaming.
You never overclocked before? Or just a bad troll.

Sounds pretty similar to my experience on both platforms (8700K & 2700X) - Install memory, enable XMP, check everything is as it should be and then.. enjoy.

Meanwhile my other Ryzen system gets a little more.... UEFI playtime. Saying that is does look like this:

 

[swirl09]

In my eyes, all computers are fairly cheap. They used to be $5000+. And they weren't even workstation class.

Like most things in life, it goes through cycles. Its been on the up recently, so it does feel like we're paying a lot atm. But they certainly are not at a peak, I remember paying hundreds for just a CD-ROM drive when they were the new thing. The list goes on, but stuff wasnt cheap and you didnt have the selection on certain parts that you do now either.

Having said that, the price of RAM does feel extortionate, simply because of what you could get a few years ago. As I was putting together a mock basket today, it felt odd going from 32gb of 3200 cl14 to .... 32gb of 3200 cl14 ram o.0 while paying double :O

Am waiting for real i7 and i9 benches and to see if AMD responds. Hadnt originally planned on building a new machine til next year, but with the early arrival of the Ti, I would like something new now.

 

[GoldenX]

Sounds pretty similar to my experience on both platforms (8700K & 2700X) - Install memory, enable XMP, check everything is as it should be and then.. enjoy.

Meanwhile my other Ryzen system gets a little more.... UEFI playtime. Saying that is does look like this:

Those Founders Edition coolers look so good.

 

[Xaser04]

Purely for testing purposes I am on the hunt for another 690 and Titan (OG).

 

[Batailleuse]

2900Mhz memory for ryzen tho. They sshould have tested with 4200Mhz on both and then the difference would be less Than 5% overall because ryzen scales way much better off ram speed than Intel.

 

[Deleted member 158293]

Latest GPU & CPU hardware releases are for...

High paying enthusiast or spendthrift chumps?

I'm definitely leaving towards chumps.

 

[GoldenX]

You know full well you got the right memory to work with Ryzen, and that Ryzen was rife with memory issues at launch, and while they improved over time, are still not exactly perfect. I mean, my TR-1950X has ZERO problems running 3600 MHz, so clearly some of the CPUs are capable of high memory speeds, but not all are, and many boards have poor BIOSes for memory clocking.

It' a very old DDR4 module, it's not Ryzen optimized, it's not Samsung B-die, it's a common, cheap 2400MHz kit, so no excuses, it worked even with the first BIOS.
Newer BIOS versions allowed me to reach 3333 instead of 3200, that's all that changed over time. Maybe expensive RAM is harder to configure?