Quote Originally Posted by Mando Knight View Post
The comparison there was a Core i7 vs a Ryzen 5, where the Ryzen wins on price, not performance: the Coffee Lake i7s are multithreaded 6-core processors, just like the Ryzen 5, and the Core i7-8700 beats out the Ryzen 5 2600 across the board because of it. However, it's also a much more expensive processor, as is the Ryzen 7 that goes toe-to-toe with the i7 performance-wise (though the i7-8700 still narrowly beats out the Ryzen 7 2700X in single-core performance).
The processors in the linked computers are a $320 (newegg price) 3.2GHz i7 8700 and a $160 (again, newegg) Ryzen 3.4GHz Ryzen 7.

The only significant advantage of the Intel chip will be during low-threaded applications where the Intel will be running in burst mode at ~4.6GHz and the AMD will be limited to ~3.9Ghz (and no matter how you overclock it, getting the AMD to 4.3GHz will be impressive. It won't do 4.6GHz. The Intel is locked and expect to pay a lot more if you want to see if it works around 5GHz).

But when all twelve cores are running, expect both chips to be running at rated clockspeed: the AMD will have a 6% advantage in pure clock speed, eating about least half of Intel's IPC advantage (10-15%). It will be hard to notice the 4-9% advantage the Intel chip brings. If you put that $160 dollars saved into a better GPU, you will almost certainly notice it.

If you must buy an Intel CPU for a $1000 budget, I'd look at i5 8600K and 9600K chips ($260 and $280 respectively). They aren't that much more expensive than the Ryzens, and if clocked around 4.8GHz or more will beat the Ryzen chips regardless of the number of threads in play (each core will be running fast enough to make up what it loses thanks to a single thread). Just be aware of you extra power and cooling needs (I'd go with an AIO water unit to reduce the cooling noise), and a gaming machine will certainly suffer from losing ~$100 from the GPU budget (especially with a $1000 budget). If you don't want to overclock, I'd go with the AMD (which might be odd, considering they are all unlocked).

Note that the "prebuilt systems" almost always prefer the 3.2GHz i7 8700. Mostly because you might have to pay a little more money and attention to things like the heatsink and power supply, and of course Intel certainly wants you to think that i7>i5 (the difference becomes meaningless on notebooks: expect to plug the CPU's SKU into google if you want to know how many cores and threads any Intel notebook CPU has).

Quote Originally Posted by tyckspoon View Post
(Take a look at something like this iBuyPower model being sold for $800. The major parts alone in it probably cost about 6-700 retail, and it'll whip the linked Dell from earlier in any kind of gaming task.
That isn't too bad. On the other hand, I'm really wary of the "8GB + 16GB optane memory". That "optane memory" is a superfast flash card hanging off the PCI-e bus that has to page memory in and out in 4k chunks. It presumably has double duty in caching the HDD.

Adding in your own SSD will likely involve moving windows over to the SSD. This involves shrinking the filesystem and imaging the thing over (does windows do that at all, or you going to have to boot something linux/BSD based?). Installing windows myself on the SSD seems to make much more sense, especially when I know it won't have the shovelware (other than what Microsoft insists on including).

Scrolling through both IBUYPOWER and Cyberpower I noticed a few things.

They ship almost exclusively 8-series Intel and 1-(first gen zen) series AMD. Expect to lose another 10% with first gen AMD compared to second gen. They love to include 1TB hard drives. You can buy 1TB drives for $40, and 3TB drives for $60. Unless you know you aren't going to fill up your drives, that's leaving a lot on the table. *If* they bother to include a SSD (they rarely do, and it is a relatively critical item), it at best a 120GB. Basically they are all the SSDs that they can no longer to sell to people looking to buy SSDs because you can get twice the room for ~$25 more.

Not to mention that if you don't like manually move things between SSD and rotating hard drive, AMD B450 motherboards include "storemi" software that handles that "tiering" for you. Just be aware that it will only meld 256G of "fast storage" to one HDD (not an array or anything). Don't expect this included in any "prebuilt" PC.

Not to mention some of the other silliness I saw. The first cyberpower I noticed with a 2xxx Ryzen chip made me think they finally included a new CPU. Then I saw it had a G2600 chip (which while newer, has the old core inside). Then I noticed they had added a nvidia GT730 GPU. The computer would actually run games faster by simply removing the nvidia card and using the built in video (unless they wimped out on the memory, but I really didn't want to dig into it).