If you use Hard OCP as the only site you look at in order to make a video card decision, that's a huge mistake. Where they add value is that they're doing something totally different from everyone else, which gives you different data. If several different sites run the same canned benchmark in the same way and get the same results, getting those numbers once might be useful, but repeating it on several different sites doesn't add anything beyond having the numbers once. Hard OCP gives you different data that isn't just duplicating what someone else is doing.
I actually think video card reviews are among the worse things that HardOCP does.
I like that they are more subjective than other sites, you don't just see a FPS graph - they actually try to see how a card affects what your gaming experience would be.
That being said, what I consider acceptable for my gaming experience, and what you consider acceptable, may be two entirely different things. It's a fine line for them to juggle in a review like that, especially when you get into titles where Card A runs one feature well, but Card B runs an entirely different feature well, so which feature is the more important of the two?
I also dislike that HardOCP reviews make it very difficult to compare cards. If you want to see how a 480 stacks up against a 970 or a 390, your in luck. If you want to see it compared to any other card... nope. They usually pit a card against 3-4 cards in it's same price/performance tier, with whatever 4 or 5 games they happen to like playing at that moment, and that's it. And whatever drivers they have that day they are doing that, that's it. I suppose when you are doing a more subjective review, that's really about the only way to do it.
I rely pretty heavily on Anandtech's database for comparing between any given cards I even use something the Passmark chart, which even in it's own flawed way, lets you quickly get a relative comparison between any two cards in their database.
I come to HardOCP reviews for their subjectiveness - they will say if they liked a piece of hardware or not, and they aren't afraid to call a turd a turd.
You combine that subjective review with a few quantitative sources (such as Anand's database) and you start to get a complete picture. If you just look at HardOCP, all you will be able to tell is if Kyle or Brent liked it.
Their new VR review process is a hot mess. They are keeping some kind of running talley for different video cards, and I just don't see any value in that at all. Their power supply reviews - top notch. I wish they would review all hardware like they do power supplies, but it's difficult to do that because DC output doesn't really change, but the standard (games) you need to compare hardware performance on change all the time.
Doesn't look like the 6 and 4 core Zen are going to be nearly as compelling, if the AMD slide deck prices are anything to go by.
The 8 core has a niche, and clearly competes against the high core count EX platform for workstation/prosumer use. It's half the price of the competition, and great. The 4/6 count... well, now your out of those special use cases and down in with all us common people, where IPC is still king. I think that at 3.5-4G a Ryzen will be a perfectly capable CPU for consumers. It will play games, it will do facebook, it will do your taxes, etc.
But the X5 1600X 6 core at $249 - I don't think that will compete against a Core i5, especially when a i5-7600K (which is Intel's top binned i5) is only $20 ~less~. You could argue that the X5 is meant to compete against the i7, but I don't think so. And that we are looking at a 6c/12t vs a 4c/4t, but here at this performance tier, all those cores aren't going to do you a lot of good because not much can take advantage of them. No one here has ever really recommended a Core i7 in a gaming rig unless there are other uses for it, or the buyer simply has money to burn. The X5's true competition is the Core i5, not the i7 7700k, and even AMD knows that as shown by the naming convention.
Yes, I'm also ignoring the 4 core X5 bins right now - you might be able to make a case for the 1500X, with a stock speed of 3.5/3.7 - if it overclocks well. But at $189, your still within $20 of a Core i5, with higher stock speeds, and AMD has lost all but the SMT portion of the core count advantage at that point.
You could also argue that your comparing a 4 core Intel CPU with no SMT to a 6 core with SMT, but there you'd think the advantage would go to AMD - and for the general use case, where it appears that ICP means more than overall throughput, the advantage still appears to go to Intel. And if you really needed the cores anyway, why wouldn't you go ahead and jump to the X7's and their 8c/16t models?
Now, I fully admit - I am making some assumptions about the performance of the X5. I am assuming that at similar clock speeds, it will have roughly the same IPC as the X7, and total processing power scales more or less linearly with core count. I'm also assuming it will have an overclock ceiling of around 4.0G give or take a little bit. Maybe these X5's will be overclock monsters, and that will change the calculus a little bit. But right now, given that the X5 1600X has a similar clock profile as the X7 1800X, I don't know that we'll see much more overhead out of these lower core count chips.
I like Ryzen a lot. I think at this price/performance level that is being presented right now at X5 level is going to be challenging for AMD, as you aren't the clear leader in price, and given what we've seen on the X7 so far, you aren't going to be the clear leader in performance for what these chips are primarily used for.
The X3, when those finally come out - at that level, it's all about price and very little to do with performance. We'll see if AMD decides to make a move into that market, but there it's so commoditized that there isn't really any profit margin to be had, and that's where they had been playing previously with Bulldozer/Vishera. I'll fully admit I'm not all that interested in the X3 no matter how it looks, in the same vein I was never really interested in the 6300 or the 4300 or the Core i3 or Celeron. They are nice things to have available when your in an extreme budget crunch, but it's one of those things you only look at if you absolutely have to.
I'm not seeing how the X5's will work. Maybe come April once the reviews come out it will paint a different picture though.
R7 is about as fast in gaming as 7600k. Assuming those extra cores are uselesss and R5 will perform about the same as R7, it could be somewhat (not so great);alternative but imo it still lacks a reason why I should get a CPU that needs to be OC and has higher TDP just to be competitive with Intel that I might even likely get for the same price or cheaper and with no hussle....
It really all depends on the game. If you have one that uses a lot of threads plus have other applications active at the same time, the Ryzen would probably be a better choice. You have to remember that most games are still GPU bound, not CPU.
For me I sometimes have 2 games running at once, for instance BDO is almost always in my system tray. It uses say about 20-30% on average while in the tray of the CPU. Supposedly it does scale to 6 CPUs, I don't know for certain or how well.
So lets say BDO only uses 4 cores and its in the tray. I'm going to play another game that only uses 1 core at the same time. Would a 6 core be beneficial over a 4 core, or would there be no difference?
Now lets say BDO does in fact use 6 cores and it is in the tray. Now I want to play a game that uses 1 core as well. Would there be a performance difference between the two scenarios?
The load distribution of cores has always baffled me.
If you're actively playing two games at once, and one is using three cores and the other two cores, that's five cores between them. So yeah, you could use a lot of cores for that.
But if Black Desert is only in your system tray and not active on the screen, there's no need to do all of the work to render every single frame. That might only use a small fraction of one core. But there's no need to guess: you can check directly. Open Task Manager and see how much of your CPU Black Desert is using while in the system tray.
No diff. BDO is not stressing your CPU enough. Windows will sort out the scheduling in case a task is poorly optimized and is primarily 1 thread.
let me word it this way then. If BDO in the tray uses 20-30% of 4 cores, I want to play another game at the same time and it uses 4 cores at 50-60%. Would a 6 core make a noticeable difference in this instance?
Being able to run multiple clients is a strength of a multi-core CPU. The more apps and processes spun up, the more cores there are, then the more evently they can be distributed amongst core. So sometimes, for some users, a multi-core CPU is an advantage even when they're running mainly single threaded apps.
If you're in that scenario more than likely you're a power user though, not a standard user. A standard user is going to have a browser, a game, messenger, and a few background apps running. A 2/2 or 4/4 CPU is all they need.
Ah see, I have 2 sometimes 3 game clients working, youtube, several chrome tabs, mwb/eset, discord, a growing amount of game launchers.
I haven't really kept up to date on stuff lately. Once upon a time, the load distribution wasn't so great for multicore at least from my experience. I remember times when the system would throw everything on a single core, while the others core were only running 1-5% utilization. Though that was back in the vista/early win7 days.
What matters is not just how many processes you have running, but how much CPU time they take. You've probably got several dozen processes running that you're not even aware of. An extra process that uses 0.1% of one CPU core can basically be ignored as a rounding error. But if it's this process needs 10% of one core and that one needs 20% of one core and so forth, that adds up to a lot and you're more likely benefit from more than four cores.
You can track your CPU usage yourself in Task Manager. If pushing all four cores on your current CPU hard is a decently common occurrence for you, then definitely, get a Ryzen CPU with 6+ cores and it will be a big upgrade for you. No sense in fussing with quad cores if you know that four isn't enough for your needs. But I'd be surprised if that's the case.
Doesn't look like the 6 and 4 core Zen are going to be nearly as compelling, if the AMD slide deck prices are anything to go by.
The 8 core has a niche, and clearly competes against the high core count EX platform for workstation/prosumer use. It's half the price of the competition, and great. The 4/6 count... well, now your out of those special use cases and down in with all us common people, where IPC is still king. I think that at 3.5-4G a Ryzen will be a perfectly capable CPU for consumers. It will play games, it will do facebook, it will do your taxes, etc.
But the X5 1600X 6 core at $249 - I don't think that will compete against a Core i5, especially when a i5-7600K (which is Intel's top binned i5) is only $20 ~less~. You could argue that the X5 is meant to compete against the i7, but I don't think so. And that we are looking at a 6c/12t vs a 4c/4t, but here at this performance tier, all those cores aren't going to do you a lot of good because not much can take advantage of them. No one here has ever really recommended a Core i7 in a gaming rig unless there are other uses for it, or the buyer simply has money to burn. The X5's true competition is the Core i5, not the i7 7700k, and even AMD knows that as shown by the naming convention.
Yes, I'm also ignoring the 4 core X5 bins right now - you might be able to make a case for the 1500X, with a stock speed of 3.5/3.7 - if it overclocks well. But at $189, your still within $20 of a Core i5, with higher stock speeds, and AMD has lost all but the SMT portion of the core count advantage at that point.
You could also argue that your comparing a 4 core Intel CPU with no SMT to a 6 core with SMT, but there you'd think the advantage would go to AMD - and for the general use case, where it appears that ICP means more than overall throughput, the advantage still appears to go to Intel. And if you really needed the cores anyway, why wouldn't you go ahead and jump to the X7's and their 8c/16t models?
Now, I fully admit - I am making some assumptions about the performance of the X5. I am assuming that at similar clock speeds, it will have roughly the same IPC as the X7, and total processing power scales more or less linearly with core count. I'm also assuming it will have an overclock ceiling of around 4.0G give or take a little bit. Maybe these X5's will be overclock monsters, and that will change the calculus a little bit. But right now, given that the X5 1600X has a similar clock profile as the X7 1800X, I don't know that we'll see much more overhead out of these lower core count chips.
I like Ryzen a lot. I think at this price/performance level that is being presented right now at X5 level is going to be challenging for AMD, as you aren't the clear leader in price, and given what we've seen on the X7 so far, you aren't going to be the clear leader in performance for what these chips are primarily used for.
The X3, when those finally come out - at that level, it's all about price and very little to do with performance. We'll see if AMD decides to make a move into that market, but there it's so commoditized that there isn't really any profit margin to be had, and that's where they had been playing previously with Bulldozer/Vishera. I'll fully admit I'm not all that interested in the X3 no matter how it looks, in the same vein I was never really interested in the 6300 or the 4300 or the Core i3 or Celeron. They are nice things to have available when your in an extreme budget crunch, but it's one of those things you only look at if you absolutely have to.
I'm not seeing how the X5's will work. Maybe come April once the reviews come out it will paint a different picture though.
This has already been proven that clock to clock performance Ryzen will stay right up there with an I7, you can turn off 4 cores and 4 threads on Ryzen which they did and clocked it at 4ghz vs the 7700k at 4ghz. The only reason the 7700k wins in the long run is because it can hit 4.5ghz. Ryzen isn't even fully optimized. We need bios updates to get rid of the memory bug and Microsoft needs to fix how it see's Ryzens SMT.
AMD is on the right track and ZEN 2 will bring even more IPC. Intel is kinda stuck till they start up that R&D again because the Tick Tock model is dead. They now just try to push the clock speed up to get what they can out of the new chips like AMD has for the past 5+ years. This is a new platform and it takes time for things to be optimized. The X99 chipset wasn't all that great when it came out.
Ryzen 7 will be the new gaming chip within a year or two as developers will use DX12 or Vulken to take advantage of those cores(at least I hope they do), so unless intel drops something in the same price range which isn't what intel does AMD will take back a huge chunk of market share. They are getting ready to take servers back from intel, gaming will be next.
Just my two cents. I have a R7 1700 overclocked to 3.9ghz and its a beast of a chip. I ran the counter strike source benchmark with a RX 290 vs my 5820k overclocked to 4.3ghz with a 1080 ftw clocked at 2000mhz and the AMD system beat it. So I take the gaming benchmarks right now with a grain of salt. In a few months when everything is optimized will see where things stand.
One suspects that AMD will have a successor to Ryzen within two years, even if it's only a refresh. But I'd be very surprised if gaming jumps straight from four cores is nearly always enough to six cores plus SMT often isn't enough.
No diff. BDO is not stressing your CPU enough. Windows will sort out the scheduling in case a task is poorly optimized and is primarily 1 thread.
let me word it this way then. If BDO in the tray uses 20-30% of 4 cores, I want to play another game at the same time and it uses 4 cores at 50-60%. Would a 6 core make a noticeable difference in this instance?
Being able to run multiple clients is a strength of a multi-core CPU. The more apps and processes spun up, the more cores there are, then the more evently they can be distributed amongst core. So sometimes, for some users, a multi-core CPU is an advantage even when they're running mainly single threaded apps.
If you're in that scenario more than likely you're a power user though, not a standard user. A standard user is going to have a browser, a game, messenger, and a few background apps running. A 2/2 or 4/4 CPU is all they need.
Ah see, I have 2 sometimes 3 game clients working, youtube, several chrome tabs, mwb/eset, discord, a growing amount of game launchers.
I haven't really kept up to date on stuff lately. Once upon a time, the load distribution wasn't so great for multicore at least from my experience. I remember times when the system would throw everything on a single core, while the others core were only running 1-5% utilization. Though that was back in the vista/early win7 days.
What matters is not just how many processes you have running, but how much CPU time they take. You've probably got several dozen processes running that you're not even aware of. An extra process that uses 0.1% of one CPU core can basically be ignored as a rounding error. But if it's this process needs 10% of one core and that one needs 20% of one core and so forth, that adds up to a lot and you're more likely benefit from more than four cores.
You can track your CPU usage yourself in Task Manager. If pushing all four cores on your current CPU hard is a decently common occurrence for you, then definitely, get a Ryzen CPU with 6+ cores and it will be a big upgrade for you. No sense in fussing with quad cores if you know that four isn't enough for your needs. But I'd be surprised if that's the case.
100% utilization is easy.. I can't play Overwatch with BDO in tray as it causes 100% utilization. . A match will have already started before any of the characters even begin to appear. Overwatch is a CPU hog, it'll use 80-90%+ of all cores on its own. Hell everything Blizzard is a CPU eating monster.
But if everything is using all cores more efficiently then I'll definitely have to keep an eye on the 1600X, that was my biggest concern because that wasn't always the case.
It is completely trivial for Windows to put different processes on different cores. There could be a little bit of overhead where both processes have a bunch of different threads that are intermittently active, so you shouldn't necessarily expect 100% CPU usage as opposed to 98%. But if you're commonly hitting 100% usage on a quad core, then yeah, get more cores. A Ryzen 5 1600X or even a Ryzen 7 8-core CPU (available today, but more expensive) makes a ton of sense for you.
Comments
I like that they are more subjective than other sites, you don't just see a FPS graph - they actually try to see how a card affects what your gaming experience would be.
That being said, what I consider acceptable for my gaming experience, and what you consider acceptable, may be two entirely different things. It's a fine line for them to juggle in a review like that, especially when you get into titles where Card A runs one feature well, but Card B runs an entirely different feature well, so which feature is the more important of the two?
I also dislike that HardOCP reviews make it very difficult to compare cards. If you want to see how a 480 stacks up against a 970 or a 390, your in luck. If you want to see it compared to any other card... nope. They usually pit a card against 3-4 cards in it's same price/performance tier, with whatever 4 or 5 games they happen to like playing at that moment, and that's it. And whatever drivers they have that day they are doing that, that's it. I suppose when you are doing a more subjective review, that's really about the only way to do it.
I rely pretty heavily on Anandtech's database for comparing between any given cards I even use something the Passmark chart, which even in it's own flawed way, lets you quickly get a relative comparison between any two cards in their database.
I come to HardOCP reviews for their subjectiveness - they will say if they liked a piece of hardware or not, and they aren't afraid to call a turd a turd.
You combine that subjective review with a few quantitative sources (such as Anand's database) and you start to get a complete picture. If you just look at HardOCP, all you will be able to tell is if Kyle or Brent liked it.
Their new VR review process is a hot mess. They are keeping some kind of running talley for different video cards, and I just don't see any value in that at all. Their power supply reviews - top notch. I wish they would review all hardware like they do power supplies, but it's difficult to do that because DC output doesn't really change, but the standard (games) you need to compare hardware performance on change all the time.
Doesn't look like the 6 and 4 core Zen are going to be nearly as compelling, if the AMD slide deck prices are anything to go by.
The 8 core has a niche, and clearly competes against the high core count EX platform for workstation/prosumer use. It's half the price of the competition, and great. The 4/6 count... well, now your out of those special use cases and down in with all us common people, where IPC is still king. I think that at 3.5-4G a Ryzen will be a perfectly capable CPU for consumers. It will play games, it will do facebook, it will do your taxes, etc.
But the X5 1600X 6 core at $249 - I don't think that will compete against a Core i5, especially when a i5-7600K (which is Intel's top binned i5) is only $20 ~less~. You could argue that the X5 is meant to compete against the i7, but I don't think so. And that we are looking at a 6c/12t vs a 4c/4t, but here at this performance tier, all those cores aren't going to do you a lot of good because not much can take advantage of them. No one here has ever really recommended a Core i7 in a gaming rig unless there are other uses for it, or the buyer simply has money to burn. The X5's true competition is the Core i5, not the i7 7700k, and even AMD knows that as shown by the naming convention.
Yes, I'm also ignoring the 4 core X5 bins right now - you might be able to make a case for the 1500X, with a stock speed of 3.5/3.7 - if it overclocks well. But at $189, your still within $20 of a Core i5, with higher stock speeds, and AMD has lost all but the SMT portion of the core count advantage at that point.
You could also argue that your comparing a 4 core Intel CPU with no SMT to a 6 core with SMT, but there you'd think the advantage would go to AMD - and for the general use case, where it appears that ICP means more than overall throughput, the advantage still appears to go to Intel. And if you really needed the cores anyway, why wouldn't you go ahead and jump to the X7's and their 8c/16t models?
Now, I fully admit - I am making some assumptions about the performance of the X5. I am assuming that at similar clock speeds, it will have roughly the same IPC as the X7, and total processing power scales more or less linearly with core count. I'm also assuming it will have an overclock ceiling of around 4.0G give or take a little bit. Maybe these X5's will be overclock monsters, and that will change the calculus a little bit. But right now, given that the X5 1600X has a similar clock profile as the X7 1800X, I don't know that we'll see much more overhead out of these lower core count chips.
I like Ryzen a lot. I think at this price/performance level that is being presented right now at X5 level is going to be challenging for AMD, as you aren't the clear leader in price, and given what we've seen on the X7 so far, you aren't going to be the clear leader in performance for what these chips are primarily used for.
The X3, when those finally come out - at that level, it's all about price and very little to do with performance. We'll see if AMD decides to make a move into that market, but there it's so commoditized that there isn't really any profit margin to be had, and that's where they had been playing previously with Bulldozer/Vishera. I'll fully admit I'm not all that interested in the X3 no matter how it looks, in the same vein I was never really interested in the 6300 or the 4300 or the Core i3 or Celeron. They are nice things to have available when your in an extreme budget crunch, but it's one of those things you only look at if you absolutely have to.
I'm not seeing how the X5's will work. Maybe come April once the reviews come out it will paint a different picture though.
But if Black Desert is only in your system tray and not active on the screen, there's no need to do all of the work to render every single frame. That might only use a small fraction of one core. But there's no need to guess: you can check directly. Open Task Manager and see how much of your CPU Black Desert is using while in the system tray.
You can track your CPU usage yourself in Task Manager. If pushing all four cores on your current CPU hard is a decently common occurrence for you, then definitely, get a Ryzen CPU with 6+ cores and it will be a big upgrade for you. No sense in fussing with quad cores if you know that four isn't enough for your needs. But I'd be surprised if that's the case.