I need to change?

[jose]

Stupid question guys:

Yesterday a friend on a flash sale bought a new PC based on I9 12900K with a 3080 graphics card. Ok, his old PC is a 7700K/1070 so just for the graphics card it's worth the change 

We tested it (mode stock, non overclock) and I have the feeling that, except for getting a better score in Benchmarks, for "normal" use (web, mails, youtube, some games...) there really wasn't much difference compared to my 9900K/3080:  yes, yes, my 9900K takes a second longer to load some applications, it gets a few FPS less in some games...  single core tasks it does seem somewhat superior (such as DCS in VR) but in general, I did not notice a "radical" change.

Something similar happened to me when changing from I7 8700K to I9 9900K... 

The seller has recommended that I change the motherboard and processor now (When I told the guy that I still had a 9900K his look was shocked) but I am not entirely convinced.

what do you think?

[jamesmking]

5 hours ago, jose said:

The seller has recommended that I change the motherboard and processor now (When I told the guy that I still had a 9900K his look was shocked) but I am not entirely convinced.

what do you think?

The 12900k is very good at single threaded performance, multi threaded is good BUT its value for money is poor and the motherboards are not cheap....

yes you get newer versions of pcie but apart from a few expensive M.2 ssds nothing really takes advantage of the new pcie.

the 12xxx series have performance cores and non performance cores and it makes the operating systems task scheduler much more complex because it now has to decide which tasks should go on the high performance cores vs which go on the lower performance cores.... and the new scheduler is only available in windows 11, so if you stick with 10 you potentially can lose some performance

12xxx series support both ddr5 ram and ddr4 but not at the same time (so your choice or ram and motherboard are tied together) ddr5 ram is almost twice the price of ddr4 for perhaps a 10% performance up lift...

also most 12xxx motherboards don't have a lot of sata connections so if you have lots of physical drives you may have issues and require an additional sata or HBA expansion card...

all in all 12xxx is a hot running expensive platform, slowly dropping sata support for more and more m.2 drives.. so if you don't need the horsepower stick with what you have. 

I would also mention AMD as a more cost effective option BUT:

The only "modern" system I have is an amd 5900x and I would hessite to recommend it because of hardware and driver bugs that have persisted for years. I tried raid, stuttering, drives completely dropping out and only reappearing on reboot, terrible performance unless I loaded down one core... then it just worked... I guess it was power save and frequency scaling bugs. As soon as all the cores dropped bellow 3.6ghz drives vanished or hung. I ended up having to go non-raid. AMDs non raid drivers where SO bad AMD dropped the drivers and just provide Microsofts' ancient standard sata drivers with no chipset specific optimisations. After this I still got occasional random stuttering and random short duration windows freezes... turns out the amd equivalent of TPM (trusted platform) had bugs.  I was using it for boot drive encryption... That bug was present from the beginning and only got fixed a month ago. After they fixed it they admitted there was a problem if they had admitted earlier I would have tried an add on TPM rather then the in built one but I had no way of knowing what was causing the freezes. Then I got audio issues, random stuttering unless I loaded down one core. Paradoxically increasing the soundcards hardware buffer (which should have reduced the stuttering actually increased it).. I ended up using tiny hardware buffers.  Timing errors, dma or interrupt issues I guess. Same soundcard worked flawlessly on multiple intel platforms. Before all of these issues there was widespread well documented issues with usb randomly dropping out... but I purchased after that got fixed so I did not experience it myself. I was very happy with the cpu performance and value for money but the overall experience was not at all polished amd left a sour taste in my mouth. My 5900x experience was the most frustrating of any build I have done over the last 20 years and the lack of timely updates and acknowledgments of issues from AMD did not help... My experience with Intel is it just seemed to work. Now with the latest fixes from AMD things are not bad but I don't have confidence another driver or hardware related issue with not magically appear and take multiple years to fix... I just cant trust the platform in the way I can with intel.

Oh and I almost forgot to mention 13 gen intel is around the corner... it will only be an incremental upgrade since it will be a refinement of 12 gen but that might explain why the seller is pushing hard for you to upgrade - so they can shift stock before it gets obsoleted in a few months. Unless you want the features of 12 gen intel stick with what you have and save a ton of cash for DIY builds or music. Long gone are the days of upgrading from say a 286dx 12Mhz to a 386dx 40Mhz and seeing a 2-3x performance uplift in a single cpu generation... now its more like 25% increase in 4 generations. Yes you get more cores in each generation but very little software will exploit all the cores so unless you are doing coin mining, massively parallel video rendering etc most of the cores will just sleep...

 

Edited July 28, 2022 by jamesmking

[jose]

Thanks James. I think you are very close to my point.

From the beginning I have ruled out AMD. I know several people who have had tons of compatibility issues e.g with HP Reverbs and honestly I'm not going to change my VR headset (I have the G1 and I'm very satisfied with them) 

My intention is to stay with Intel and I'm runing Win 11 with my current system I haven't had any major problems at the moment.

The only thing I've seen positive about this new board is that it supports PCIe 4.0 vs PCIe 3.0. but in the "macroscopic world/real live" the difference using one of my M.2 nvme was... 0 (we don´t use Benchmarks, only a few programs), so I don't see the purchase as justified either.

€900 processor + motherboard (Z690 DDR4) seemed quite expensive to me. If I want to move at DDR5, I need to buy 64Gb which would increase the cost significantly

 

[HiWire]

Not a big enough jump going from Coffee Lake to Alder Lake, in my opinion.

I've been looking at new computers and one of the things to mention is that the Intel processors are some of the hottest and most power-hungry they've ever been on this newer process, Intel 7 (10nm).

The upcoming Raptor Lake processors will also be manufactured in Intel 7 and they are increasing the number of cores, so expect a bit more performance from that update. AMD's Ryzen 7000 series will be built on TSMC's 5nm process and they've increased the maximum power limit to 230W (15% performance increase estimated).

In my opinion, the value proposition hasn't changed radically for most PC users, especially desktop users. You're more likely to notice an improvement from other factors, like a new monitor, better speakers, larger SSD drives, or 10 Gigabit Ethernet or Wi-Fi 6 in daily use.

Yes, GPU and CPU power is important in gaming and some other applications, but they haven't pushed CPU and overall system performance as heavily because of the number of people using older hardware in the market and delays in software development. The last few years of supply chain shortages haven't helped things either.

Prices are starting to drop, thankfully, but I think a lot of people are still waiting for really substantial changes to come down the pipe (like the new Nvidia GeForce 40-series and AMD Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs) rather than incremental changes like PCIe 5.0 or DDR5 that take several years to fully optimize.

People are still waiting for Windows 11 to implement some basic features, too. I played around with a co-worker's Win11 system, but it didn't seem much better than Win10 to me. Here's a list of missing features:

https://www.windowslatest.com/2022/04/03/should-you-upgrade-to-windows-11-heres-a-list-of-missing-features/

Edited August 1, 2022 by HiWire

[jose]

Yes, except for the new look, I don't see anything revolutionary with Win11. In any case, a loss of performance until the patches have been arriving over the months. 

38 minutes ago, HiWire said:

In my opinion, the value proposition hasn't changed radically for most PC users, especially desktop users. You're more likely to notice an improvement from other factors, like a new monitor, better speakers, larger SSD drives, or 10 Gigabit Ethernet or Wi-Fi 6 in daily use.

These are precisely things that I have improved until I was forced to migrate to the 30 series in April due to HP Reverb. Thanks to the collapse of mining, I pay a price close to the recommended. 

About the new GPUs generation (I use Nvidia but I´m not a fanboy) I am quite skeptical. Nvidia has a "questionable" way of doing business (not mention mining, and how prices have been artificially inflated). 

My perception is that prices will not drop to pre-pandemic levels (CPUs, GPUs or SSD). The industry has seen that they can increase prices and continue to sell (including AMD) So the only alternative when the time comes will be OM computers. 

 

[HiWire]

Yes, they are so greedy. It's going to be difficult to time the market or get a good value because they will withdraw the old stock availability as soon as possible, so you can't count on highly-discounted old stock to stay around.

There have also been compatibility problems reported with old games using Windows 11's new scheduler and Alder Lake – not all developers of old games are in business any more, so it remains to be seen if some old games will remain incompatible (or poorly optimized) indefinitely on the new systems.