People who use a computer to do work don't their Storm Peak Valentine until September. :(

mongbiohazard: Good news on the GPU front though, it looks like Intel might actually mean to get a foot in the door for the GPU market and keep it the

One of the GPUs in my Threadripper rig is an A750. Intel isn't terribly impressive for gaming stuff, but it is absolutely top of the charts for people who do video processing. That's a weird flex, because it's not something tons of people do, but neither AMD nor nVidia support the 10-bit h.265 422 video that contemporary mirrorless cameras natively output. Intel does. Intel also has GPU encoding support for AV1.
This is legitimately a big deal for productivity workloads and addresses something that the other two guys were dead set on ignoring.

An A770 tops out at about 225W TDP with a $300 price tag. It sits somewhere between an RTX3060 and 3060Ti for gamer things, but 3060Tis cost quite a bit more and the trendline for 4000-series GPUs doesn't suggest that even a 4050Ti will be so cheap as that.

In other words, there's a lot of value in those Alchemist GPUs.

NathanAllen: How do PC gamers even have money for games?

I have a lot of friends in their early 20s. Very, very often, a decent PC is one of the first things they buy when the grown-up job money starts rolling in.

Also, even a $250 Walmart Vomit PC has a roughly 3 decade backlog of compatible games available to it, and that's without dipping in to DOS-era software. Maybe it can't run the latest AAA titles, but WoW, Counter Strike and League of Legends will run on a goddamned potato.

madgonad: PC gamers spend far more than console peasants. A modern gaming PC easily exceeds $1500 and those using 4080/90 GPUs may exceed $3k.

There is a caveat to that, which is that even 5 year old mid-range CPUs (i5s 8500s or r5 2600s) are probably overkill for most gaming, and a GTX1060 from 2016 is good enough to get decent FPS at 1920x1080. So yes, you can get a monster PC (the system I'm typing on is well in to nice used car territory) but so is something that can be put together out of 5+ year old parts for about what a console costs.

madgonad: likefunbutnot: madgonad: PC gamers spend far more than console peasants. A modern gaming PC easily exceeds $1500 and those using 4080/90 GPUs may exceed $3k.

There is a caveat to that, which is that even 5 year old mid-range CPUs (i5s 8500s or r5 2600s) are probably overkill for most gaming, and a GTX1060 from 2016 is good enough to get decent FPS at 1920x1080. So yes, you can get a monster PC (the system I'm typing on is well in to nice used car territory) but so is something that can be put together out of 5+ year old parts for about what a console costs.

Uhm, yeah. That is coming to an end. I'm still sitting on a 4670k and a 1080 and at 3440x1440 I have to turn stuff down. Heck, the new Witcher 3 update and Cyberpunk runs around 20fps with almost everything turned down at 1080p. Yeah, I can always play Portal, Civ6, Endless Space 2...., but if I want to play new AAA games I will need to upgrade.

The current PC math kinda sucks.
$320 for 13600k
$180 motherboard
$120 RAM
$100 NVME SSD
$100 Case/fans
$100+ power supply
$600 3070ish card - good luck

So that puts you way over $1500 for a gaming PC that has 3 year old GPU and enough CPU/MEM to consider a GPU upgrade in 3 years.

Compare that to what AMD is positioning
$700 7950X3D
$250 X670 motherboard
$175 32GB 6000CL30
$250 PCI 5.0 NVME SSD
$125 better case
$150 better power supply
$2000 4090 GPU

Now we are on our way to $4k

PC gaming has turned into a rich person's toy.

You don't need a top end CPU for gaming. A 7950x3D has a bunch of slower cores that games will never touch.

You also don't have to game at 4k, even if your display supports it. Switch to 1440p or 1080p and buy a more modest graphics card if you're price sensitive. The A770 is in the right ballpark for 3060ti specs and those things cost under $350. AMD has some reasonable options in that range as well.

Nvidia is being greedy and stupid right now. They want mining prices for 4000 series cards and that's driving an extra level of inflation on their hardware, but unless your heart is set on NVenc or Ray tracing, the other guys are competitive and cheaper.

DDR5 is also considerably more expensive, but 13th gen Intel and 5000 series Ryzen both still have DDR4 support if you'd rather have more, cheaper RAM. The CPU you pick for gaming will be more than enough regardless.

madgonad: likefunbutnot: You don't need a top end CPU for gaming. A 7950x3D has a bunch of slower cores that games will never touch.

You also don't have to game at 4k, even if your display supports it. Switch to 1440p or 1080p and buy a more modest graphics card if you're price sensitive. The A770 is in the right ballpark for 3060ti specs and those things cost under $350. AMD has some reasonable options in that range as well.

Nvidia is being greedy and stupid right now. They want mining prices for 4000 series cards and that's driving an extra level of inflation on their hardware, but unless your heart is set on NVenc or Ray tracing, the other guys are competitive and cheaper.

DDR5 is also considerably more expensive, but 13th gen Intel and 5000 series Ryzen both still have DDR4 support if you'd rather have more, cheaper RAM. The CPU you pick for gaming will be more than enough regardless.

7950X3D also doesn't have the clocks turned way down. 7800X3D has the lowest base clocks in the generation. The 7950X3D will outperform the 7800X3D by 15% on clock speed alone and perhaps by more if the extra cores matter (they will in 3-5 years when I assume you will still be using this top PC).

Yeah, Fark Nvidia, but it isn't like AMD is going the intel route with GPU prices.

DDR5 is faster. Pretty big difference when Intel buyers cheap out and go DDR4. I think I have seen benchmarks of about 8% loss when going DDR4 with Intel and Raptor Lake.

Anyway the point of buying big is that your PC has a long life. Mine is about nine years old with a GPU upgrade six years ago and it is only now useless for modern games. If you buy a 3050 now to save money you are going to want to upgrade in a year or two. If you pay the ransom and buy the 4080 you will have 5-6 years of solid AAA gaming performance.

Until 8K VR.

The 7950x3d does boost higher on a single core but a whole 100MHz, but the 7900x3D has higher base clocks and all core boost. I strongly suspect it's a better overall deal for gaming; getting 4 extra cores that'll probably be idle 95% of the time because almost noonp has 32 thread CPUs meand you're probably spinning your wheels in everything but benchmarking software. You're spending money you don't need to spend.

As far as DDR4 v. 5, yes, there's an increase in bandwidth at a cost to latency (which is usually a bigger deal for consumer applications), but neither Intel nor AMD currently supports all the JEDEC approved speeds, though motherboard vendors might. Maybe. Hope you bought qualified DIMMs.

Support is kind of immature and again, it's not a world changing difference. Cost per GB is roughly double, the performance gain outside benchmarks is marginal and if you're arguing that PCs are expensive right now, there's a compelling case that you could stick with Ryzen 5000. You could also wait a generation for prices to drop; you have a decent computer already, and an incremental upgrade to a faster GPU is probably all you REALLY need to set yourself up from a run at a different platform in another year.

I  have a Threadripper 3960x, but that was an upgrade from a 1st gen Threadripper and before that a Haswell based Xeon. I need IO and my workload benefits more from more threads than fast threads, but with gaming, as long as the CPU has the horsepower to not choke the GPU, you're fine. Your i5 or r5 will get you there, and at least on AMD, you'll probably be good to upgrade from a $230 CPU to a $500 one down the road if you don't want to put in the cash up front.

Gaming rigs don't have to be insane any more. They're limited by what consoles can do in a lot of cases, and building for gaming longevity is kind of silly because every couple generations there's always a new killer feature that'll make you ditch your old GPU anyway.

Is the insane top of the line system going to be faster? Yes. Are you going to be able to subjectively tell while you're actively playing? In a lot of cases, probably not.