Time for a new computer - what processor?

[technix]

what a load of codswallop:

Supports AMD 2nd Generation Ryzen™/ Ryzen™ with Radeon™ Vega Graphics/ 1st Generation Ryzen™ Processors
Dual Channel Non-ECC Unbuffered DDR4, 4 DIMMs
HDMI, DVI-D Ports for Multiple Display
Integrated I/O Shield of Ultra Durable™ Design
Dual Ultra-Fast NVMe PCIe Gen3 M.2 (x4, x2) with One Thermal Guard
High Quality Audio Capacitors and Audio Noise Guard with LED Trace Path Lighting
RGB FUSION with Multi-Zone LED Light Show Design, Supports Digital LED & RGB LED Strips
GIGABYTE Exclusive 8118 Gaming LAN with Bandwidth Management
Smart Fan 5 Features 6 Temperature Sensors and 4 Hybrid Fan Headers with FAN STOP
APP Center Including EasyTune™ and Cloud Station™ Utilities
CEC 2019 Ready, Save Power with a Single Click

Where are all the important metrics and part numbers?

Exactly! what are Audio capacitors? didn't anyone tell them that digital signals are far faster than audio ones and if audio capacitors is all the assholes put in then they ain't clever!

Classic consumer hardware marketing wank.

That is another reason I have almost completely switched to workstation/server hardware: no marketing wank and cut directly to the technology details, after their longevity optimized validation process and their much broader hardware compatibility.

[hans]

Intel still is king in single core performance, but AMD is not far behind. But Intel has production shortages right now, so their premium priced products are even more premium. If you don't need 8 cores, get one with less. Simple as that. AMD is looking very competitive in price/performance across the complete spectrum now.

Personally I would recommended getting an AMD CPU with fast RAM. The RAM speed spec for AMD Ryzen 2nd gen is 2933MHz, so any slower (2666MHz) will run below factory speeds. Any board should support factory speeds. If not, return it.

You do have much more faster memory like 3200, 3600, etc. But basically you're overclocking at that point. If you want a stable system, don't touch any OC feature.

The necessity of 16GB or 32GB is a personal thing. 5 years ago, I built an i5 system with 16GB DDR3 (costed me 100 euro's back then). 16GB serves me well in both my Linux workstation (which I use to run 2 Windows VMs + Jetbrains IDEs at the same time) and my Windows desktop (CAD + entertainment). , With recent DDR4 shortages the 16GB DDR4 prices haven't even settled down to that level.
Unused RAM won't hurt anything, so if you can afford sure go ahead..
If fast RAM is at the cost of a SSD (NVME if possible), then 

[drussell]

Looks like it has to be a 7 for DDR4 support.

If you mean the Ryzen chips, no, anything with the AM4 socket is DDR4.

oh and as i have a GPU already why buy a Rayzen 3 or 5 as i don't need their included GPU

Most of the earlier version Ryzen chips do not have integrated graphics, only the newer ones do, like anything with a G suffix and some models of X.  You need to check the processor specifications for the particular models you're interested in.  While it doesn't add much to the cost to have it in there, if you're never going to use it then it is kind of silly to get one. 

As for memory speed, the memory controller is in the CPU so as long as the motherboard is physically designed properly you maximum memory speed is limited by the CPU, not the board.  Most of the current chips officially support up to 2933 MHz memory speed.  Most of the systems I've been building lately, though, I get proper 3200 MHz rated RAM and run it at that.  Have not had a single issue yet.  You system will probably default to 2666 or 2933 depending on the CPU installed and the BIOS on the board but "overclocking" the memory controller part of the CPU by 10% isn't going to hurt anything and on a decent board stability is not an issue.  if you buy a cheap-ass motherboard that had the PCB layout done by a chimpanzee, then probably stick with the official 2933 maximum clock. 

3400 MHz would probably be fine also in virtually all cases (on a good MB) but trying to run in the 3500-4500 MHz range is less likely to work properly without careful tuning, even with RAM that is intended to run at those speeds.

[Simon]

It's not purely layout with the RAM, most people never seem to realise that the actual distance between RAM and CPU is an issue due this inconvenient thing called the speed of light and even slower speed of electrons in a PCB trace......

[drussell]

It's not purely layout with the RAM, most people never seem to realise that the actual distance between RAM and CPU is an issue due this inconvenient thing called the speed of light and even slower speed of electrons in a PCB trace......

Uhhh...  How is that not a layout issue?

The DIMM sockets need to be right by the CPU with careful attention to trace length matching, impedance of the traces on the finished board, what kind of crazy stuff you're running around there on other layers, etc.  That is "board layout" in my book.

[Simon]

True

[Simon]

I have set my eyes on some 3.2GHz RAM and the motherboard supports up to 3.45GHz so I might just push the CPU a tiny bit.

[Mr. Scram]

I have set my eyes on some 3.2GHz RAM and the motherboard supports up to 3.45GHz so I might just push the CPU a tiny bit.

Ryzen performance is helped by fast RAM more than that of Intel chips.

[Simon]

I always wonder about RAM controller clock to CPU clock. I found this on the FX4250 I have that just adding 200MHz made a difference even though it was just a 10% jump. I assume that just 10% increase in RAM speed might mean that the data the CPU wants is ready one clock cycle before it would have been before, if the data comes 5% after the last CPU tick it's no good and will take a further 0.95 of a tick before usable, but if i go 10% faster then it is ready at 0.05 before the next CPU tick that is effectively 1 whole CPU cycle early.

[Mr. Scram]

I always wonder about RAM controller clock to CPU clock. I found this on the FX4250 I have that just adding 200MHz made a difference even though it was just a 10% jump. I assume that just 10% increase in RAM speed might mean that the data the CPU wants is ready one clock cycle before it would have been before, if the data comes 5% after the last CPU tick it's no good and will take a further 0.95 of a tick before usable, but if i go 10% faster then it is ready at 0.05 before the next CPU tick that is effectively 1 whole CPU cycle early.

Note that the FX has an entirely different architecture which cannot be compared other than through benchmarks.

[Ice-Tea]

Have a look at mindfactory.de for cheap PC HW for good prices.

https://www.mindfactory.de/search_result.php?select_search=0&search_query=ryzen+2700

[Simon]

I am in the UK, considering current exchange rates they are about the same as the supplier i am already registered with.

[Mr. Scram]

Warranty could be a pain too.

[Simon]

I am buying the parts now in the UK, £651 for the ryzen 7 2700, 16GB of 3200MHz RAM, a 512GB M.2 drive and a motherboard

[drussell]

Out of curiosity, what motherboard have you decided on.

[drussell]

I am in the UK, considering current exchange rates they are about the same as the supplier i am already registered with.

Things like CPUs are a commodity item so in most locales the prices should be similar unless there are significant tarrifs or something.  After currency conversion, that listed German website is right about $20 CAD more than the typical high-volume retail or online price around here, so about right overall.  Small quantity wholesale pricing knocks another 10-15% or so off of that at my suppliers currently, so that's in the ballpark, not getting ripped off or anything. 

[Simon]

Out of curiosity, what motherboard have you decided on.

https://www.ebuyer.com/835547-gigabyte-x470-aorus-ultra-gaming-am4-atx-motherboard-x470-aorus-ultra-gaming

[cdev]

Simon, just curious what settings are you using that work for you?

I have an fx6300.

I always wonder about RAM controller clock to CPU clock. I found this on the FX4250 I have that just adding 200MHz made a difference even though it was just a 10% jump. I assume that just 10% increase in RAM speed might mean that the data the CPU wants is ready one clock cycle before it would have been before, if the data comes 5% after the last CPU tick it's no good and will take a further 0.95 of a tick before usable, but if i go 10% faster then it is ready at 0.05 before the next CPU tick that is effectively 1 whole CPU cycle early.

Also, if you are upgrading, and want to use an AMD CPU, with Linux in the future to pursue a number of kinds of scientific computing using your GPU, just in case the technology is something you want to get into in the future, make sure you get hardware that is known to be compatible with the RoCM software project. Most newer HW is likely compatible but since you are upgrading all at once, you should double check.

Basically this means PCIe gen 3 atomics and there may be some other particulars about the way the main bus is laid out. 

See https://rocm.github.io/hardware.html

Would I get an Nvidia graphics card rather than an AMD? thats a difficult question. Id be lying if said that I haven't had moments regretting picking AMD recently. This project is supposed to make it possible to run cuda software on AMD graphics and CPU HW. But it may still make much more sense for some kinds of work (neural networks, deep learning and many kinds of computer graphics) to have a cuda card, even though they are more than 50% again expensive for an equivalent performance.

[Simon]

i just bumpet it up by one increment which i think is 200MHz, it runs at 2000MHz, 2200 is fine, 2400 could be unstable

[drussell]

That Gigabyte X470 AORUS ULTRA GAMING is a good board, it should serve you well.

It looks like you've picked a good combo, I think you'll be pleased with the performance.  Total processing power-wise it is about 3 times what your FX-4350 can muster...  More than enough to notice the difference, especially with a decent PCIe SSD. 

[Ice-Tea]

Heh. Got the same gear for 100£ less at mindfactory. But your funeral

[mariush]

Simon, you should run some tests with the memory.

The thing with very high frequency memories is that they also have very loose timings.
Ryzen likes very fast memory but from some point (around 3000-3200 Mhz) the benefits are minimal and in fact it could actually be a bad idea (infinity fabric inside cpu may not cope and may get corrupted transfers and waste time repeating tranfers etc)
You should do some tests with that memory running at 3200 and 3000, in both cases with the smallest timings that are stable. 

[drussell]

i just bumpet it up by one increment which i think is 200MHz, it runs at 2000MHz, 2200 is fine, 2400 could be unstable

I think you were probably changing the CPU clock multiplier then.  On most decent motherboards should be able to change the actual master clock speed in 1 or 5 MHz increments, then fiddle with multipliers (on chips that support it and aren't locked, of course,) RAM speed, etc.

I usually do all my burn in-testing for customer machines about 5% higher than I intend to run the combo at, then back it off that little bit.  Often the machine is actually stable at another 10+% above that but I don't normally severely overclock machines going out to customers (and other than the memory being above "rated" I normally run the processor clock at stock (or slightly below for things like silent media PCs, etc.)

[NorthGuy]

I always wonder about RAM controller clock to CPU clock. I found this on the FX4250 I have that just adding 200MHz made a difference even though it was just a 10% jump.

I don't know about AMD, but different Intel processors have Memory buses of different width. The wide-bus Intel chips have over 2000 pins and the memory bus is twice as wide. In theory, this should matter more than 500 MHz difference in DDR4 speed. Although I haven't seen the benchmarks. Of course, these bigger chips are more expensive and require a different motherboard, which is also more expensive.

[mariush]

Ryzen has Infinity Fabric which connects the two CCX  (core complexes, up to 4cores 4 threads each) and the memory controller and everything else...  pci-e , the SOIC part (usb3 and sata ports on cpu) 

It's tied to the memory frequency, see https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/infinity_fabric and https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-threadripper-1950x-game-performance,5207-2.html