They sell everything they put into laptops, in that market they can’t keep up with demand. Similar story for enterprise.
In the DIY desktop market, which this article is about, It’s been instilled into everyone to wait for the X3D chips, by basically every reviewer. And for good reason.
Certainly doesn’t help that:
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a Windows 11 bug made performance look over 10% worse than it actually was on release, which is when all benchmarks are done and opinions are set (E: btw this has been fixed, and the fix also helped older CPUs too)
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AMD decided to massively lower energy usage at the expense of out-of-box performance (I actually love this decision, I’m sick of components getting more and more power-hungry, and I’m sick of a hot stuffy room. Most gaming-focussed reviewers hated it though, which bugged me tbh because they also moan when power usage is high. I think they just like being negative because it drives engagement). At previous-gen TDPs, Zen 5 gains a lot of performance, but that’s not how they are benchmarked.
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the price of Zen 4 has dropped, and the 7800X3D in particular looks compelling to those who might’ve wanted Zen 5.
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most DIY PC builders are PC gamers, and what do we need new CPUs for? Most gamers are more GPU bottlenecked right now, especially as people are moving to 1440p, 1440p ultrawide, or 4K. Add to that the fact that there have been very few good PC game releases this year and of course we’re in a slump.
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the only people who can buy a Zen5 CPU and drop it in their machine easily are Zen4 users, who won’t see a large uplift and likely won’t bother. People with earlier systems are looking at a significant investment - new motherboard and DDR5 RAM, why bother with that when the 5700X3D is such an insanely good value proposition that still won’t be bottlenecked unless you’re running an insanely good GPU?
I still have my 3700X and it keeps up well enough with a 4070 even on cyberpunk.
I’m still on my Zen1 1600, with DDR4 RAM and RX580 8GB which I built back in 2018. Whenever I’m thinking of upgrading I just look at the prices. I’d basically need to upgrade everything, maybe aside from GPU which would become a giant bottleneck, so it should be upgraded as well.
I really don’t even want to think about gutting my PC and upgrading, I’d much rather switch to a console.the price of Zen 4 has dropped, and the 7800X3D in particular looks compelling to those who might’ve wanted Zen 5.
This is the big one.
Literally the best gaming chip from any company is a Zen 4 and surprisingly cheap
For most people they won’t need anything more than a 7800x3d for 5 maybe even 10 years?
I’d hate to say what GPU it takes to make cpu the bottleneck on one of those.
Agreed, I bought a 7950X3D over the 9950X as it was $150 cheaper. Seemed like the smarter move.
Let me agree with you explicitly on loving the return to a sane power configuration here. I was watching Hardware Unboxed’s retest of this after the patches and it takes almost fifteen minutes of them reiterating that the 9700X and the 14700K are tied for performance and price before they even mention the bombshell that the 9700X is doing that with about half the wattage.
The fact that we keep pushing reviews and benchmarks focused strictly on pedal-to-the-metal overclocked performance and nothing else is such a disgrace. I made the mistake to buy into a 13700K and I have it under lower than out of box power limits manually both to prevent longevity issues and because this damn computer is more effective as a hair dryer than anything else.
We don’t mention it much because Intel was in the process of catching on actual fire at the same time, but the way this generation has been marketed, presented to reviewers, supported and eventually reviewed has been a massive trainwreck, considering the performance of the actual product.
100%, it’s the lack of the X3D parts. Zen 5 on its own is compelling but not for gamers and DIY, would I buy it in a pre-built desktop or a business machine, Yes I would all day long. But if I’m gaming and there’s no X3D part why would I get anything else other than a 7800 X3D. AMD really shot themselves in the foot and what’s worse is we warned them it was coming yet they chose not to listen.
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I’m considering it, but only just, my 5800x is good enough for most gaming, which is GPU bound anyway, and I run a dual xeon rig for my workstation.
zen 2-4 took care of a lot of the demand, we all have 8-16 cores now, what else could they give us?
I have a 5900x and honestly don’t see any need for an upgrade anytime soon.
A new CPU would maybe give me like 10 fps more in games, but a new GPU would do more. And I don’t think the CPU will be a bottle neck in the next few years
Even beyond that, short of something like blender, Windows just can’t handle that kind of horsepower, it’s not designed for it and the UI bogs down fairly fast.
Linux, otoh, I find can eat as much CPU as you throw at it, but often many graphics applications start bogging down the X server for me.
So I have a windows machine with the best GPU but passable cpu and a decent workstation gpu with insane cpu power on linux.
What is your problem with Windows, though?
Meh, not nearly as configurable as linux, some things you can’t change.
NFS beats SMB into a cocked hat.
You start spending more time in a terminal on linux, because you’re not dealing with your machine, you’re always connecting to other machines with their resources to do things. Yeah a terminal on windows makes a difference, and I ran cygwin for a while, it’s still not clean.
Installing software sucks, either having to download or the few stuff that goes through a store. Not that building from source is much better, but most stuff comes from distro repos now.
Once I got lxc containers though, actually once I tried freebsd I lost my windows tolerance. Being able to construct a new effective “OS” with a few keystrokes is incredible, install progarms there, even graphical ones, no trace on your main system. There’s just no answer.
Also plasma is an awesome DE.
Ah, ok, I thought you were taking about Windows not being able to run CPU at full speed. But yes, it’s certainly a different OS with ups and downs.
