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Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

arstechnica.com

111–119 of 119 posts

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MSI X299 RAIDER is the cheapest X299 board I can find at NewEgg and costs $219.99. The GIGABYTE GA-AB350M-Gaming 3 is the cheapest Ryzen board I can find at NewEgg and costs only $94.99 by comparsion. Therefore, there's an obvious savings of $124. Although, you can easily spend $189.99 or more on a higher-end Ryzen board given NewEgg's offerings. So while there is a discrepancy, it's not massive.

Fair enough. I listed Micro Center because they routinely have the best deals on CPU prices and often have incredible CPU & motherboard combo prices. For a while you basically could get a Ryzen motherboard for free with the CPU and they took $50 off the MSRP of the CPU. I ultimately didn't go for it, but I was looking at an 1800X + motherboard for $500, which is $100 less than the i7-7820X alone. But I agree that a $…

> ... they routinely have the best deals on CPU prices and often have incredible CPU & motherboard combo prices.

Agreed.

> The X299 is early in its lifecycle, of course, so I'd hope availability for a few years.

Same, here. I've seen ASRock Intel boards vanish from the market only a year after they debut.

It's disturbing. And moreover, it's detrimental to the lifetime of the board as driver and BIOS updates cease.

Hopefully this chipset and socket will last a bit longer.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#112
post #30
post #18

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CPU gains for the last few gens have mainly been in perf/watt and, now, core count in lower-class chips thanks to AMD. The biggest benefit of a system upgrade for the last few gens, from a user perspective, has been for the chipset's gains - NVMe, USB3, USB-C, etc. more than raw performance. That's slowly trickled up but the real-world gains in many tasks haven't been enough to really justify it. I know many people s…

> NVMe While NVMe benchmarks are stunning I really am curious whether in an ordinary setting the difference to SATA can be felt at all. Not measured -- felt. When the era of swap ended because CPUs / chipsets finally could handle enough RAM and when we went from HDD to SDD, those could be felt for sure. > This is marginally different for laptops In laptop world, the problem is that with the spread of thin craze most…

Just upgraded to an NVMe for my primary drive... my mb had a x2 nvme slot, but it didn't work... luckily I got a pciex4 adapter, frankly, I know it's a bit faster than the SSD, but in general use, I haven't noticed the difference so much. Aside from node builds are a bit faster (which tends to touch a lot of random files on disk). General use hasn't been noticeable.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#113
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NVMe While NVMe benchmarks are stunning I really am curious whether in an ordinary setting the difference to SATA can be felt at all. Not measured -- felt. When the era of swap ended because CPUs / chipsets finally could handle enough RAM and when we went from HDD to SDD, those could be felt for sure. > This is marginally different for laptops In laptop world, the problem is that with the spread of thin craze most…

NVMe definitely feels faster. I have an NVMe and a SATA SSD in my workstation. I do most of my work off the NVME, but occasionally work on projects that live on the SATA disk. I definitely notice a difference in things with a lot of disk access.

About the only things I've noticed is in some of my node projects so far.. for general use, not nearly so much.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#114
post #5

Another issue beyond the fact that the X299 boards are problematic in terms of how many, and/or what slots you can and can't use seems to be excessive heat and stability in some of the reviews I've seen. I'm still running a i7-4790K at home, and though I'd like something with more cores... nothing is compelling enough to bring me to switch given the costs involved. If I were building new, would most likely go with an…

Just curious, what do you do that will make a difference with more cores?

Software dev.. usually have one or more DBs and/or services containerized, vm or direct running at once. Mainly it's a matter of the number of background processes that will run as intently as the front/dev side depending on what I'm doing.

I also have multiple SSDs and an NVMe I recently put in... that seems to have made the most difference. I'm running 32GB ram now, and don't tend to bump into that as a limitation.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#115

But once again they have included a second "processor" on each chip with a bunch of restricted backdoors that can not be removed [1]. There have already been bugs [2] and exploits [3] found and therefore no Intel or AMD chip can be used if you care about security and/or privacy. If I think Microsoft isn't free enough for me, then I can remove Windows and install Linux (or BSD). If I think Chrome is sending my data to…

What you say is absolutely true, but I don't think there's any reasonable alternative if one wants to have an X86 fast compatible processor nowadays.

I myself am thinking of buying one of these new AMD processors.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#116
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still on my i7 860 with nothing compelling me to upgrade. Intel's biggest competitor in 2017 is Intel from 2010.

It really depends on your applications/field. If you are in machine learning or data analysis, AVX can give a welcome performance boost. Also, a maximum of 16GB RAM is quite limiting.

My i5-750 has run 32GB RAM for years (4x8GB). I haven't had any issues.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#118
post #92
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just replaced my work desktop i5-2500 with an i5-4570. Same SSDs, 16GB RAM instead of 24GB. (Not a voluntary move.) There's no perceivable difference. If you have enough RAM to avoid swapping and cheap SATA SSDs, all the requirements for fast/large CPUs or graphics cards are special applications of some sort. Browsers and editors and terminal windows and video playback don't count.

Even with a very intense overclock, Sandy Bridge is starting to fall behind the pack in gaming. Not obsolete by any means but 5 years of even incremental IPC gains do add up, and Sandy Bridge is still running PCIe 2.0. The 2500k is starting to come out 30-50% behind the 7600K in many titles let alone a 7700K, which is a very perceptible difference. http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2773-intel-i5-2500k-revisi... http:…

Yep. It was that reason that i upgraded from the 2600k. My entire workspace is virtual machines. The 2600k started falling down there. Vmware without hyperthreading is kinda non optimal. Sub normal. Frfrrl. Everything else, it is still a cracking pc.

Re: Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world

#119
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPU gains for the last few gens have mainly been in perf/watt and, now, core count in lower-class chips thanks to AMD. The biggest benefit of a system upgrade for the last few gens, from a user perspective, has been for the chipset's gains - NVMe, USB3, USB-C, etc. more than raw performance. That's slowly trickled up but the real-world gains in many tasks haven't been enough to really justify it. I know many people s…

> I upgraded last year and it was from a 920 to a 6600K. Even the 920 did much of what I wanted, honestly, it was more a luxury upgrade. The 920 is a solid performer, but oh my does it need efficient cooling. At launch it almost felt like a return to the Pentium 4 era in terms of power consumption. If I were to upgrade my 920 anytime soon, it would be to reduce the need for cooling fans and to get a quieter system. A…

When I upgraded to my 4790k (from amd FX-8350) the main driver was my electric bill, I actually had a couple hotter computers running, my htpc was similar power usage... went to the newer i7 on the desktop, and a brix (similar to nuc) for htpc, recently to an nvidia shield tv in place of htpc.
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