Are Ryzen 5000 CPUs Too Expensive? Memory Sweet Spot? Zen 3 Q&A

[Music] welcome back to harbor unboxed i am back yet again i have had a little bit of sleep since you would have seen my 5600x review so it's been a bit full on but we've got that done now and of course we've jumped head first into other zen 3 related things i've started some memory testing a bit of ipc investigation so there'll be more content coming up but in between all of that tim and i thought we'd have just one of our sort of relaxed laid-back conversations about the whole launch and the products and basically address a heap of questions that we've got from our patreon members slash now float plane members i guess yeah yeah this was all on our discord so uh yeah that that's it so it's just going to be we're going to talk about basically the questions that we have been asked by the patreon slash floatplane members but there'll be some other probably conversation in there as well a few things have popped up so we'll just get into it you guys enjoyed it when we did this last time for the what was it the rtx 370 was the last one we did yeah that's right so anyway before i waffle on anymore let's get into it let's go all right first question here what price do you think the 5800x will settle to in about six months when the buyers settle into the price to performance approach hmm interesting discussion because we you found that the 5800x was sort of the worst value of the products didn't you so interesting question yeah obviously it's it's a what do you think type thing so crystal ball type question i can't remember what i said in my review but it needs to be priced a maximum of 400 really to make sense in the current market six months down the track it depends on what change is there if intel makes any adjustments seems unlikely yeah i i it's hard to say it really is because we also need a 5700 x yeah that's that's exactly what i was going to say 5700 x what's happening there that's right so we're looking at about 300ish dollars for the 3700x as obviously msrp was 330. it's come down below that certainly six months after launch and it sort of cruised back up for the release of zen3 so hopefully we can get an eight-core cpu with the kind of ipc we're seeing from zen three at around that price point i think that's what everyone be hoping for it's a similar situation really with the 5600 non-x that we're also hoping is a thing rumored price of 220 us if that happens that is going to be the best seller for next year for sure yeah that cpu at 220 us is just an absolute bargain people are going to blame me now for saying that amd is going to adjust prices but yeah that's not a thing so hopefully yeah hopefully we do see these lower prices but of course there'll be i'm expecting like a second wave of these sort of zen reviews of the non-x models so i'm hoping we do see either a 58 not x or a 5700 x or whatever it may be there and then of course the um the 56 not x but anyway it's really stuck in one of those it's kind of like the mid-range situation that we've seen a few times like 10-700k for example it was kind of well 10 600k was sort of the value gaming choice from the intel side and then if you really wanted the best then you wouldn't buy the 10700k you just go all the way up to the 10 900k and you're getting a very similar thing here because it's not really like a lot of creators i guess would choose a 5800x type product because if you're going all out on productivity then you just go right up to 5900x or something like that so really you're stuck in that very difficult position so yeah i think there's a lot to play out here and hopefully as you say we'll get some some more chips that sort of slot in around here and improve that situation yeah definitely it'll be one of those things where the market dictates what happens if it's a situation where early next year amd's still rapidly selling everything they can pump out then they're not going to be incentivized to make cheaper more affordable parts based on the same silicon really and they'll probably be well they're definitely binning silicon at this point so there'll be some 58 well there'll be some eight core uh dies for example that won't clock maybe as well and they'll be getting binned for the the future cheaper more affordable parts let's say yep but anyway we'll have to wait and see on that one all right next question here this one got quite a few thumbs up in the discord chat so obviously a few people want this one addressed with ryzen 5000 cpus running slightly cooler for both the cpu and vrm they're using slightly less power sometimes uh would a not so great x570 and b550 motherboards be all right to run higher tier cpus eight or twelve core i honestly don't think you'll see too much difference yeah they are depending on which models we're talking about here they can be slightly more power efficient slightly easier on the vrm but i don't think to the degree we're a really a board that can't well let's say an msi gaming edge for example the x570 gaming edge or the gaming plus they were kind of the worst boards we saw again they'll still work perfectly fine with the 12 core cpu for gaming it's more if you're going to do core heavy workloads like a blender type workload for extended periods of time like half an hour we saw them throttle in that sort of workload without air flow within five ten minutes but if you have airflow they'll certainly survive a bit longer before throttling the cpu a bit but i don't expect to see too much difference basically the motherboards that you should have avoided you should still should avoid um and that's that really yeah it seems with some of those boards it's kind of like when they're bad they're really bad like they're so much worse than other products and it yeah i mean i'm not an expert motherboard testing but it doesn't sound like those boards are running very close to the edge like a few watts here or there would be the difference between being able to run those cpus without throttling and getting throttling it seems like they're just bad they're just bad products so yeah i'd agree with what you're saying and to be fair there really aren't many boards here we're talking about yes that's right about three maybe x570 motherboards unfortunately i all came from msi msi has refreshed some of those boards now which has addressed those problems as far as b550 goes as long as you have a bit of airflow and a 30 degree ambient or lower room temperature there's no b550 board that won't run any of these cpus for extended periods of time and quality workloads so really they all stepped their game up for b550 all the b550 boards are quite good i'm talking about any b550 motherboard with a heatsink on the vrm so just yep yeah if they if they don't have a heat sink we didn't bother testing them because they're probably not going to be great for the 16 12 16 core models right next question super simple one only three words thoughts on availability they're my kind of questions i love the short ones it's interesting one because i think we've seen some commentary sort of comparing the zen 3 launch to the rtx 3000 series launch which i think has been sort of the that was the talking point going into this you know will it be as bad as the nvidia launch and it seems pretty clear from user reports from what we're hearing from retails as well that availability is significantly better like it did not sell out in one second like the rtx 3080 but it's unlike in a lot of regions actually you could buy chips hours after the launch especially for stuff like the 5600x which was pretty good yeah so the 5600x from all reports i've heard thousands of those available for order um individual retailers so plenty of 5600x cpus uh i think the 5800x not too bad and then as you get to sort of the the 5900x which it seemed like that was the cpu amd was pushing but not quite as good availability at this point in time for that one and then the 5950x limited availability there no real surprises though because like the 3950x that had really bad availability for it was yeah up to yeah was it two something like two months from memory they just yeah all of a sudden then it was just oh you can buy one now and the the supply caught up with the demand basically yeah and we're going to see that again here so i think the default uh sort of reaction from buyers these days is to lose their minds and screen paper launch from the rooftops but basically whatever a new exciting product launches that claim something crazy like a 19 ipc improvement or whatever it may be they're going to sell out like they're just going to sell out on day one at some point and i mean as you said as you say it didn't necessarily sell out everywhere but it did in certain places retailers may be under-ordered because they didn't know that the demand would be so high you we've said this i don't know how many times at this point you've really got to look one to two weeks down the track if you get two weeks and it's still really hard to buy then perhaps there is some kind of supply issue but yeah generally speaking i expect in two weeks time you'll be able to buy at least like the 5900x the 5800x and the 5600x pretty easily not sure about the 5950x as i said the 3950x was a at least a month if not two months before that was easy to purchase sort of anywhere and i think with rd and a2 supply will possibly be worse that's certainly what the reports sound like but again i know it's going to happen anyway people are going to lose their minds on day one paper launch all that sort of stuff give it a couple of weeks and once the crazy overwhelming demand cools off or people start to get their orders fulfilled then hopefully it won't be like what we see with the rtx 3080 but maybe it will that's right we we generally call it a month after launch i think that's a a reasonable enough a reasonable amount of time for them to get things sorted out and and work out how strong the demand is and then meet that yep right next question is and i'm pretty sure steve will know the answer to this one is there a new memory sweet spot for zen three have there been real improvements to fclk tuning able to get say ddr4 4000 to run one to one again got a couple of thumbs up on that one so interesting well i've started doing a bit of tinkering as i uh alluded to at the beginning of this video doing a bit of memory testing and whatnot uh the fclk 2 gigahertz 2000 megahertz not a thing on any of my cpus at least on the x570 godlike i know amd's hinted at that being possible it hasn't been for me yet so if you leave the fclk at 1.9 gigahertz and put the dda up to 4 000 no real improvements there so it seems based on my preliminary testing that the sweet spot is for zen 3 is the same as n2 so you're looking at like 3 800 basically that that 1900 megahertz fclk seems like it's much more achievable at least with zen three but it's more i've found again tuning those memory timings so if you're using like 30 32 is with low low latency timing still pretty good but 3638 with those manually tuned timings very comparable so i wouldn't really stress too much about which frequency you're running at it's more about tuning up those timings again and as game as nexus released a video talking about two sticks versus four something we covered in depth in january of this year basically with these zen processors it was the same with zen two same with zen three four sticks will perform better than two and well i should say single rank works better than dual rank so if you have two single rank sticks and then you go and get another two single rank sticks that actually changes it to dual channel operation so you mean dual rank operation right dual rank operation yes so not to be confused with dual channel because that's still a thing whether you have two or four sticks providing they're in the right dimm slots but you end up with more uh 64-bit banks to access and they not that they're accessed simultaneously but you can write to one uh well the the one that you're going to read from next is ready to go individual banks so they talk about interleaving and stuff like that anyway it's all covered in a video that we uh released in january so probably put a link to that because yeah we can do that yeah it was a good it was covered that covered this sort of you want dual rank for gaming put more sticks in tends to be better but you said that potentially quad rank was not don't go all the way to quad but duel is is good i haven't tested it so i don't know i i i honestly don't know if if quad ranks going a step too far and that overwhelms things and you see a bit of a performance decline or if it's the same or improve no idea there uh so not something we've looked at yet perhaps it's something we could look into the future i just need two kits of dual rank memory and i only have one so not something i can test at this point in time yeah just but anyway as for sorry go on yeah i'm just going to say i mean going back to the the memory sweet spot with fc okay i actually found it surprising that amd said you know oh you might be able to do two gigahertz on it considering they also said it was the exact same iodide design so i was kind of wondering you know how would that have been possible were they binning it more to try and make that claim i mean if it's the same surely we're going to get the same memory performance yeah exactly robert was talking about a new agisa code that was going to make it more likely that you could run the fclk at 2000 megahertz again none of my chips do it with the current bios i don't know if that'll be a thing but yeah as i said 1900 megahertz seems more plausible now because i think i only had like one or two cpus of the many zen2 chips that i have that could actually do that it was more you know 1800 megahertz was standard typical so we've gone up at least 100 megahertz there and it does make a difference but as i said it's really all again about those memory timings tuning them up does make a really big difference and again i'll have a video covering this in more depth soon but you will see if you grab just a pair of eight gigabyte sticks so a 16 gigabyte memory kit pretty common what people go for and it's a cl 16 kit with some fairly loose timings the performance decline compared to what we showed in our review is pretty severe there is a when cpu limited there is quite a big drop off in performance i don't know what performance you'll see with an intel cpu that maybe that's a separate video we can do where we take all that stuff and then re-do it on intel and do comparisons i know people will be begging for that that's a lot of testing though for one video and i wouldn't be able to get it out this week and i know people are really keen because they want to know what memory to buff their rise and processor it's also for those of you who want a bit of memory buying advice right now this is the something we always talk about the reviews and the way we test there isn't necessarily something or it isn't the hardware configuration you necessarily want to purchase we're doing a sort of scientific testing if you will we're trying to do an apples-to-apples thing and eliminate certain variables so we can focus on cpu performance but as i said as i've said in all of my ryzen 5000 reviews typically when gaming you will find yourselves predominantly gpu bound so you will not be bound by your memory frequency so keep that in mind basically don't go buying super expensive memory with low latencies that typically is something overclockers would get to get the best scores possible under realistic conditions you whether you're using 3200 or 3800 you're probably going to see really no difference in performance and then where it does become a little more cpu dependent we're talking about a couple of frames so spending hundreds more in your memory doesn't make sense but anyway i'll i'll cover this in much more detail in that upcoming video uh but yeah at the moment 3600 cl 16 reasonably priced kit probably the way to go cool so more details to come right next question here is from jeremy uh do you believe zen 3 will be similar to zen plus as in lacking the low end ryzen 5 and ryzen 3 as those were replaced by apus on those brackets instead do you think it's possible that even non-x x600 so like 5600 in this situation i'd reckon that t will be emitted this time i think we've talked a bit about how probably the 5600 non-x is going to exist i think it's very unlikely they'll just have a 300 cpu and nothing below that seems it seems like they will have something there but for those ryzen 5 and ryzen 3 low end parts like sort of your quad cores it's we know that there's n3 apu's coming up potentially as early as sort of you know first month or first couple of months of 2021 so it could be that they just leave it to that product which is pretty likely going to be an eight-core die again so they might even have as much as a ryzen seven on an apu design yeah it's a really hard one to say i mean will direct will get like a what would it be a 5300 x and 50 100 for this yeah like quad core pro zen 3 quad cores maybe i i mean we didn't really get quad cores with zen 2 did we yields just weren't bad enough to work the existence of those processors that would be lasering off working dies essentially and that's why that i'm well i don't know for a fact but i'm guessing that's why availability for the 3100 and 3300x was so bad they spent pretty much the entire generation building enough really defective dyes where they only had four working cores to be sold as those parts and they even had to mix and match with the the ccds because different configurations basically and yeah it took a long time for them to come in they seem to sell out pretty quickly and never properly get restocked i don't actually know what the availability situation is currently but last i looked it wasn't great so yeah we may just see uh sort of like a limited edition quad core run on zen three halfway through the the product cycle and then that's it i don't know uh but yeah we're just all guessing i'm i'm very confident we're going to see a 5600 non-x yeah beyond that though yeah so i i would say it's probably more likely there'll be apus but again it's just hard to say i would imagine that they'll have something in that sort of 200 maybe 150 us dollar price range though it'd be pretty unusual to to stop at 300 as we've sort of said all right next question another one about the the value of zen 3 considering the price hike of zen 3 processors compared to zen 2 processors and the good enough performance that they gave in gaming and already excellent performance in productivity is it worth the extra money to buy zen 3 cpu compared to a zen 2 option which will hopefully come down in price as well excluding time is money the extra savings could go towards other things like a better gpu as shown by the 3600 with a quick overclock can match the at higher resolutions with i assume this is an an rtx 3080 yeah what are your thoughts on this one yeah it's a bit like what i've said in a few of the reviews as sort of noted here they are a good value option the 3600 200 really hard to beat the advantage of getting that over something like intel's yo 10 400 f is the fact that you are on the am4 platform and you do have the option to upgrade to a zen 3 cpu with higher ipc or higher ipc and more cores so that's a nice upgrade path for those coming from something like a 3600 whether you buy one of those cpus you know second hand in a few years time or whatever if you're on a budget for at least right now and yet again if you had to buy right now i would urge you guys to hold off until early next year uh because perhaps at that time we will have a 220 50 600 which would be a much better purchase than a 200 six hundred yeah if you had to build right now 3600 is a great processor to get as we've seen it plays all games perfectly fine and for the most part as of as again as i've said you are usually pretty heavily gpu limited because most of you might be running a 3080 or 3090 at 1080p on a yes on a ryzen 5 3600 most of you will be using i imagine somewhere in that mid-range like a 2060 2070 super 5700 5700 xt somewhere in there would be the sort of the higher end uh graphics card you'd be pairing with with a 3600 and you're almost always going to be gpu limited at 1440p the 3600 won't really be holding you up in many tiles unless you're talking about some old ancient game that uses a single thread like starcraft or whatever but all modern games run really well in the 3600 so yeah right now zen 2 is the the value option really it's it's kind of like a threadripper second gen threadripper third gen type situation where if you want a lot of cores on the cheap you've got the second gen threadripper if you want the latest and greatest third gen same sort of situation here yeah i guess it depends how how far zen 2 falls in the next couple of months like if you could pick up a 3600 for 150 dollars in the next couple of months that's going to be like a pretty a pretty good deal and if that's you know sure nearly a hundred dollars less than a even a 5600 non-x if that part exists you know that that is a significant amount of money that could go towards like moving just one tier up in a gpu purchase so sure yeah there's a lot to play out there but i mean if it if it comes in that they're only like as you said sort of 200 versus 220 dollars for a six core then you know that's not really getting you that gpu upgrade so you may as well spend that little bit of extra money it really just like with all these sort of let's predict the future questions it really comes down to where it's positioned and i think we've seen amd though be pretty aggressive with dropping the price for older generation parts once the new stuff comes in and sort of availability settles on it so it wouldn't surprise me if zen 2 still is quite a good value buy you know into next year if they continue to stock them yeah it's a similar sort of conversation if the 3600 drops down to 150 and then you get a 5600 at 220. yeah again you're probably not while i'd be tempted to get the 220 option honestly again 150 probably gonna be looking at the same performance in games and that that's again that's the problem with the benchmark videos uh although i try to stress it in when we're reviewing the cpu we're reviewing the cpu we're trying to show you the differences between the cpus when other factors are eliminated as much as possible but then when you get into real world testing which is why i like to do the gpu cpu scaling which comes later because that is a huge amount of testing but often we find for those of you running a mid-range gpu at a 1440p type resolution the cpu doesn't play or the role the cpu plays there isn't nearly as significant so you have to go much further back in time before the cpu becomes a problem okay next one here for a pure higher end gaming system think rtx 3080 or 6800 xt do you think it would be better to get an eight core 5800x or save the money with a 5600x or 5600 comes out and put the money towards a zen four system so you know ddr5 upgrade and all that sort of stuff so that's basically the question huh well i guess it depends on your budget and what you plan on doing with the system if you're someone who let's say you have two screens this argument's been coming up a bit lately if you have two screens open and for some reason you insist on trying to watch a youtube video while you're playing a game i couldn't imagine doing that because i usually play competitive games and but even the storytelling games you play wouldn't that be a bizarre situation yeah it's too distracting don't do it maybe with flight simulator or something like that but aside from that yeah okay yeah that might make sense that sort of game anyway let's say you're a weirdo that does that you calling these people weirdos people all the people that didn't don't get sarcasm or jokes they're just mass exodus uh if you do other things like streaming or watching youtube videos while you game or something else in the background that uses anywhere from an insignificant amount of cpu usage to maybe a significant amount then those two extra cores could come in handy and maybe will help avoid frame stuttering for the most part if you're a normal person who when they play games they close their video encoding software and they close their 4k youtube video generally when i game even i mean i'm gaming on a 3970x 32 zen 2 cores 64 gigs of ram plenty stuff whenever i game i shut everything down basically because it reduces your risk of a the game crashing at some point because that can happen especially in certain games and you just don't need stuff in the background while you're gaming so i usually close most things down i leave the web browser open with a few things anyway everyone's different but basically i think most people will find a 5600x very sufficient for gaming because it is similar to something like a 3700x in terms of cpu resources it just has significantly better memory and cache latency uh performance so yeah i would personally yeah if if i had a certain budget and it was like if i was getting a 5800x and i didn't really want to cough up the extra money uh to make up the difference over something like a 3600 x2 for the the gpu i would get the 5600x and get the higher end gpu that i wanted rather than shuffle around the budget to accommodate for more cpu cores that i'm possibly not going to use but it comes down to the individual you've really got to think about what you do with your computer if you're the kind of person that shuts down most things you leave chrome open with maybe discord and a couple of things and i don't know some other maybe skype type chat program you got steam and maybe you know something else playing then the six core processor we process it will be fine but if you're the type of gamer that has you're doing mega tasking while you're gaming you've got your 4k youtube video playing and something else then the extra cause might help uh but anyway sort of repeating ourselves at this point yeah i think the angle on the zen four system as well is pretty interesting because that's we don't we don't really have a lot of insight into sort of what's coming in the future and that could be a fairly substantial upgrade necessary we're not just talking about like a drop in cpu on your standard motherboard it could be you need to do the full platform motherboard memory and cpu so in that sort of sense you know if you're saving money towards zen four it might not even be worth doing a zen 3 to zen 4 upgrade when you sort of factor in that entire platform switch i mean it really depends what that cpu looks like the sort of performance gains but i think that for a lot of people that have invested in this zen 3 that just came out that if there is this platform switch then probably you're not going to be wanting to do a single gen upgrade so maybe if you still have the budget available it would make more sense to just get the 5800x anyway and sort of not really think about doing that zen 4 upgrade but again it really depends what sort of things we're looking at when that those products are announced and all that sort of thing but i would expect a full platform upgrade so yeah that's just another interesting dynamic it's kind of like uh to change the change it slightly we've been asked countless times should i get a ryzen 5 3600 or a ryzen 7 3700x and we've often said if you're on a budget the 3600 can't be beat you know it's it's usually been prior it was like 165 dollars when we were saying this the 100-ish dollars you save by getting the six core processor can be put towards a future upgrade and if i had a 3600 with a mid-range gpu i'd probably skip the 5600x and i'd be looking at putting that hundred dollars or so towards the zen four upgrade or whatever that may be in the future yep so yeah saving the money can make a difference if you are able to save money and put that money away for a future upgrade rather than waste the extra hundred dollars on cores that you probably aren't going to use all right next question is despite your thoughts on saying the 5800x is one of the poorer value products in the current zen 3 lineup do you think amd may have gone a little too far trying to increase their average selling price throughout their whole lineup i personally feel that had amd kept pricing similar with the 5600x and the 5800x but gone a little higher with the 5900x and the 5950x the situation wouldn't be as debatable as where it stands at the moment so i'm really interested to hear your thoughts on it i'll just give a couple of my thoughts on this first i think the 5600x is enough of a compelling product that they can kind of get away with selling it at 300 especially when you sort of look at the the intel lineup and the rest of the market you know beating or at the very least competing with a 10 600 600k and often higher end products makes it well they can just sell it for that price that's perfectly fine i do agree the 5800x is probably a little too expensive given what it's offering and then yeah i think if they increase the price or kept that price increase what we've got now for those higher tier parts probably wouldn't be too much of a concern given their more sort of your creative focus products where those people are more willing to spend more money and not necessarily you know you know the difference between 750 and 800 isn't that significant for them um but those are just my thoughts i'm interested to hear what you have to say on this one yeah i pretty much agree with all of that i don't think increasing the price of the higher end parts would have been a smart play i mean they've obviously increased them by 50 dollars but increasing them further yeah i don't think that would have been the way to go to be honest with you the 50 900 x there's no real competition for that part so they can charge a premium but they are charging a premium uh and then the 5900x that's really got to compete with the 100k and had that been any more expensive then it wouldn't have been as compelling it's still pretty hard to make an argument for buying the intel processor given the much higher power consumption we're not tdp limited the lack of pci express 4.0 all that kind of stuff does make it harder to recommend the intel cpu but i think you know if you end up in a situation where intel then becomes the value offering it's just role reversal basically from what we saw with zen two and i i don't think that's what people want to see and that's not really a great look for amd the second they become very competitive they are just go and do an intel uh which i don't believe they're done at this point i know people are claiming they have but i don't think they have and yeah i mean it's it's just a market thing isn't it they've released these cpus they seem to be selling extremely well yeah so i think i think they've probably nailed it and hopefully sales do slow down though so they they look to uh re-launch zen 3 with the non-x models hopefully that happens before long but we'll have to wait and see yeah and i think you know it's never great to see like a 50 price increase on a budget or sort of more mid-range part like a 5600 x would have been great if that was still 250 dollars again if there's a 5600 non-x then that could smooth out that situation a bit but personally i think that the 5950x being that sort of there's as you say there's no competition for it like it's just in a realm of its own the fact that they're only charging 800 for it when they could have done like an nvidia titan thing and said all right well 5900x is a 550 or 600 cpu whatever and then oh 5950x yeah that's 1200 dollars like because it sort of left a bad taste it would have left a bad taste um but that's sort of what a monopoly situation can do when you've got a part that can do everything like you can do titans type stuff so i think the fact that they're only increasing by 50 is pretty reasonable but again it really depends i mean fifty dollars for a 750 part is a way different percentage than fifty dollars on a 250 dollar part so yeah look if it was a thousand dollars it would have been the 5950 xe yeah it would have been the extreme edition because and then they would have been very much like intel so i'm glad they didn't they didn't try and get away with that all right next question is with performance like this what are your expectations for threadripper 5000 series uh can the x299 platform go to the bargain bin at kmart or will intel continue to flog a dead horse isn't it already in the bargain bin it came out sort of yeah intel's settled into flogging that dead horse they're they're going to keep doing that for a while they don't really have too much choice unfortunately yep but yeah threadripper 5000 series is going to be brutal yeah it's going to be a beast brutal i we were just talking about pricing a moment ago i have no idea what sort of pricing adjustment going to be looking at there because 3rd gen threadripper was already a bit extreme so not sure what to expect i i shudder to think but yeah 5000 series threadripper is going to be something else it's going to be insane it's going to be really great for workstation news and i can imagine amd already just based on sort of the the messaging they were using for the 5950x you know they're not going to have a situation where it's just multi-core performance i mean something like this big threadripper cpu is going to be great for pretty much everything like your your video encoding and your 3d rendering but also modeling and stuff that really heavily relies on your single thread performance where those intel chips can have a bit of a lead there so sort of your solidworks and stuff while it doesn't necessarily need you know that many cores some parts of those applications do also you know when you're doing certain tasks can spool up across all the cores but then you know during the editing process it really relies on single thread performance so i think for those applications you're going to see amd just going all out on the marketing with that sort of thing so i could i envisioned them being quite expensive um potentially even higher as we sort of talked about but again really don't know having 64 calls with this sort of single thought thread performance is going to be quite a compelling option very hard to compete with yeah definitely yeah i'm not looking forward to seeing the pricing on those ones but anyway all right next question is given the lessons learnt from past cpu launches for amd and motherboard manufacturers have you come across any software hardware compatibility issues with the xen3 processors so help me answer this tim yeah i mean it's probably best that someone has actually used the cpus answers that question all right fine uh no no issues as of yet which is yeah great to see having said that i have to admit i haven't done a whole lot of testing on uh well i mean we've done all we've done all the software testing we've done and so that was all fine but as far as hardware compatibility goes very select range of uh memory modules graphics cards that sort of stuff and i haven't really even tested that many motherboards but i haven't really heard of anyone having any problems it seems like those that bought it slotted in and they're enjoying their cpu so unless there's any major reports that i've missed then yeah i think it's it's pretty well dialed in at this point i think it was also interesting to see that amd i think maybe not learnt from compatibility related stuff but learnt from the spec sheet and making sure that they don't maybe overestimate the the frequencies that the chips run it because there's been quite a few reports that some of these chips will boost single their single core performance or single core frequency up to five gigahertz when it's not advertised as a five gigahertz chip so i think they they definitely learnt from that respect and sort of dialed back a little bit on their what they're advertising i think that's right as well having said that i don't think that they overestimated on the spec sheet what the cpus could do it was just a bug in the agiza code that they yeah they ironed out and then it was no longer a problem and people got their 25 50 megahertz back yeah there were some there were some boards that were like 150 megahertz down or whatever but they were clearly buggy boards uh but anyway it all got sorted out before long but it was a very minor teething issue that had no real impact on the performance shown in reviews or anything like that continuing on from sort of motherboard testing the next question here is have you tested any b450 motherboards with the 5000 series cpus yet no uh i heard rumors that i think it was gigabyte had uh bios support for zen 3 on their b50 boards i have no idea if that's true i haven't actually looked into it yet because i haven't had a chance but no i haven't tested any b450 motherboards i asked msi if they had a bias i could try for their max boards nothing as of yet so they're still talking about early next year makes sense so not sure if it's yeah we'll see if that situation changes uh next month but yeah if not it'll be the month after so not too long to wait for those on b 450 motherboards but again really they're probably doing your favor i say this a lot when something's delayed that they're probably doing you a favor but if january comes around and you end up getting that 5600 for 220 us it's going to be a lot better value cpu for you guys hanging on to your b450 motherboards all right we'll have to wait and see what happens there all right question here from nick who's a long time supporter one of our the ogs i think anyway how does ryzen 5000 handle games like microsoft flight sim and metro exodus that even at 4k had a big performance deficit on ryzen 3000 versus intel cpus well they didn't at 4k 4k the performance was identical with an rtx 3080 and 390. so maybe you're thinking of 1440p where there was a bit of a deficit the answer is i don't know but i'm tipping a lot better so i've promised and it will happen soon i'll probably get through this new radeon launch cycle once that's done i promise you guys i'll do like a 30 40 game benchmark comparing ryzen 5000 cpus with the intel 10th gen cpus and there'll be some big gpu comparisons the sort of stuff you often see from us we do that after the launch cycle's over yeah in the in the lighter periods of the year in the lighter periods i'll sit there and you know spend day and night benchmarking and we'll get a heap of data and we'll make those videos so yeah hopefully we can squeeze them in december if not it'll be early next year but i'm i'm aiming to do it the second i can basically so that's all i can really promise you all right next question this is kind of an interesting one bit different to some of the value and motherboard related stuff we've just been talking about so back in the days of phenom some motherboard manufacturers used to offer biases with the unlock cause option potentially giving the user to run a 3 core processor with all its 4 cores if they were lucky enough to get a cpu where the core was just disabled and otherwise fully functional is there any reason why this isn't an option anymore other than manufacturers not implementing it it sounds like something that should be possible given how the cpus are built at least according to what you've said in the 5800x review so i guess part of the reason is that a lot of the time these days they actually laser like the parts so they physically cut off that part of the cpu from being used so even if you flashed like a different i don't know how you do this sort of like gpu board flashing where you flash a different bias on it but you flash a different like chip bios or code or whatever it just wouldn't work because they've been hardware altered and i guess in addition to that even if it was possible and they weren't lasered i think it'd be like a pc 4.0 on b450 situation where amd would quickly get the motherboard makers to remove that feature from existing because with all these things like the motherboard makers have to sign an agreement with the the vendor like you know amd or intel to implement all the features and stuff that they're you know there's all sorts of complications there with things they can and can't do and i think that this would clearly be a situation where it would not be allowed um because you know they want to have their segmentation and they want to sell the eight core processes at a higher price and it'll be just far too complicated and you get all sorts of like youtube videos being like i'll just buy a 5600x and then you can unlock it and it will become a 5800x and it would just be a big mess well yeah it's everything you said and it's not just about the product segmentation either it's i'm imagining some instances you will appear to have enabled all the cause but the call was actually deemed defective for a reason so it may work in certain workloads are under certain conditions but it's not fully functional and it will cause crashing or system hanging or yeah or weird stuttering problems output areas yeah and then you know people have a habit of modifying a product in the way that they're not meant to and then when it doesn't work as intended blaming the product yeah that's right and even if they were aware that they'd modified the product it wasn't behaving the way they wanted then you get people rma and cpus because they didn't win the silicon lottery let's say and it just creates endless headaches so that's that's just why they don't do it yeah it makes it seem like it's a supported feature if it's in the motherboard settings like sort of like your overclocking stuff which you know it's not supported within warranty but amd is like yep okay you're all good we'll let you control those things um and then yeah obviously people understand the silicon lottery but if you put that sort of feature in it's like yep we understand that some of these chips are going to be you're going to get a good situation there and i think the reality is that that'd be the bidding process has probably come come a long way since then as well so you'd probably be a lot less likely to get a work in a properly working chip if you did it so yeah plenty of reasons why should they uh they avoid that situation all right another question here have you seen any instances of the lower core parts out doing the higher core parts in games where there is enough load for the course to get loaded uh leading or leading to a lower frequency in the higher core parts as reported by gn uh not 100 sure on that basically i have seen the parts that are limited to a single ccd performing slightly better in very sensitive latency sensitive titles such as far cry new dawn i'm not sure how much of that is due to clock frequency i imagine it's more the fact that all the cores are located within a single ccd but that's really all i can say on that one for the most part the performance is very similar like we're talking very insignificant differences in uh test conditions that aren't necessarily super real world yeah i think in the amd review guys and that sort of thing i mean we never want to go entirely on amd's review guide but their expectation generally is that you will see a few games where potentially the 5600 is the fastest chip on the 5600x sorry um and the 5800x as well but in a lot of the situations is much of a muchness that's sort of what you found with your review it's it's more to do with the do you have one or two i um chiplet dies on your chip or not that's kind of the big performance factor and yeah beyond that it's kind of they all perform pretty similarly which is great for gaming performance allows you to buy the lowest allows you to buy the lowest part you possibly can and still get all the gaming performance but yeah it's an interesting interesting theory i have to go and watch some of the gm videos and see what they're saying on that but it would be an interesting situation if it did if a game was really frequency sensitive but then loading it loaded a lot of the cores as well so caused a frequency reduction it'd be i'm sure there are situations where something like that is possible so you would get a benefit from having fewer cause but i guess that would be sort of offset by situations where the opposite would happen like you know you need the extra cause or it needs this high single thread frequency or whatever the situation is so okay last question here from ib slice who's a long time supporter of harbor unboxed and his question is if i was to go from a 3900x to a 5800x even though your video was a don't buy it it's still better per dollar than the 3900x and performance is above the 3900x so he's saying the 5800x is faster and technically better value so in that instance it would be a worthwhile upgrade or would it be a worthwhile upgrade if you're just gaming i mean i guess i'd refer to sort of stuff i've already said that in the case of ib slice i know he has a 2080 ti and he targets 1440p gaming with even with the 2080 ti really in most games you're going to be more gpu limited than cpu limit there will be a few instances where you'll see a small performance uplift but it's not going the the uh the performance or the cost per frame isn't going to equal out to what we show in our review because you're not using a 3090 at 1080p you're using a 2082 at 1440p so really the upgrade there is going to be pretty insignificant yeah some games will be a little bit faster most will be about the same not worth it yeah you're you're with the 39 uh with a 3090 you are definitely better off waiting and seeing what we get with zen four yeah so and hopefully in that situation so interrupt museum hopefully in that uh instance you would also have an upgrade path the problem with jumping from a 3090 to a to a 5800 x is that um or 3900 xr to a 500x is the fact that there is no upgrade path so it's a very minute upgrade and you're also not getting anything after that yeah it's one of those situations where you'd make that upgrade if your sort of setup had changed like for example you you'd swapped out the 2080 ti for a 30 90 or an even more powerful gpu if you suddenly had a change of heart and like yeah 1080p competitive gaming that's my thing now or you're playing a lot of competitive titles then you would make that change first and then go okay well now my cpu is becoming the more limiting factor so then that sort of minor side grade type upgrade becomes a more viable thing whereas i guess as we've been talking more about his setup here very much and then don't upgrade that sort of path because i mean it's still an expensive part and you still have already bought the 3900x so it's not a situation where you're sort of choosing between do i buy a 3900x or do i buy a 5800x you've already got it so you spend it's like an additional investment that you might get some back from selling this cpu secondhand or whatever so yeah it's with those zen three two zen two to zen three upgrades i think a lot of people find that waiting or not upgrading is better but then for anything below that very much you're going to get a significant upgrade so that's what we've been saying all along yeah i think you've nailed that one really the only time it would make sense is if you've got a 3600 or lower and as you say your situations change now and you either want to do competitive type gaming or some sort of productivity task that can take advantage of the more cores than going up to in that instance you'd probably still want to be jumping up quite significantly to like a 5900x which is obviously a big difference in cpu price but in the case of someone like ib slice who has a 2080 ti who targets 1440p who isn't a competitive gamer he plays sort of your assassin's creed the division two all those sort of games that you play as well um predominantly single player games then it i would be sticking with the 3800x for sure yeah i think we end up saying this pretty much with every generation it's like on the cpu side your single generation upgrades is very rarely going to be worth it unless you're doing like a big tier change like changing from buying ryzen 5 to buying ryzen 9 or something like that we you can see an upgrade but if you're buying within the same segment it doesn't make a lot of sense for people to do those upgrades was i tend to say that it makes more sense to do like a single gen gpu upgrade a lot of the time because you're going to get i mean recently you're not going to get significant gains but previously i mean potentially you could get like a 20 or 30 percent gain in a single generation on the gpu front so it makes a lot more sense to sort of save your money not not do a 3900 to 5800x upgrade and spend potentially 500 plus australian dollars and put that towards a single gen gpu upgrade and you get a pretty much better experience in games so that tends to be what i think at least so yeah okay that is going to do it for this random ryzen 5000 series video hopefully you guys enjoyed the discussion and there was some good answers in there to your questions as i said soon i will have a memory related ryzen 5000 video followed by an ipc video and then shortly after that there may be some new radio and gpus that we'll have to look at as well so yeah as usual i'm flat out tim's just sitting back reviewing a monitor here and they're enjoying life yeah it's always fun i mean there's been a lot of stuff going on the background as you've seen we've just launched float plane for us as an example so there's been lots of stuff going into getting that ready so i guess it's a good place to join if you're um if you're not already sign up a member and you want to ask questions for some of these future q a's that we're doing based on discord questions then you've got the option now either patreon or float plane so it's been really exciting for us and yeah it's been good to get get a bit of a break it's it's good to have you slaving away at some benchmarks and making content so i can focus on getting some of this stuff out in addition to monitor reviews um tiger lake i've got tiger lake systems in finally so we'll be able to do some updated intel laptop stuff which is good and yeah fun stuff yeah i joke of course tim's always working hard on something there's always there's always something to do isn't there oh yeah the list of ideas you know it's always you know you're doing like 20s and zen three reviews i'm like oh but i've got like a full schedule of my own videos i want to do and you're doing like five videos a week so yeah it's just it's always busy always stuff to cover lots of fun lots of fun being a tech reviewer especially at the moment lots of lots of different stuff yeah yeah well yeah i think that's pretty much going to do it for this one so thank you everyone who asked a question of course thank you to everyone who watched this video thank you to everyone who gave it a like and yeah if you're not subscribed make sure you are because as i said a lot more content coming and tim will probably do a video soon as well very soon well i'll be editing this one so i guess that sort of counts in a small way doesn't it it does all right all right guys thank you very much for watching i'm your host steve i'm yours tim we'll see you see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 198,018

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: NFRttrENhmw

Length: 51min 52sec (3112 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/BADMAN-TING]

I think the 5600X and 5800X are too expensive. But I think prices of the 5900X and 5950X not bad for what's on offer.

[u/[deleted]]

I like the 2080 Ti box monitor stand.

[u/e-baisa]

Many people will be disappointed by 'AMD cheating', if Steve's promoted $220 5600 doesn't come out, or comes out at a higher price, or is something like 6c/6t or 16MB L3.

Just want to remind- there have not been any leaks of existence of a physical 5600 CPU, or any different SKU with 6c/12t in any testing. Pricing is also unlikely to be set in stone- but considering minor performance differences in AMD's previous X and non-X CPUs, AMD is unlikely to crush their current, higher priced lineup by releasing full 6c/12t 32MB L3 5600 by $80 cheaper than the 5600X.

[u/waltc33]

Excellent--one of the best, yet. Some of the questions were a bit better than usual, but the answers were all very good...;)

[u/Goukira]

For an only gamer perspective it is way to expensive. Where I live the 5800x starts at 520€ whereas an i7 10700k costs 309€, even the 5600x for 350€ is a bad value compared to that i7. Gaming performance is about the same in higher resolutions than 1080p and everyone knows 1440p is the new 1080 :)

[u/WarTherapy1195]

a 10700k (overclocked on core and cache) beats a 5800X in almost every single game)
meanwhile the 5800X costs 48% more than the 10700k (right now) and runs insanely hot.

6800XT, 6900XT over NVidia? absolutely.
Zen 3 over Skylake #5 (For Gaming only!) absolutely not.