Intel's CPU market increased

[Erehy Dobon]

This all goes back to my point that you state your usage case and your processor/motherboard combination will become far more clear (in hand with budget).

My primary custom build is for gaming. My secondary custom build is for mundane productivity use. It was pretty easy to choose components because I had a clear understanding of my usage cases.

Had I been in your shoes, I might have selected something else. Or maybe not. I have 32GB of RAM in both of my current working builds.

It doesn't sound like ToS is optimized for multi-threaded execution. If it leans heavily on single-thread performance, I can definitely see the argument for running it on an Intel CPU.

 

[maflynn]

What's difficult is getting parts. Especially if you want a 5900X or 5950X.

My experience had been that Intel processors and motherboards were in short but AMD supplies were plentiful. That’s the only reason why I switched from Intel to AMD. I didn’t want to wait who knows how long for replacement CPU/motherboard

 

[I7guy]

One big difference for system builders between the late Nineties and today is the great coverage and tutorials that are now available. Twenty years ago there were a handful of websites (Tom's Hardware, Anandtech, a few others that shut down) and some paper magazines (like Maximum PC). Online tutorials on building a custom PC were very few and far between.

Back then you REALLY needed to do your homework to avoid pounding your head against a brick wall for hours trying to get a $30 NIC to work on Red Hat Linux.

Yep, those were days, hehe. These days everything is supported.

I downloaded clonezilla and it recognized all of the hardware on my new build...surprisingly to me, when I fired it up.

 

[I7guy]

This is what I am doing. I have two functional builds. I have two incomplete builds that are expensive doorstops.

Periodically I buy a new component when it goes on sale but I've already noticed that RAM prices have increased about +25-30% in the past couple of months. My guess is that NAND flash chips will also increase in price as the new generation of videogame consoles will eat up more of these.

I do realize that whatever I buy/stockpile today will be last year's tech shortly.

I bought an additional 32gig of ram after the build and the 32 gig cost me (I believe) $40 more than when I ordered it originally. Of course, if I had planned properly I could have gotten 2x32 at a decent price and save some $$$.

I just checked newegg prices, the same memory I bought at $130 last October/November is now selling for $190. CPU dropped in price, system board surprisingly stayed roughly the same despite the newer z590 chipset system boards now being sold.

 

[I7guy]

This is what I am doing. I have two functional builds. I have two incomplete builds that are expensive doorstops.

Periodically I buy a new component when it goes on sale but I've already noticed that RAM prices have increased about +25-30% in the past couple of months. My guess is that NAND flash chips will also increase in price as the new generation of videogame consoles will eat up more of these.

I do realize that whatever I buy/stockpile today will be last year's tech shortly.

I have 3 windows computers. 1 is my new desktop build, and then 2 windows laptops. One is a recent core i7 chip the other is 10 years old but runs windows 10 as a casual email, browser machine. Those big updates are killers on the laptops.

My desktop needs a new graphics card but I'm not going to get ripped off and thus I'll survive until the supply chain eases up and hopefully the prices come down. But I want the desktop to do everything I need without compromise on my part.

I like running vms. I tuned the bios for good performance, but set a tjmax of 80c, which at this point the cpu throttles to keep the temperature. I want to be able to run the box pegging the cpu at 100% as much as possible up to a max of 80C. Figure that's a good balance between performance and longevity.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

Running a CPU-Z stress test, my SFF productivity build's CPU (NZXT H1 with Ryzen 3700X) maxes out at 64ºC. The 140mm AIO cooler's fan is still very quiet (1000 rpm); there's a Noctua Low-Noise Adapter on the cable and the BIOS's fan curve is programmed for 80% max.

And I've bumped up the power limits on the CPU. The CPU maxes out at 92W PPT (beyond the stock 88W), EDC at 116A (90A stock) and TDC at 54A (60A stock) without any additional overclocking tweaks.

I never load my CPU that hard in the real world. Even a Handbrake encode is far lighter.

My gaming PC is close. It's a Ryzen 5600X (65W TDP) and it maxes out PPT at 105W and EDC at 110A. TDC clocks in at 61.7A. There's something different about the motherboards (ASUS ROG Strix B550-I in the H1, MSI MAG B550-M Mortar in the gaming build).

I read a TechPowerUp forum discussion about AIO liquid coolers and one of the takeaways was to deshroud the GPU (on low-end or medium cards) and reapply thermal paste to the videocard. I did that with my ghetto $65 RX 550 and boy was that dude RIGHT.

A dollar's worth of thermal paste and 20 minutes of my time changed the thermal/acoustic performance of this ghetto GPU.

 

[pshufd]

This all goes back to my point that you state your usage case and your processor/motherboard combination will become far more clear (in hand with budget).

My primary custom build is for gaming. My secondary custom build is for mundane productivity use. It was pretty easy to choose components because I had a clear understanding of my usage cases.

Had I been in your shoes, I might have selected something else. Or maybe not. I have 32GB of RAM in both of my current working builds.

It doesn't sound like ToS is optimized for multi-threaded execution. If it leans heavily on single-thread performance, I can definitely see the argument for running it on an Intel CPU.

I went with 64 GB (2x32) as I like to play with Virtual Machines and also wanted to make it easy to go to 128 GB.

I'm pretty sure that both programs are multithreaded. ATP, though, is written on some ancient platform which seems very inefficient.