Question $80 new budget CPU king?

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

I just saw that Micro Center now has dozens of the Ryzen 5 3600 cpu in stock at $80 each. They have about 30 in stock at our closest store. This brings back memories of the Ryzen 1600 they had in stock for $80 for about a year and a half, pre pandemic. That's what I initially built my system on. I later upgraded to a 3600, and then a 5500.

I'm thinking of building two new budget systems to replace some old intel based I5 4570 systems. At $80 each, these make a compelling case, and cpu performance would be about triple the current processors. (17,800 cpu marks for the 3600 at $80)

https://www.microcenter.com/product...oxed-processor-wraith-stealth-cooler-included

If they keep these in stock at this price for a year or more like they did with the 1600, do you think these will become the new "budget cpu king"?

 

[Tech Junky]

As a active used market buyer and seller

Now, that's the place to be to keep tabs on pricing and how the market is taking things as they come along.

If I'm actively hunting for a build I have a better grasp on what's happening for inventory / pricing but, in between builds it's more of a casual observance occasionally when there's a post or blog mentioning something. After you've doe this re/build a few times you get more insight into how the market performs with supply / demand / next gen price fixing through limiting supply and seeing through most of the hype surrounding a new release. I spotted something earlier that AMD is worried about the lack of response to the AM5 CPU's as everyone is snatching up the prior gen stuff because a complete rebuild is costing too much. This doesn't surprise me though when they priced things for the CPU + boards over $1500 in some cases and at least $1000 in most. That's going to put you in a corner until you manage the pricing appropriately and get more people interested or willing to stretch a little further than they want to. AM4 is still viable and the perks of the next gen aren't huge ATM same as Intel which is in a holding pattern until the big leap with Arrow Lake to 2nm processes.

GPU's are another part of the issue when a 4090 out of the box is $1600 that's the price of a full system with a iGPU on the CPU.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Really? Depends on the user I guess. I still have an i7-920 that I use for games. That's long in the tooth. My daughter has an i7-4790. That's getting there too, but she can play the majority of titles, although there is one coming up that will require an upgrade. Still, I'm having a hard time believing that the 3600 won't be usable for at least a few more years and longer depending on what you use it for.

Lots of CPUs are "usable", though a 920 is borderline useless since it is missing ISA extensions that some modern software may require to run (it's not as bad as K10-era CPUs from AMD that don't fully support SSE4.x). That aside, the issue isn't whether it's "usable", the issue is whether it's better to have 6 aging cores vs 4 relatively-modern ones. Zen2/Matisse is far enough behind Golden Cove that I would think having four Golden Cove might actually be better, especially if you're gaming. Given that the 3600 now costs more than the 12100F, I think that the little baby Intel CPU is a no-brainer unless you absolutely must have some platform feature from AM4 that you won't get with a budget 12th-gen Intel system.

 

[Tech Junky]

6 aging cores vs 4 relatively-modern ones

It depends on your use but, yes, the newer options pack more punch per core.

For the budget in the OP though it's a good CPU option for extreme coupon clippers or for mundane daily tasks. Throwing together a zombie system that runs 24/7 for under $400 can be appealing for those that want to keep it cheap and running in the background.

Now, if it were 5-10 years ago or whatever when it first came out and we weren't comparing it to todays standards it was more appealing for performance use.

 

[Ranulf]

As a active used market buyer and seller I have the opposite perspective on it. I think it is sad and hilarious owners of pre 10th gen Intel i3 and i5s had to suffer being extorted for an i7 that worked in their boards for so long. For those Haswell folks, it was pay up or do a whole platform swap including ram. And if they didn't pay up for a Z board up front they got stuck with pedestrian ram speeds. It's laughable how long it took for Intel to allow XMP on anything but Z. Tick Tock your platform's time is up. THAT as I see it, is what is truly worthy of the sad trombone.

The reason old Ryzens are so cheap, is AM4 is over 5yrs old. You don't have to change boards and/or ram to get a much faster CPU, you just update the bios and drop it in. With the uplift between a1600 or 2600 and a $130 5600, for a 5 minute swap out, do you think we mind letting go of the 1600 or 2600 for $50-$60?

Sure, its sucked but well, those i7 at least lasted 5+ years. The i5 was a bad buy from 6th gen skylake (maybe even haswell) thru 9th gen. But most everyone said spend on the gpu not the cpu. Even buying a couple of i3 cpus for servers turned out to be a bad idea, I should have bought quad cores i5's at least. Old Ryzens are cheap because AMD was releasing new chips every year and Intel mindshare said they were more valuable. People held on to them longer or you had the lack of used mobos. My 1700 was about the same perf as my 4790k for gaming.

 

[Hotrod2go]

Who says games are confined to cores? Isn't it threads that matter?? 8 threads - obviously what the 12100f has, is great for gaming these days, not only that but are budget builders going to be able to realistically afford modern AAA rated games when they are around approx $70 & up with each new release? plus add in the fact that with inflation in general bighting into costs of living growing by the day as well? These budget builders don't have a money tree handy....

I think perspective is a wonderful thing easily lost in forums like this when the practical reality of daily life in today's world is taken into consideration.

Getting a bit off topic here but I'm having a ball on my gaming rig running an 11700k but with HT off, playing a 16 yr old game aka Oblivion game of the year deluxe version & there's only been one part of the entire map that has requested more than 3 threads over 80% (@ 144hz/1440p).
Compare this game to today's so called AAA games & the games of the 2000s when done well, win my a huge margin imo with outright creativity. The point I'm trying to make here is that 8 threads is great for quality PC gaming today still & probably because all the consoles to date still use only up to 8 cores.

 

[ondma]

Eh, thing is the 12100 is still better than the 9400f because it has 8 threads vs 6. While 8 threads will likely not last as long as the 12 thread 3600, I don't think it is going to matter that much to most budget gamers in the next 2-4 years. Given the performance jumps over the past couple of generations, many will probably want a whole new system in 4-5 years. If not, they may want to jump up to a 13th gen i7+ or AMD 5000 series. I'd actually vote going AMD in that case simply because AMD's chips have not held their value near as much as Intel even in the past 3-4 years where Intel's cpus drop in value quicker than before.

Its been sad and hilarious at times to see some first and second gen Ryzen cpus drop to values equal or less than 4th gen i7 chips.

9400f is a ridiculous comparison. In addition to less threads, the 9400 is probably behind by 30 or 40% in IPC.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

How many AAA games does the typical PC gamer even buy? Especially at full price? Most of the PC gamers I know play a handful of games into the ground.

Most of mine have been picked up over the years on the regular sales. Both Steam and GOG. I think the last I paid full price for was Skyrim*. You can have very nice things on a tight budget if you're patient enough.

Helps keep hardware requirements low since by the time AAA games go on fire sale, hardware has caught up that you can run them on "ultra" settings on a more mainstream pedestrian card.

*Which I re-bought when it launched on GOG. Yes, I'm weak.

 

[aigomorla]

To be honest you'll be GPU limited before CPU limited in about 80% of the games you'll play unless your seriously playing at a resolution of less then 1080p.

Even on a RX6600 assuming the budget card or a 1660 Super, your not going to be CPU limited even on a 7700K @ 1080p on high settings for most games. Well unless were talking like Valorant or CS:GO.

Then once you get up to 1440p, there you'll hit the GPU bottleneck fast on lower mid level cards.
You don't get past the 1440p bottleneck GPU until you hit the mid high, or low high, which is about a 6800XT or 3070 Bar.
If you can afford those last 2 cards, i don't think your going to be looking for a 100 dollar cpu.

When it boils down to it, its what cpu and motherboard combo is the cheapest and best.
By that I mean, which has the most features... like how many nVME ports, does it have a onboard DAC, Type-C USB header, USB 3.2? 2.5g Ethernet.
The only advantage i see in intel at the moment is the boards, because in most cases the better Intel boards are cheaper overall for the features you get, and Intel Nic is the gold standard. Not ragging on Marvel, or Realtek, but id take a Intel Nic any day of the week especially on a 2.5g or a 10G. Intel's Wifi 6e is also the gold standard for wifi.

Marvel AQtion maybe gaining popularity in 10G, but the X540 is my always go to nic for 10gbe.
I have no idea what Realtek calls its 10Gbe network card, but its probably not better then Marvel's.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

To be honest you'll be GPU limited before CPU limited in about 80% of the games you'll play unless your seriously playing at a resolution of less then 1080p.

Even on a RX6600 assuming the budget card or a 1660 Super, your not going to be CPU limited even on a 7700K @ 1080p on high settings for most games. Well unless were talking like Valorant or CS:GO.

Then once you get up to 1440p, there you'll hit the GPU bottleneck fast on lower mid level cards.
You don't get past the 1440p bottleneck GPU until you hit the mid high, or low high, which is about a 6800XT or 3070 Bar.
If you can afford those last 2 cards, i don't think your going to be looking for a 100 dollar cpu.

I agree, but I wouldn't go lower then a 6600(XT) for dedicated gaming. In the titles where my 6600XT struggles a bit @ 1440p, I just use upscaling to get 1080p-like performance. Which it handles just fine.

When it boils down to it, its what cpu and motherboard combo is the cheapest and best.
By that I mean, which has the most features... like how many nVME ports, does it have a onboard DAC, Type-C USB header, USB 3.2? 2.5g Ethernet.
The only advantage i see in intel at the moment is the boards, because in most cases the better Intel boards are cheaper overall for the features you get, and Intel Nic is the gold standard. Not ragging on Marvel, or Realtek, but id take a Intel Nic any day of the week especially on a 2.5g or a 10G. Intel's Wifi 6e is also the gold standard for wifi.

Marvel AQtion maybe gaining popularity in 10G, but the X540 is my always go to nic for 10gbe.
I have no idea what Realtek calls its 10Gbe network card, but its probably not better then Marvel's.

I'll just add that when on a budget, do not pay extra for features you'll never actually use. If you plan to use them, fine, but again, don't pay extra for nice-to-have features.

 

[Shmee]

To be honest you'll be GPU limited before CPU limited in about 80% of the games you'll play unless your seriously playing at a resolution of less then 1080p.

Even on a RX6600 assuming the budget card or a 1660 Super, your not going to be CPU limited even on a 7700K @ 1080p on high settings for most games. Well unless were talking like Valorant or CS:GO.

Then once you get up to 1440p, there you'll hit the GPU bottleneck fast on lower mid level cards.
You don't get past the 1440p bottleneck GPU until you hit the mid high, or low high, which is about a 6800XT or 3070 Bar.
If you can afford those last 2 cards, i don't think your going to be looking for a 100 dollar cpu.

When it boils down to it, its what cpu and motherboard combo is the cheapest and best.
By that I mean, which has the most features... like how many nVME ports, does it have a onboard DAC, Type-C USB header, USB 3.2? 2.5g Ethernet.
The only advantage i see in intel at the moment is the boards, because in most cases the better Intel boards are cheaper overall for the features you get, and Intel Nic is the gold standard. Not ragging on Marvel, or Realtek, but id take a Intel Nic any day of the week especially on a 2.5g or a 10G. Intel's Wifi 6e is also the gold standard for wifi.

Marvel AQtion maybe gaining popularity in 10G, but the X540 is my always go to nic for 10gbe.
I have no idea what Realtek calls its 10Gbe network card, but its probably not better then Marvel's.

I agree, for the most part, on most people being GPU limited. As for boards, I think the nice thing about the Intel options right now for current gen stuff is DDR4 support. AM5 is DDR5 only. That said, a good Alder Lake board is pretty pricey.

I think the AM4 platform will be a great option for a long time, as just about any decent board can take a nice discounted Vermeer chip, and some of those will do 5GHz+ with PBO2. I know the 5950X I got does. Another thing I like about AM4, besides the compatible upgrade options over the years, is the socket design. Though AM4 CPUs can get bent or twisted pins if someone is careless, I still find them much more resilient than an LGA socket, which most Intel boards, as well as AM5, now have. I get the feeling there will be a lot more expensive AM5 or Intel boards ruined with broken sockets than there will be AMD CPUs with bent pins.

Also, funny how you mention the 10GbE NICs, I have an X540 myself in my NAS. At least with FreeBSD based OS, Intel does seem to get along the easiest. And I have a Marvel AQtion based card in my desktop, which works fine in Windows. It is an Asus branded card I believe.

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

Maybe, but anyone looking for a 100.00 cpu is most likely not going to have the money for a gpu capable of good performance in ray tracing. As someone else said, for general use or productivity purposes, that is a great deal. I would not go with a 2 gen old Ryzen for gaming though, unless you are just dropping it into an existing motherboard.

I definitely got 'spoiled' by the $80 cpu's that Micro Center had for a year and a half, before the pandemic. Now that they're back, I'll definitely do 1 or 2 system builds before the end of the year. And that's probably what AMD was trying for - people building new systems with new processors, motherboards, memory. From what I've seen lately, demand has taken a nosedive - overall demand in the 4th quarter is likely to decline between 15% and 20%. Things that were hard to find during the pandemic will be piling up, unpurchased. Retailers will have to resort to sales, rebates, & such.

I already have an "open box" motherboard that I found at Micro Center nearly a year ago for $50 that I'll use as the base for my system. Already have the RAM that I got during a sale. Already have 2 spinny hard drives that I bought during a sale a few months back. Just bought a 1 TB SSD with 800 Terabytes of wear durability. Now I was just looking for the processor, and I think I found it for $80.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Things that were hard to find during the pandemic will be piling up, unpurchased. Retailers will have to resort to sales, rebates, & such.

From what I'm hearing on the grapevine, we'll get some great deals when Black Friday rolls around here in Denmark. Retailers are sitting on a literal ton of pandemic-ordered electronics that no one will buy right now due to how the economy has it at the moment.

I imagine it'll be similar across the Atlantic. So if you have spare cash, be prepared.

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

A 3600 would get beaten handily by a 5600 all else being equal especially in games .... Zen 3 IPC was far better for gaming then Zen 2.

Having said that, as I mentioned I went directly from 3600 to a 5800X with the identical motherboard, memory and storage.... IRL it was an underwheming upgrade that I wish I had bypassed considering the price-tag at the time.

What I WISH I'd done was ride the 3600 until the 5800X3D was released. (first world problems big-time!)

Not always true - probably 96% of the games we play are casual, top down view games that would play almost exactly the same on a 3600 as they would on a 5600.

For example, right now I'm playing a turn based game called Age of Fear 4, a strategy game from Steam. It would get absolutely no benefit at all from a processor upgrade.

 

[Captante]

Not always true - probably 96% of the games we play are casual, top down view games that would play almost exactly the same on a 3600 as they would on a 5600.

For example, right now I'm playing a turn based game called Age of Fear 4, a strategy game from Steam. It would get absolutely no benefit at all from a processor upgrade.

I was taking stuff like that for granted but okay .... not much point in comparing games that can be run just fine on an old APU. (or a potato!)

PLENTY of old and/or casual games run just fine on my FX-8350/GTX-1650 backup PC too!

 

[VirtualLarry]

If you need a sort-of-cheap (*) GPU, Newegg has new PowerColor Red Devil RX 580 8GB cards, for $160.

(*) At least WAY better than a GTX 1630, at the same price-point.

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

I was taking stuff like that for granted but okay .... not much point in comparing games that can be run just fine on an old APU. (or a potato!)

PLENTY of old and/or casual games run just fine on my FX-8350/GTX-1650 backup PC too!

Yep, just reminding folks that not everybody loves first person shooters, and there are a lot of recent games like Age of Fear 4 that are turn based, or don't make much use of 3D. Minecraft is probably the game we have that uses the most 3D resources. Works fine on the RX 550 video card we have.

 

[blckgrffn]

If you need a sort-of-cheap (*) GPU, Newegg has new PowerColor Red Devil RX 580 8GB cards, for $160.

(*) At least WAY better than a GTX 1630, at the same price-point.

B Stock EVGA $190 2060 6GB (even the highest clock ones), $210 2060 12GB and $250 2070 and $370 3060Ti OMGWTFBBQARGB edition are all reasonable options too. It is so nice to get real performance cards at prices that aren't full on crazy.

You can play a lot of games at some solid settings with a 6GB 2060. I'd drop the $20 for the longevity of the 12GB card myself, but then we start climbing that slippery slope

Using Anandtech Bench! What a great tool! So sad it's dead :/

GPU 2019 Benchmarks - Compare Products on AnandTech

GPU 2019 benchmarks: Compare two products side-by-side or see a cascading list of product ratings along with our annotations.

www.anandtech.com

2060 is worth $30. Get that matx B450 board and step up!

 

[Asterox]

Lots of CPUs are "usable", though a 920 is borderline useless since it is missing ISA extensions that some modern software may require to run (it's not as bad as K10-era CPUs from AMD that don't fully support SSE4.x). That aside, the issue isn't whether it's "usable", the issue is whether it's better to have 6 aging cores vs 4 relatively-modern ones. Zen2/Matisse is far enough behind Golden Cove that I would think having four Golden Cove might actually be better, especially if you're gaming. Given that the 3600 now costs more than the 12100F, I think that the little baby Intel CPU is a no-brainer unless you absolutely must have some platform feature from AM4 that you won't get with a budget 12th-gen Intel system.

If we look outside of gaming, in real applications the difference in performance is not significant.Old example, or 6/12 CPU-s with almost identical All core boost in multithread situations.

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[DrMrLordX]

Intel's Wifi 6e is also the gold standard for wifi.

Not sure about Intel's latest AX series of Wireless NICs, but I've hated my AX200 (Wifi 6/802.11ax). It took me a long time to get it running right.

 

[aigomorla]

Not sure about Intel's latest AX series of Wireless NICs, but I've hated my AX200 (Wifi 6/802.11ax). It took me a long time to get it running right.

I've not run into a single problem with the AX210.
I don't know what exactly is different about 200 vs 210, but the last 3-4 cards i upgraded / bought were AX210, and they work flawlessly with my unifi6 AP's.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I've not run into a single problem with the AX210.
I don't know what exactly is different about 200 vs 210, but the last 3-4 cards i upgraded / bought were AX210, and they work flawlessly with my unifi6 AP's.

Good. I think the AX200 had teething issues. There used to be a ton of driver updates for it, too. Wifi 6e is basically a bugfix/update of Wifi 6 anyway so it makes sense that the AX210 would be a better product.

 

[Captante]

Overall I've had the best luck with Realtek wired network adapters/drivers the last few years believe it or not.... wifi I have to agree Intel is the most stable though.

 

[q52]

at the <$80 price point, if "bang for your buck" is the goal I dont think its worth buying new, scrounge up something on eBay, I recently got a Ryzen Pro 4350G for $80 and it seems like a pretty good contender

 

[Shmee]

Yeah one could probably get a used Zen 3 6 core CPU for under $100 these days. I know I sold my 3700X for about $95 about a year or so ago when the Zen 3 BIOS for the B350 boards came out. Now there is more new stuff available, such as 13th gen Intel CPUs, as well as Zen 4 stuff (including 3D cache variants), so Zen 3 should continue to be found at lower prices, especially used.

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

It looks like the best "bang for the buck" deal right now is the Ryzen 5 5500 for $84.99