Was planning on getting Ryzen 3000, but then I saw that 9900k is still king in games, Zen 2 while clearly superior in things like Cinebench, is not superior across the board, so that made me hesitate and didn't make the purchase the day it came out.
Instead I saw some rich asian student selling his used x99 kit to get Ryzen 3000, and I decided to get that instead.
It was a Rampage V Extreme, 5960x with 32GB Samsung 3000Mhz CL15, all for $550.
These are prices for CPU+mobo+32GB RAM only
All the new builds here have +13% HST included because I'm Canadian.
"IPC" here has no scientific proof, I basically looked at reviews and "eyeballed" them, they're estimates.
All the Ryzen build use memory that are ~$50 more expensive, because they are more sensitive to RAM performance.
I don't like mainstream, because they are mainstream.
I don't like dual channel, because ram on either side of the CPU looks more symmetrical and more high-end.
I don't like PGA sockets because it's a plastic piece, and that looks worse than the all-metal LGA socket.
Sure there will be some combination of cheap mobo+2700x or 3700x that will end up roughly the same price, but I don't think the extra performance is worth the other deficiencies.
Interesting observation here is that Ryzen 3000 isn't that good for mainstream, a 3800x build overall costs about the same as a 9900k build. But the 3900x is much cheaper and faster than the 9820x, that's great for AMD, and I hope Intel will drop their HEDT prices to compete better.
So that's why I decided to go with 5960x, so much cheaper. Forgot to include Threadripper here, but it'll be about same price as 3900x for same core count, lower performance but without the PGA and mainstream drawbacks. I don't think that would've made sense because I'm mostly just gaming here.
When it comes to games, what performance you need is heavily dependent on what performance do the consoles have. Next-gen consoles will have 8c zen2 but at like 3Ghz or something, cuz it'll have to be cheap and power efficient. With the 5960x you can easily power through the IPC difference when it's clocked that low. So chances are good that I won't be CPU limited in any of the next gen games. Of course, Unity engine games with god awful optimization will still be problematic.
Another reason I decided to not go all-out on Ryzen 3000 is how strong Intel's SunnyCove is in terms of IPC, even though their fab is still ****, we can tell it's very strong because 10nm SunnyCove cores are 4.1Ghz are beating 9th gen at 4.5-4.7 Ghz, I believe that's a bigger lead than Zen2. So chances are good that when Intel sorts out their ****ty fabs, they'll be at least on par with Zen3 in terms of IPC. So I believe that will be a better time to buy, whether I end up buying Zen3 or Intel 10th gen, at the very least there will be more competition, lower prices and better products. Right now AMD is kind of sandbagging Intel with Zen2, and charging relatively high prices.
Also, I very much enjoyed the manual tuning with Intel processor with tones of headroom, and a true flagship mobo. With Ryzen 3000 it's basically plug and play, not much you can do at all.
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