Question what's up with Ryzen 5 3600 price? (did prices actually go UP over the past year??)

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

A little over a year ago, I was watching the price of a Ryzen 5 3600, and it only came down to about $170, and not the $150-$160 that I was looking for. I ended up paying $80 at Micro Center for a Ryzen 1600. That Ryzen 5 1600 gave about 70% of the performance of the Ryzen 3600 at less than half the price. I figured I would wait a year, then new processors would be out, and the price of the 3600 would surely be down to $150 or so, because folks would want the newer processors. Instead, I took at look at Micro Center, and I see the 3600 listed at $250. On Newegg, I see it listed for $230 and out of stock. What's up with that? Prices usually go down over time, when new cpu's are released. Not only that, but now I see prices for the 1600 that I bought going for about 60% higher than what I paid at Micro Center. Mind blown.

I also need to build a system for my parents, since theirs is having problems. I have the AM4 motherboard, 32GB of system memory, power supply, case, pretty much everything but the hard drive and the processor. Their old system is about 6-7 years old, based on a dual core A4-6320 processor. I was looking around for budget AMD AM4 processors in the $60-$70 range, but it appears that the word "budget" and AMD may not go hand in hand any longer!

 

[GoodEnough]

Is it possible for me to run your job on my PC to compare time?

 

[MalVeauX]

Is it possible for me to run your job on my PC to compare time?

Yeap, I would just need to get a 20Gb file of the data I use so that it's an honest representation. Unfortunately my internet cannot handle that. The folk that I have colaborated with on this we just snail mailed USB drives around, sad but true.

The software is primarily Autostakkert!3 (free), working through a .SER container of RAW video, basically calculating laplace class changes in contrast over each frame to align them all and they're constantly moving (like boiling waves and ripples). It heavily is influenced by single thread performance (this is where my FX8350 falls down hard) and multi-core performance (and it uses every core as many as you have and hyperthreading, so if I had 64 threads, it would use them all). My FX8350 works well in the multi-core performance part, it's slower than modern stuff, but still manages to stay decent. It's that single core performance that shows hard, and that's where the Athlon 3000G kills it and saves so much time due to its significantly better single core performance in the routine.

The other software I use for this is PIPP (planetary imaging preprocessor) which does a similar job, but it's single threaded so it doesn't benefit from multi-core and really just does its job with whatever has best single core performance. It does similar as Autostakkert!3, is also free, in that it's often using an algorythm that sorts the frames in the .SER RAW container and quality weights the frames based on contrast (laplace again) and reorders them from best to worst.

It sounds kind of silly but this is the kind of processing work that is used to produce images through atmosphere of our local solar system that ends up on Spaceweather.com and housed by NASA in their APOD section (which I won a place in this year for the mercury transit so my imaging work result is hosted by NASA indefinitely).

Very best,

 

[GoodEnough]

Yup I totally get it. You don't know what you're missing out on ...and are used to 20 min batch jobs.

In reality, you could have had a big update in 2018 with the ryzen.5 2600 for $199 and almost 2.5x the performance

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Yeap, I would just need to get a 20Gb file of the data I use so that it's an honest representation. Unfortunately my internet cannot handle that. The folk that I have colaborated with on this we just snail mailed USB drives around, sad but true.

Don't underestimate snail-mail, sneakernet or even avian carrier bandwidth. It's just the latency which kind of sucks...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers#Other_avian_data_transfer_methods

 

[MalVeauX]

Yup I totally get it. You don't know what you're missing out on ...and are used to 20 min batch jobs.

In reality, you could have had a big update in 2018 with the ryzen.5 2600 for $199 and almost 2.5x the performance

Sadly yes, I was looking at an upgrade back then, but got side tracked with other equipment. The solar cycle (25) is increasing so I'm generating more data (about 250Gb~400Gb per session, per day) and so the amount of data is starting to stress the system. When I was only doing 100Gb or less, it wasn't a big deal. But now I'm sorting 4x the data commonly and it really impacts time. Had I upgraded a few years ago, I'd be on an Intel platform probably. But right now, its hard to argue with Ryzen 5000 series for cost.

Very best,

 

[StrangerGuy]

IMO. Intel has been awesome at the budget side of things with the 10400/10400F, even when capped at B460/DDR4-2666. I guess everyone forgot about Intel when they are so fixated on Zen 3.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Double post.