GPUs & CPUs & Enthusiast hardware: Questions, Discussion and fanboy slap-fights - Nvidia & AMD & Intel - Separe but Equal. Intel rides in the back of the bus.

[BPD Gunt Rider]

I recently bought an Alienware AW3821DW monitor. I’m pretty excited since it will be my first ultrawide. Anyone else have experience with this monitor? I didn’t want to go OLED mainly to avoid the text fringing and burn in issues. Also I don’t like how reflective most oled panels are.

I've used the 34 inch QD-OLED one and it's beautiful. I own a LG C1 variant, and once you go OLED for gaming, it's very hard to go back. Also, I'm 3000 hours of usage with my OLED and no issues, if that means anything.

 

[seri0us]

I've used the 34 inch QD-OLED one and it's beautiful. I own a LG C1 variant, and once you go OLED for gaming, it's very hard to go back. Also, I'm 3000 hours of usage with my OLED and no issues, if that means anything.

Sounds like when my current LCD turns to dust that I have a new standard to aspire for.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

The Zen 2 Threadripper with only 4 memory channels sucked, but at the time, I guess it was good for 16 cores, and Ryzen/Core didn't go that high. We just needed more than that.

I was under the impression that Threadripper models with 8 populated memory channels did not result in a huge benefit in most workloads. Obviously, some users would see benefits and it sounds like you did. Threadripper is not for me, so what do I know? Stuff I half remember reading years ago.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-threadripper-pro-3995wx-review/5

https://www.phoronix.com/review/threadripper-5965wx-ram/2

Intel is talking the big talk again, with Meteor Lake and other details. Meteor Lake's iGPU performance for the 128 EU model should be about double the performance of the previous 96 EU models, putting it near AMD's Phoenix (7040 series). It also has up to 8 ray tracing units (AMD added hardware ray tracing support in Rembrandt/6000 series). Media and Display engines have been disaggregated from the iGPU.

There are two additional E-cores located in a separate tile/chiplet from the usual P-cores and E-cores. If it works properly, Meteor Lake's idle power usage should be extremely low. I suppose all cores can run at the same time, giving you up to 6 P-cores and 10 E-cores, but those "LP E-cores" aren't going to win any awards.

While both the E and LP E-cores are based on the same Crestmont microarchitecture, the E-cores on the compute tile are built on Intel 4, along with the P-cores. The LP E-cores are made on TSMC's N6 node, like the rest of the SoC tile. These low-power island E-cores are tuned for finer-grained voltage control through an integrated Digital Linear Voltage Regulator (DLVR), and they also have a lower voltage-to-frequency (V/F) curve than the big E-cores on the compute tile, meaning they can operate with a lower power cost, thus saving power when transitioning low-intensity workloads off of the compute tile and onto the LP E-cores.

Meteor Lake brings a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) similar to XDNA in Phoenix. There is a doubling of AVX2 VNNI ports in Crestmont E-cores that can also benefit AI workloads, but has nothing to do with the NPU, which should probably be used instead.

Key details are missing, such as IPC gains for Redwood Cove and Crestmont, and information about Adamantine L4 cache, which might not be in Meteor Lake.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/20046/intel-unveils-meteor-lake-architecture-intel-4-heralds-the-disaggregated-future-of-mobile-cpus

https://www.anandtech.com/show/20061/intel-demos-lunar-lake-in-action-silicon-pulled-in-to-intel-20a

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

At 19:53, Ian Cutress mentions that Intel has already put its Meteor Lake neural processing unit (NPU) in an M.2 form factor for industrial customers, and he has been trying to convince Intel to release it for retail. It wouldn't be without its competitors, but I would consider getting one.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

same as how they initially cried over the Xbox 360 having in-order cores, because they were used to IPC uplift doing everything for them and not having to learn about things like thread safety or task scheduling. PC devs bitched especially hard, because they were used to writing single-threaded code for dual-core machines where one core ran their game, and the other core ran Windows.

I disagree with that part, the dual core athlon was released just 6 months before the Xbox 360 and it was the first dual core consumer processor on the market. It took many devs years before they made anything of it. "But can it run" Crysis launched in late 2007 and that's an infamously single threaded game.

 

[The Ugly One]

I was under the impression that Threadripper models with 8 populated memory channels did not result in a huge benefit in most workloads.

Depends entirely on the arithmetic intensity of your workload. For anything involving a lot of sparse linear algebra, every GFLOP on the processor needs 4-10 GB/s of bandwidth to keep it busy. For an FFT, it's closer to 1:1. For large, dense matrices, it's flipped - more like 10 GFLOPs per 1 GB/s of bandwidth. Or more. And then when you get into typical consumer stuff like games and web browsers, they barely ever even coming close to sniffing the limits of a pair of DDR3 channels, let alone 12 channels of DDR5. Even compiling is compute-bound, not bandwidth-bound.

Intel is talking the big talk again, with Meteor Lake and other details. Meteor Lake's iGPU performance for the 128 EU model should be about double the performance of the previous 96 EU models, putting it near AMD's Phoenix (7040 series). It also has up to 8 ray tracing units (AMD added hardware ray tracing support in Rembrandt/6000 series). Media and Display engines have been disaggregated from the iGPU.

Apple already dumped discrete GPUs completely, and the market didn't punish them for it. I think NVIDIA's discrete gaming GPU business is just going to keep declining until it just falls off a cliff.

There are two additional E-cores located in a separate tile/chiplet from the usual P-cores and E-cores. If it works properly, Meteor Lake's idle power usage should be extremely low. I suppose all cores can run at the same time, giving you up to 6 P-cores and 10 E-cores, but those "LP E-cores" aren't going to win any awards.

This seems somewhat analogous to the two E-cores on Apple Silicon, which handle really, really basic tasks. This seems like a smart move for a mobile CPU. Unlike on the desktop, power consumption affects the mobile experience a lot, so any way to do things without pumping up clock speeds will enhance the platform. I've found on my 8+8 CPU, if I'm compiling, it uses every available hardware resource, so I wonder if those cores will get picked up by especially demanding tasks.

 

[WelperHelper99]

I have a question. The Nvidia 3060, which gives me 12 gigs of GDDR6 ram, or the Nvidia 3070, which gives me 8 gigs but has more power. Assume this is going into a PC with 64 gigs of DDR4 3200 ram and a Ryzen 5800X. Which one is gonna run Cyberpunk or Bauldurs gate at minimum specs and not burn the house down?

 

[Judge Dredd]

What's the difference between the variations of I3/5/7/9 processors? Is an I3 10400 the same as an I9 5000 or an I7 8000?

Others have answered this in detail, but as a general rule of thumb, i3/5/7/9 and Ryzen 3/5/7 are general price tiers.

3 = budget
5 = mid range
7 = power user
9 = top tier

However, there are nuances to it, as others have said. Not all i5s are created equal.


Another thing I didn't see mentioned. You will see Ryzen CPUs with "X3D" at the end of their names. These are CPUs that have bigger/faster cache. This makes them faster for specific tasks and games, but makes no difference on others. Hardware Unboxed (and I assume others like Gamers Nexus) have the benchmarks if you care for such things.


One thing I 110% agree with though is this.

You need to avoid weak points in the build, e.g. you don't want a very old processor or a mechanical hard drive for your system, but allowing for that you don't necessarily get the equal return on your investment by over-spending on everything.

This is of vital importance as I've been hearing of some very lopsided systems lately, especially when it comes to Starfield. I don't know how much you know about such things so I won't explain unless you ask.

Two other bits of CPU related information. When I built my system about a year ago, I was told stock coolers are good now. That was not my experience. Your millage may vary. Also, some motherboards require flashing the bios to get some CPUs to work.

 

[The Ugly One]

On the subject of CPUs, I'm doing a ton of compiling on my i9-12900 in WSL, and since replacing the bracket, not only is it running cooler, but it's sustaining higher clock speeds for much longer, which makes sense. Its max speed on paper is 5.1 GHz. Realistically, with every core populated, 4.8 is the highest it goes, but it will stay there for quite some time. The E-cores run at 3.8 GHz during the job.

I have a question. The Nvidia 3060, which gives me 12 gigs of GDDR6 ram, or the Nvidia 3070, which gives me 8 gigs but has more power. Assume this is going into a PC with 64 gigs of DDR4 3200 ram and a Ryzen 5800X. Which one is gonna run Cyberpunk or Bauldurs gate at minimum specs and not burn the house down?

At min settings, especially with DLSS on (I've found it makes a huge difference in heat & noise) neither one of those will run hot or come close to using the available VRAM. But I'd get the 3060 anyway.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

3060. The 3070 should just go die in a pit by now.

 

[seri0us]

I have a question. The Nvidia 3060, which gives me 12 gigs of GDDR6 ram, or the Nvidia 3070, which gives me 8 gigs but has more power. Assume this is going into a PC with 64 gigs of DDR4 3200 ram and a Ryzen 5800X. Which one is gonna run Cyberpunk or Bauldurs gate at minimum specs and not burn the house down?

12 GB 3060 because the extra GB can handle/enable bloat better.

 

[BPD Gunt Rider]

Two other bits of CPU related information. When I built my system about a year ago, I was told stock coolers are good now. That was not my experience. Your millage may vary. Also, some motherboards require flashing the bios to get some CPUs to work.

Stock coolers are at least usable now, unlike the old tiny Intel trash coolers. I always recommend buying a decent aftermarket cooler now, though. There's numerous quality options for like $30-40 now, and they're more than worth it if you're doing any intensive tasks.

I have a question. The Nvidia 3060, which gives me 12 gigs of GDDR6 ram, or the Nvidia 3070, which gives me 8 gigs but has more power. Assume this is going into a PC with 64 gigs of DDR4 3200 ram and a Ryzen 5800X. Which one is gonna run Cyberpunk or Bauldurs gate at minimum specs and not burn the house down?

As always, depends on price. 3070/3070 Ti are cards I would avoid because I rarely see them at a good price.

If you can find a 3060 Ti within ~20% of 3060, I would get that even with the lower RAM. At 3060 performance level, I don't think the 4GB will ever be that useful.

 

[Susanna]

Stock coolers are fine for the lower heat processors. Ryzen 7600/5800 and below, and Intel 13100/12400 and below. More power hungry processors will produce more heat, and while a stock cooler can keep an eight core CPU cool 90% of the time, during high loads it's going to shoot up to max temperature and throttle. That's less bad on AMD than on Intel, because Intels lose a lot more performance from limiting power (which is what throttling is), but it's not great either way. You're paying for performance you're not getting.

If your chassis can fit it, for desktop PCs I'd always recommend a 240mm liquid cooler (AIOs are fine). The advantage here is that water has a very high capacity to store heat, so you can run the fans at very low speeds and still keep the CPU from throttling, which makes them very quiet. Just make sure you mount it so that the pump hoses are located beneath the hoses on the radiator, AIOs aren't always bled well and if you get air in the pump it's going to cause a very annoying bubbling noise, but mounting the radiator above the pump will let any air bubbles collect there, where they won't make any noise.
If you're making a server, get an air cooler. Especially 4U can fit some very effective coolers, and the extra noise doesn't matter anyway because you've hopefully got a closet or basement to put it in.

 

[Second Sun]

I just had an absolute bastard of a time setting up sata raid on a new AM5 system. The MS drivers didn't work, the AMD website drivers stopped windows booting entirely, solution was to get mobo specific ones. Whereas I've plugged drives from an intel array into a completely different generation mobo and had it work instantly with zero config.

 

[Susanna]

I just had an absolute bastard of a time setting up sata raid on a new AM5 system. The MS drivers didn't work, the AMD website drivers stopped windows booting entirely, solution was to get mobo specific ones. Whereas I've plugged drives from an intel array into a completely different generation mobo and had it work instantly with zero config.

Noo, don’t use motherboard RAID. You’re just asking for unrecoverable data loss when anything makes the pool break. You’re not getting checksums anyway so it really only protects you from disk failure, which is pretty rare nowadays.
What you should do is set up a ReFS storage pool with the disk management feature in windows. It’s Microsoft’s version of ZFS, and apparently actually really good.

 

[Overly Serious]

Noo, don’t use motherboard RAID. You’re just asking for unrecoverable data loss when anything makes the pool break. You’re not getting checksums anyway so it really only protects you from disk failure, which is pretty rare nowadays.
What you should do is set up a ReFS storage pool with the disk management feature in windows. It’s Microsoft’s version of ZFS, and apparently actually really good.

Completely second not using Motherboard RAID. I've never noticed performance difference from just setting it up in Disk Manager and it's always seemed overly complex to me.

So ReFS... I used to use it. I stopped using it because Microsoft - whose ability to fuck up a good product with business decisions is unlimited - decided to remove it from Windows 10/11. If you had created one already then you could continue to use it but the ability to make new ones was removed. Now I heard something about them re-enabling it and if they did, then great. And you would typically use it in combination with Storage Spaces which is a feature Windows has for managing pools of drives and is fine. That's what I did and I still have Storage Spaces but no longer ReFS on them which is... frustrating.

Unless you've got clear needs for Storage Spaces, I'd be inclined to just go into Disk Manager in Windows and set up a mirror in there, directly. Pro-tip, just right-click on the start button and select it from there.

 

[The Ugly One]

Stock coolers are fine for the lower heat processors. Ryzen 7600/5800 and below, and Intel 13100/12400 and below. More power hungry processors will produce more heat, and while a stock cooler can keep an eight core CPU cool 90% of the time, during high loads it's going to shoot up to max temperature and throttle. That's less bad on AMD than on Intel, because Intels lose a lot more performance from limiting power (which is what throttling is), but it's not great either way. You're paying for performance you're not getting.

If your chassis can fit it, for desktop PCs I'd always recommend a 240mm liquid cooler (AIOs are fine). The advantage here is that water has a very high capacity to store heat, so you can run the fans at very low speeds and still keep the CPU from throttling, which makes them very quiet. Just make sure you mount it so that the pump hoses are located beneath the hoses on the radiator, AIOs aren't always bled well and if you get air in the pump it's going to cause a very annoying bubbling noise, but mounting the radiator above the pump will let any air bubbles collect there, where they won't make any noise.
If you're making a server, get an air cooler. Especially 4U can fit some very effective coolers, and the extra noise doesn't matter anyway because you've hopefully got a closet or basement to put it in.

A data point on the steaming hot intel CPUs, I saw an article or YouTube, don't remember which, where somebody swapped out the i9-12900 in a NUC Dragon Canyon with an i9-12900k and got roughly zero performance gain. It simply doesn't have the ability to move heat away from the core unlocked CPU to allow it to run any faster than the locked version. This also implies that, despite it being socketed, there's no point in trying to upgrade to a 13th gen, as 13th gen is by and large just 12th gen running even hotter.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

A data point on the steaming hot intel CPUs, I saw an article or YouTube, don't remember which, where somebody swapped out the i9-12900 in a NUC Dragon Canyon with an i9-12900k and got roughly zero performance gain. It simply doesn't have the ability to move heat away from the core unlocked CPU to allow it to run any faster than the locked version. This also implies that, despite it being socketed, there's no point in trying to upgrade to a 13th gen, as 13th gen is by and large just 12th gen running even hotter.

14th gen Raptor Lake Refresh will have a "cheaper" 20-core (8p+12e) i7-14700(K/T) (33 MB L3) which could be a minor upgrade for some 12th genners.

If 14th gen includes a Digital Linear Voltage Regulator (DLVR), it could have minor efficiency gains at certain clock speeds. If not, it's business as usual.

 

[The Ugly One]

14th gen Raptor Lake Refresh will have a "cheaper" 20-core (8p+12e) i7-14700(K/T) (33 MB L3) which could be a minor upgrade for some 12th genners.

If 14th gen includes a Digital Linear Voltage Regulator (DLVR), it could have minor efficiency gains at certain clock speeds. If not, it's business as usual.

I think an upgrade would make sense if you didn't get a high-end CPU to begin with. The cheapest 12th gen has 4 P-cores, no E-cores, so if you're not thermally throttled by your case (like me), a new CPU could be a good idea. There's no benefit to choosing a 12th gen over an equivalent 13th gen, though, like buying an i9-12900 over an i7-13700. The 13th gens by and large idle at lower clocks and can ramp up to higher clocks, which is just a win/win.

 

[WelperHelper99]

min settings, especially with DLSS on (I've found it makes a huge difference in heat & noise) neither one of those will run hot or come close to using the available VRAM. But I'd get the 3060 anyway.

With the price I've found them at for 3 fan versions of the 3060's, I'm more inclined towards it. All I ask is 1080p and a decent frame rate in Baldurs Gate lol, I'm not power gaming.

3060. The 3070 should just go die in a pit by now.

Got some hate there lol. Any reason?

always, depends on price. 3070/3070 Ti are cards I would avoid because I rarely see them at a good price.

If you can find a 3060 Ti within ~20% of 3060, I would get that even with the lower RAM. At 3060 performance level, I don't think the 4GB will ever be that useful.

If I could get a Ti at a good price I'd snag it. Same with the 3070, though that seems to be rare as is. Really cost is a major factor for me. Once I start collecting parts, I expect it to take a year until I'm ready to go. Again, all I want is it to run 1080p, not lag, and it's framerate be OK. My eyes are good enough that I don't need 4k 60 fps. 1080 is good enough. If a regular 3060 can manage that on Baldurs gate, I'm good. If I can get better, that's just gravy on top.