Question I7-10700KF is making me weak in the knees.

[GodisanAtheist]

Amazon has it going for $270. Paired with a ~$220 motherboard (what Z490 boards seem to be going around these days) it would be a relatively affordable way to springboard to a solid 8/16 core set-up to carry me for the next several years.

Basically everything else in the sig-rig would play it forward into the new one.

Have some concerns about putting down $500+ clams for what amounts to some extra CPU cores without any real forward looking tech, but who knows if and when any of those things (resizable BAR, PCI-E 4.0, DDR5, etc) actually become entrenched and really required for performance. By then (6-8 years down the line) I'll be ready for my new graphine chiplet based 64 core processor upgrade.

Drop in a new GPU when that market settles down and should be in good shape.

What am I missing, and why isn't everyone doing this?

 

[UsandThem]

What am I missing, and why isn't everyone doing this?

Depending on the person's use/needs, an Intel i5-10400 build or an AMD Ryzen 3600 for $200 and a $120 - $150 motherboard provides most of the performance of the i7. Not to mention the Ryzen 5600X for $299 is a pretty good substitute that still still comes out cheaper than an i7 and most of the available Z490 motherboards right now.

The 10700kf is good, but at $500 for the CPU/motherboard combo is so-so based on what has been available before (sales, combo discounts, etc.). The 10700k (with graphics) was also $259 recently during a sale at B&H Photo. The combo would need to be in the $400 range to make it a compelling buy to me at this point.

 

[moonbogg]

IMO it's a solid deal. I got a 10700K for $280 with an MSI Z490. The Ryzen hype made people think Intel chips are suddenly useless. The current narrative is this: If you want the best for both work and gaming and require high framerates, get AMD. If all you do is game casually and do nothing else with your computer (I mean NOTHING else) and don't require high framerates, then going Intel might be OK for the time being if you can find one for free. That's the advice. Take it or be noobed.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Depending on the person's use/needs, an Intel i5-10400 build or an AMD Ryzen 3600 for $200 and a $120 - $150 motherboard provides most of the performance of the i7. Not to mention the Ryzen 5600X for $299 is a pretty good substitute that still still comes out cheaper than an i7 and most of the available Z490 motherboards right now.

The 10700kf is good, but at $500 for the CPU/motherboard combo is so-so based on what has been available before (sales, combo discounts, etc.). The 10700k (with graphics) was also $259 recently during a sale at B&H Photo. The combo would need to be in the $400 range to make it a compelling buy to me at this point.

- Good info. I am dead set on going 8/16. I was caught pretty flat footed when I went from my Q9550 to my 6600K back in 2016. I got a ton of IPC and clock speed uplift, but the 4/4 6600K always felt like a mistep just as AMD brought the multicore thunder.

It hasn't been hugely relevant over the life of this system, and I tend to play older games as I work through my Steam Backlog, but with game consoles launching with 8/16 I want to make sure my system is forward looking in that respect.

The price isn't great, granted, but with the price and demand on computer components being what they are these days, I don't think it's a terrible deal either. Especially considering Intel and AMD are asking for ~$400-500 for equivalent gaming performance from their latest and greatest alone (more features, but those features likely won't be terribly relevant until it's time for another upgrade).

Thanks for your response. I'll keep my finger hovering over the trigger button for the moment.

 

[JoeRambo]

Z490 does support resizable BAR ( if MB vendor has released BIOS for it ). But that is minor boost at best, NV is dragging it's feet with releasing BIOS for 30XX series.

 

[NTMBK]

Buying a platform without PCIe4 feels a bit silly at this point, but it depends on how long you plan to hold onto it for.

The new consoles have crazy fast storage, meaning that more and more games are going to want high end SSDs. You're going to be bottlenecked by the low PCIe lane count and PCIe3 on that platform.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Buying a platform without PCIe4 feels a bit silly at this point, but it depends on how long you plan to hold onto it for.

The new consoles have crazy fast storage, meaning that more and more games are going to want high end SSDs. You're going to be bottlenecked by the low PCIe lane count and PCIe3 on that platform.

-Stuff like this is definitely giving me pause, but really thinking about it, how much of the market is going to actually have PCI-e 4.0 support... Even in 4 years?

I strongly suspect that for at least the first half of this gen, if not longer, most games will still assume slow rust based, or SATA SSD based storage if they're ported to the PC.

Tons of gamers are still out there with their 4/8, 6/12, and even 8/16 set-ups and PCI-E 3.0 right now + SATA SSD, wouldn't make sense for devs to make a game dependent on crazy direct storage technology unless it's a console exclusive for the next several years.

Maybe when the UE5.0 games start showing up in a couple years.

 

[fleshconsumed]

It's a decent deal. Two things, one, $220 seems too much for the motherboard considering the CPU price, and two, you'll be buying dead end platform that will be missing new features already mentioned above and that you can't upgrade. So long as you're fine with it, it's a good deal.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

It's a decent deal. Two things, one, $220 seems too much for the motherboard considering the CPU price, and two, you'll be buying dead end platform that will be missing new features already mentioned above and that you can't upgrade. So long as you're fine with it, it's a good deal.

- I agree on the motherboard. Ideally I'd want to be paying more in the $150-175 range for a solid feature rich mid-range ATX board, but the only thing I'm finding at that price point is a real bottom of the barrel Asrock board (ONE USB CONNECTOR!) I might circle like a vulture for a bit and see if some additional inventory comes into stock at that price range.

As far as the platform is concerned... well I guess all platforms are dead ends more or less nowadays. Its been a long time since drop in CPU upgrades were a thing.

It does make me wonder if I should wait to see if a deal crops up on an 11700F or KF processor (seem to be selling in the low $300's right out the gate) and a Z590 board so short of DDR5 I should at least have my PCI-e 4.0 and most other modern features.

 

[Hulk]

5600X seems to be more than a match for the 10700KF. Much faster single thread and about the same multithread.
Also the 5600X has a "sky's the limit" upgrade path all the way to 16 cores.

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[fleshconsumed]

As far as the platform is concerned... well I guess all platforms are dead ends more or less nowadays. Its been a long time since drop in CPU upgrades were a thing.

Jumping on AM4 back in 2017 has worked out really really well for me upgrade wise. I picked up x370 and 1800x initially. A year later I picked up 2700x on sale. Another year down the road I picked up Asus x470 Strix on sale under $100, then shortly after that open box 3900x at microcenter. This year I picked up used 3950x. If there is end of year clearance on x570 motherboards this year I may upgrade motherboard for PCIe4 again. Maybe when Zen4 comes around I'll be able to pick a used 5950x then too.

Point being with AM4 I was able to upgrade piecewise whenever a part was on sale, I went from x370/1800x to x470/3950x without having to completely change platform at any given time. The fun will come to an end soon with Zen4/AM5 release, but I got 4 years of pain free upgrades out of AM4 and that's worth a lot to me. This is not the case when buying Intel, with Intel you''re always buying a dead end platform, if you want to upgrade, you have to change both CPU and motherboard at the same time.

 

[VirtualLarry]

NV is dragging it's feet with releasing BIOS for 30XX series.

Probably waiting for "legal" to draft a new EULA for the drivers and whatnot, to make it "OK" to install the hashrate-limiter into the updated Resizable-BAR VBIOS for the 3080 and 3090.

 

[moonbogg]

PCI-E 4.0 doesn't mean crap to me. It doesn't do anything for SSD or GPU performance unless you sit around and transfer massive files all day. Game loading, OS startup, and pretty much every other normal usage sees no improvement. SSD performance leveled out a long time ago. I "upgraded" to a Samsung 970 EVO NVME drive for the OS coming from an old regular sata SSD and the difference there is minimal to non existent. The OS loads a tiny bit faster and games might load a pinch faster? Going from this to a 4th get SSD is not on my list of things to care about, probably ever.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

PCI-E 4.0 doesn't mean crap to me. It doesn't do anything for SSD or GPU performance unless you sit around and transfer massive files all day. Game loading, OS startup, and pretty much every other normal usage sees no improvement. SSD performance leveled out a long time ago. I "upgraded" to a Samsung 970 EVO NVME drive for the OS coming from an old regular sata SSD and the difference there is minimal to non existent. The OS loads a tiny bit faster and games might load a pinch faster? Going from this to a 4th get SSD is not on my list of things to care about, probably ever.

Umm. . . . I had this friend in grade-school and high-school who had a father full of hot air. We'd go on excursions in the mountains or night-time fishing at Bombay Beach of the Salton Sea. The old man would be driving his battered '57 Dodge station-wagon and yammering about his days as an Army Major in the WWII Pacific campaign, and he told this story about training the rank-and-file to use the short-wave radio. The sergeant would get some cone-shaped paint-filters and paint brown nipples on them, affixing them to the knobs on the radio set -- lesson being that you had to adjust the knobs very gently.

So my corollary to put forward -- showing all my own blowhard hot air -- is to suggest that each and every aspect of better benchmarks can show up in subtle ways, and eventually -- like tuning in JFK"s PT-boat -- you can see it.

On the other hand, it could be a placebo effect and you just "think you see it".

But I think I can see it, anyway.

I was telling someone else that I'd come across a recent Anandtech review for the Sammy 980 Pros, and I thought I read that the actual performance or even the benchmarks themselves didn't show much for the 7,500 MB/s for PCI-E v.4.0 in the specs.

I'm Ok with that, though! I don't even have optane. I just have a $50 software program developed in Shanghai. I typically get benchmarks for my 960 Pro of 11,000 MB/s.

But in real world performance, I'm not so sure it shows up. Even so -- other things show up, and the benchmarks translated into real performance improvement may show it. Here, we're in agreement. I don't really need to have full-out PCIE-v.4.0 performance from a Sammy 980. I could even buy a Sammy 980 because they may actually be cheaper than stale-stock 960 Pro offerings, and guaranteed to be backward compatible with PCI-E v.3.0.

whatta-ya gonna do, when you just need to acquire a 1TB NVME drive? Darn!

 

[killster1]

Umm. . . . I had this friend in grade-school and high-school who had a father full of hot air. We'd go on excursions in the mountains or night-time fishing at Bombay Beach of the Salton Sea. The old man would be driving his battered '57 Dodge station-wagon and yammering about his days as an Army Major in the WWII Pacific campaign, and he told this story about training the rank-and-file to use the short-wave radio. The sergeant would get some cone-shaped paint-filters and paint brown nipples on them, affixing them to the knobs on the radio set -- lesson being that you had to adjust the knobs very gently.

So my corollary to put forward -- showing all my own blowhard hot air -- is to suggest that each and every aspect of better benchmarks can show up in subtle ways, and eventually -- like tuning in JFK"s PT-boat -- you can see it.

On the other hand, it could be a placebo effect and you just "think you see it".

But I think I can see it, anyway.

I was telling someone else that I'd come across a recent Anandtech review for the Sammy 980 Pros, and I thought I read that the actual performance or even the benchmarks themselves didn't show much for the 7,500 MB/s for PCI-E v.4.0 in the specs.

I'm Ok with that, though! I don't even have optane. I just have a $50 software program developed in Shanghai. I typically get benchmarks for my 960 Pro of 11,000 MB/s.

But in real world performance, I'm not so sure it shows up. Even so -- other things show up, and the benchmarks translated into real performance improvement may show it. Here, we're in agreement. I don't really need to have full-out PCIE-v.4.0 performance from a Sammy 980. I could even buy a Sammy 980 because they may actually be cheaper than stale-stock 960 Pro offerings, and guaranteed to be backward compatible with PCI-E v.3.0.

whatta-ya gonna do, when you just need to acquire a 1TB NVME drive? Darn!

you dont get 11,000MB/s from a 960 pro, you would prob need to raid 4 of them together to get that speed IF you could even find something to copy to that fast. Giant pointless story! As far as pcie 4, you dont need it, gfx cards dont need it, load times dont need it 1000% agree with moonbog, best part about the upgrade if you decide it all sucks then you can just sell it again for minimal loss (shipping and fees) if i wasnt so obbssseessed with power usage and having x470 motherboards stacked up, i would have got a 10700kf instead of a 5600x for sure, we pay 40 cents a kw here and its almost summer.

 

[LightningZ71]

At present, about the only thing that PCIe 4.0 is bringing to the consumer space is a measurable decrease in load times for obnoxious games. In the near future, when games start using the direct to dram load features of DX12, having a PCIe 4.0 SSD that can actually saturate the bus might have a notable impact on games that try to do seamless in-line level loading.

It also has the ability to make x1 and x4 PCIe slots more usable. Personally, I'm looking forward to PCIe 5.0. I can't wait for motherboards that have a single PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, a PCIe 5.0 x4 m.2 slot, and a PCIe 5.0 x4 connection to the chipset, which can have a few PCIe 4.0 ssd slots, a couple of x8 4.0 slots, and a raft of PCIe 3.0 slots. It would be VERY hard to build enough bus contention to choke the chipset link.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

5600X seems to be more than a match for the 10700KF. Much faster single thread and about the same multithread.
Also the 5600X has a "sky's the limit" upgrade path all the way to 16 cores.

CPU 2021 Benchmarks - Compare Products on AnandTech

CPU 2021 benchmarks: Compare two products side-by-side or see a cascading list of product ratings along with our annotations.

www.anandtech.com

-I have to admit I'm a little shocked by how capable the 5600x is, especially given the narrative about AMD finally "catching up" with Intel... Looks like they got intel pretty handily beat at the moment.

My understanding is the 11xxx gen isn't really a huge improvement over 10xxx either.

Haven't had an AMD build since my now ancient A64 3800x2 and would love to go with an AMD build... But I am going 8 core hell or high water. 5800x is a bit rich for my blood at the moment hope we get a 5700 or some more affordable varient on 8/16 format.

Maybe the idea is just to keep waiting until AM5 with DDR5 is out and see what happens then... But my current build will be pretty badly outdated by that point.

I'll sleep on the 5600x suggestion and see how I feel about it. Figure boards are much more plentiful and affordable for AM4 as well, but I'll have to look.

Edit: Holy crap 5600x's going for $350-400 around here. Guess that puts a fork in that...

 

[JoeRambo]

Edit: Holy crap 5600x's going for $350-400 around here. Guess that puts a fork in that...

Yup, the irony is that 5600x and 5800x are going for insane prices, while CPUs that can self-justify paying premium for them - 5900x and 5950x are not available (if you need MT performance, but not as much as to go stright to TR ).

 

[Insert_Nickname]

It also has the ability to make x1 and x4 PCIe slots more usable.

Most x1 add-in cards only use PCIe 2.0 anyway. Some even only 1.1. Such devices don't really need all that much bandwidth. Also PCIe is better then regular old parallel PCI, since devices don't have to share bandwidth on the same bus.

About the only things other then SSDs that need higher bandwidth then a PCIe 2.0 x4 link can provide would be 20Gbit USB3 and Thunderbolt 4 controllers. I don't know how large the desktop market is for those.

 

[LightningZ71]

There are a few high end, multi port, multi-gig ethernet cards out there that can gobble up bus bandwidth. But, you will VERY RARELY see those in the consumer space.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

There are a few high end, multi port, multi-gig ethernet cards out there that can gobble up bus bandwidth. But, you will VERY RARELY see those in the consumer space.

Even 4x 1Gbit is almost within PCIe 2.0 x1 capability, although pushing it as far as it'll go. For more ports you'll definitely need a wider link.

In that segment I'd make sense to do a PCIe 3.0 x1-to-5Gbit Ethernet card, or 4.0 x1-to-10Gbit one. That'd be very useful, since you'd only use a single PCIe x1 slot, and faster ethernet is something everybody can use right away. Even most newer boards only come with at most 2.5Gbit, if not only 1Gbit.

Now we just need some (cheap(er)) 5/10Gbit switches.

 

[Hulk]

I'm not up on PCI interfaces. How does my Haswell system compare to PCIe 4.0? Must be pretty primitive in comparison I imagine?

I remember being so happy when we moved from those big old parallel ribbon cables PATA to SATA. Made system building so much easier.

 

[LightningZ71]

Haswell was still rather constricted on PCIe lanes on its consumer platforms. It was, at least, mostly PCIe 3.0 on most boards, but, if you had more than a couple of slots, most of them were short lanes.

 

[LightningZ71]

I was thinking of cards like this one. It's PCIe 3.0 x8. Could be x4 on PCIe 4.0.

https://www.amazon.com/10Gtek-X710-DA4-Converged-Network-Adapter/dp/B01KZQMMIQ

 

[IEC]

Don't forget Microsoft is working on DirectStorage for PC to reduce I/O overhead on NVMe drives so those super fast drives actually show a benefit in gaming.

So while I don't care about PCIe 4.0 now, eventually a faster SSD will make a meaningful difference in gaming performance. If you plan to keep your system several years then getting something with PCIe 4.0 capability seems like a no-brainer.