I have built many PCs and I am pretty good at it (not the best but good).
I am about to build myself a new PC (Windows) but I am a little confused this time around.
The “hot” chip now is the AMD 9800X3D for gamers (and I am a gamer). BUT…I also do productivity stuff on my PC (video and some other things) that the 9800X3D seems pretty poor at.
Also, for gaming, every review I see for the AMD 9800X3D is at 1080p resolution. I am having a hard time finding reviews of the 9800X3D at 1440p (where I game). I am not a competitive gamer. I almost never play online games and 100% game at 1440p or higher.
Best as I can tell the 9800X3D starts to fall apart above 1080p resolution. If so, why is it so popular? Sucks at productivity. Sucks at anything above 1080p. Yet it is expensive, a favorite CPU right now and sold out.
Am I missing something? It doesn’t seem good at all except for a very niche market.
You probably already know how Intel made some broken chips the past few years, so people are avoiding them right now?
Other than that, wouldn’t the performance be mostly GPU anyway? If you pair a 4060/70/80 card with a modern CPU (any), it can probably play most games at 1440p. The 50xx are about to come out soon too.
I sure do. I recently read that there are no Intel chips currently in the top ten best selling CPUs which is remarkable.
When you see benchmarks of the 9800X3D it blows away everything else at 1080p gaming. But, no one shows 1440p results (or few) since it seems 1440p and above levels the playing field a lot.
Also, as I said, I do productivity stuff and it seems the 9800X3D sucks at that.
I’d do the 9950X but even that seems iffy. Stellar in some cases and meh in others. It is weirdly difficult to decide.
I wonder if those inimpressive 1440 benchmarks are using the integrated Radeon GPU. Integrated graphics are rather famously low-performance compared to contemporaneous dedicated GPUs.
As to the performance hits for productivity applications, that may go to AMD’s better per-core (single-thread) performance advantage in gaming, whereas productivity applications often favor higher multi-threaded performance, where Intel had an edge when they weren’t spontaneously crashing.
CPU gaming benchmarks are done at low resolutions so that the GPUs aren’t the bottleneck on the test rig and you can actually see the difference between CPUs. When choosing a CPU for a gaming rig, you just need enough processing to keep your graphics card busy, and the higher resolution you’re gaming at, the less processing that is.