Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unbox today I'm going to discuss my experiences with AMD's rise in the thread rip in nineteen fifty X and the supporting X 399 platform are you guys often asked about my PC in the monthly Q&A and seem very interested and what I choose to use as my daily driver and since I did transition over to risin the third one for 1950 X as I just mentioned while almost a year ago now and we have second-generation fedra purchased around the corner I thought what better time than to discuss my experiences so far prior to the switchover to AMD ass which I hadn't done for a very long time I've been using Intel for the longest time and yeah I was using the core i7 69 50x Intel's 2016 flagship high-end desktop CPU packing 10 calls at 20 threads and a base frequency of just 3 gigahertz it wasn't a particularly good overclocker but still the 14 nanometer Broadwell ii part came in at an MSRP of $1,700 u.s. a somewhat absurd price but as well I suppose it was the best of the best and Intel was able to get away with charging and I'm gonna link for it just to be clear though I'm not saying there's no desktop CPUs that aren't worthy of commanding such an asking price the problem with these 69 50 X was that it costs 70 percent more than the 69 hundred K but only offered 25% more cores so true extra cores were tacked on and they bumped the price up by 70% so that's why I say the $1700 u.s. MSRP was absurd still for video editing and encoding the 69 50 X was a beast so I hung onto it for quite some time in fact a little over a year later the core i7 7900 X landed and that came in at a slightly more reasonable $1000 US and although clocked better than the 69 50x it did use the slower mesh interconnect and that meant that it wasn't really an upgrade over the 69 50 X also a new at the time that it was just a few short months before aimed it would release a 16 called 32 thread thread Ripper CPU in August and then after that Intel would release their 18 quart 36 thread core I am 979 80 XE so after testing the 1950 X in August I waited a month gave the 79 80 X ie thorough tests and decided that if I were to invest my own money in either of these products it would be without a doubt the thread Ripper 1950 X so that's what I did I got my hands on a retail thread rip in 1950 X MSI's X 399 Gaming Pro carbon a/c pretty sweet gaming motherboard that one and 64 gigabytes of g.skill trailing Z ddr4 3200 memory and through it all together at the time the 1950 X cost half as much as the core I 979 ad XE and in many workloads was only a fraction slower that being the case in terms of value the 1950 X was the clear winner in the benchmarks its price to performance absolutely destroyed the sky like x-range making home plate not a mockery of the core o 1979-80 XE and then it's 16 14 12 and 10 core variants that said the thread ripper platform did have some issues most new platforms 10 - so nothing totally unexpected there and we do see the same from Intel quite regularly actually so anyway let's talk about those teething problems as with all first generalizing products thread rippers biggest issue as memory compatibility and it was an even bigger issue on the tr4 socket than it was on the mainstream am4 socket the reason I say this is because most building a high-end desktop system designed for well I suppose workstation type usage those kind of people will likely populate all the DIMM slots with as much memory as they possibly can and Rison doesn't particularly like that assuming you have compatible memory it will of course work it just won't work at the same frequency are populating half the dims would as an example my msi x3 99 motherboard packed 8 DIMM slots and I decided to populate all of them with 8 gigabyte ddr4 3200 modules and that gave me a total system capacity of 64 gigabytes and yeah before you ask I didn't need that much memory and quite a few times premier when working on our 4k 60fps high bitrate content did use quite a lot of the memory almost all of it in fact the problem was with all eight modules installed the system was limited to a maximum speed of ddr4 2666 and even then at times I did run into a few cold boot issues and most of the time the system did boot up okay but yeah in the early days it was a bit frustrating at times MSI did continue to release BIOS updates and along the way that seemed to get ironed out and the problem went away so yeah at least one teething issue there was solved that said to this day I am stuck at ddr4 2666 if I want to run with all 64 gigabytes and memory and well that might not sound like a big deal to many of you but the system is noticeably better with ddr4 3200 so that being the case around three months ago now I just bit the bull I decided to strip out 32 gigabytes of memory again that also sounds quite crazy but the faster memory speed really did improve the editing performance in premiere the application was just noticeably more responsive and of course gaming was also a lot better as well so that is certainly quite the compromise but I felt it was worth making encoding still takes around the same amount of time for any of you wondering the difference with half as much memory the 32 gigabytes is things are just a bit laggy err when premier is doing its thing and coding something so if I'm using Chrome or whatever it's just not a silky smooth as it was with 64 gigabytes of course from time to time I also game on my main rig I do have a separate gaming system but I don't know sometimes I'm just too lazy to get up and move my body to it I don't know long long days of work you just want to fire up a game that's quick and easy and have a few around and that's what I often found myself doing and for the first 6 months let's say it was a little bit sketchy some titles just didn't work that well I decided to leave the memory mode as rumah so that's uniform memory access mode as this works better for productivity workloads so that makes sense on my editing rig it is possible to switch over to a non-uniform memory access mode or Numa for short but you do have to reset the whole system to do that still as this was mostly a workstation PC I didn't want to be messing around with memory access modes having to reset the PC every time I decided to casually firepit came for a couple of rounds the newses at some point unfortunately i don't know exactly when so that's not terribly helpful but I suppose it doesn't really matter because now it is a lot better but at some point gaming performance just got a whole lot less sketchy so games would just load up and work as you would expect them to so I'm not sure if it was one of the major windows updates or just a boss update from MSI I'm not sure what it was but I stopped seeing a lot of the glitches and issues I was seeing and well some of the games I play a good example would be Star Wars Battlefront 2 that one was quite painful the game itself once I got into the game played fine but just loading the game up so executing it from the desktop to load the menu that took quite a few minutes whereas on the 87 or okay system it was I know 30 seconds or something whereas it was 3 or 4 minutes something crazy like that so don't know if many people encountered that maybe it was just my read but that was one of the bugs I ran into and at some point without me doing anything no fresh install nothing those issues went away and I was experiencing it in a couple of games but Star Wars was definitely the worst one still as I've said not all games had issues straight away a lot of them played fine a battlefield one for example that ran without any problems at all ran really smooth and all that sort of stuff as you'd expect on like a rise in 7 processor today though I'm no longer seeing any issues at all when playing games on the 1950 X whether it's a really basic game like fortnight or something near more in depth like battlefield 1 or Star Wars Battlefront 2 they all play perfectly fine so that's something beyond the memory woes and the early teething problems with some of the games anyway it's been smooth sailing as I just said no issues with games anymore they all play silky smooth so no dramas there and I just have to make the compromise between a memory capacity or high speed memory you can't have both so it's a bit disappointing but yeah it's the first generation Rison thing well even the second generation rise in CPU still suffer that that's not quite as bad though as a side note though I should also add that it's not like Intel's x-29 platform it hasn't had its fair share of teething issues either just as the x9r platform before it did so none of this is particularly unusual or an AMD only problem let's say for everything else though thread Ripper has really delivered delivered in a big way having 16 calls and 32 threads to play with is it's just amazing and really something that we could have only dreamt of a prior to its release as I said earlier in 2016 10 cause was the pinnacle for desktop CPUs anyway and it cost you a suite $1,700 us and then in 2017 and the face of competition Intel released a pretty underwhelming ten core CPU for $1,000 us so would be by the end of 2017 though AMD was selling the 1950 x4 less than $1,000 u.s. and today it can be found on Amazon for seven hundred and seventy five dollars u.s. while the 7900 X still costs $1,000 u.s. so AMD's undercutting Intel quite heavily there anyway I've spent almost one year with thread Ripper and I don't regret the decision to go over to it from the why suppose I would have gone to the core I know in 79 AD XE if I didn't jump over a thread Ripper so yeah I don't regret that one bit and the semi 980 XE is plenty powerful but it just doesn't make sense in terms of price versus performance and I like to use the kind of hardware that I would recommend you guys use and the stuff that I imagine most of you would use that I don't think too many people would spend twice as much money on the 79 80 X II and on that note if Intel don't come out with something a far more compelling what they're currently offering I can't see myself jumping back to the blue team anytime soon in fact I'm almost certain I will be doubling down and upgrading to the thread Ripper 2990 WX on MSI's X 399 Croatian motherboard I can't wait to do that build on the channel it's gonna be a lot of fun I just jumping back to the previous generation for a second and just sort of summarizing what I just said had it Intel been far more aggressive with pricing it may have been a tough call this one but for half the price the 1950 X really was the obvious choice over the 79 80 XE and today it should be crystal clear even for the most blue eyed fans what also should be clear at this point is that next week things are going to get seriously messy for Intel as Amity pushes out their second-generation thread Ripper series we learnt at Computex that AMD would be releasing a 32 core 64 thread thread recipe on the tr4 socket and we just learnt that it's going to cost less than Intel's 18 course 79 80 XE coming in an MSRP of $1,800 us so assuming everything goes smoothly with this release and we can probably expect it to really given how well second-generation Rison was received it's very likely my workstation is going to see a doubling of cause in the very near future and fingers crossed improved memory support and that is going to do it for this one if you did enjoy the video feel free hit the like button for us please subscribe for more content if you appreciate the work we do or higher on box then consider supporting us on patreon thanks for watching I'm your host Steve see you next time