CPU: Intel likely to invoke price reductions in 2020

Debating if i should buy a video card upgrade for my Intel I7 7700 next month for birthday, ((current video card Geforce 1050 2gb)) EVGA 1660 Super, or if i should skip that and wait and see what happens in 2021 and do a whole system upgrade to maybe AMD Ryzen based


Bought this Intel System in September 2017 after purchasing a year before a Cheap Refurbed Asus M32CD AMD FX 8310 system, and it still lagged me alot in games, could've been the video card that was in that one, not sure, R7 240, came across more money in August 2017, i was like ok buying faster system, Friend suggested i go back to Intel then, so i was like ok, and bought this Asus G11CD

Someday maybe will go back to AMD based, but not sure when though

 

Depends your games and what the card delivers right now.
I sold my 1080 and used a backup gtx570 was able to run siege, but not at 1440p since it only has 1gb vram.
As long as you dont have problems getting steady fps at native res, upgrade cpu/board and be ready for e bigger gpu when the time comes.
And even if you get x570 and 3xxx cpu, you wull have at least one upgrade option without board swap.

 

Yeah right now games are Need For Speed Payback, GTA V, Battlefield 4, American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck SImulator 2, decent framerate yes right now, resolution 1080P, 1920x1080 on my newer Monitor, Asus VG245H, So guess if comes down to it, could hold off on video card upgrade, and continue saving money for x570 based system if i choose to.

 

Doesn't matter the discount for many people, last gen PCIe and security flaws hold these back compared to the competition, as it stands today.

 

@AMDMan2016
yeah save up.
go with something like 3700 when it gets price drop after 4xxx release, maybe 240/280 aio,
and you will get some nice drop in case/gpu temps helping with boost on the gpu.

 

My 3770K was delided and ran at 4.4 ghz and I was playing at 2k with GTX1080 and once in a while it had severe frame drops even,that just took the immersion out. Same with Watch Dogs 2. Going to 8 cores just smoothed everything out and took the minimum frame rate much higher. Yeah, Ubisoft has game engines that are eating CPU like crazy, but right now I believe that games use more cores/threads then ever before and quad cores are becoming obsolete fast.

 

For those still wondering...
The days of the quad-core have come and gone, though for lighter usage / lighter gaming or older gaming, it should be fine. If you go to work and dabble in a game for an hour or two, it should suffice for now.
I went from a 4790k to a 3700x last summer, courtesy of the substation blowing up (and while the motherboard, processor, and all components 'seemed' to survive, the machine was never really the same). Difference is night and day. I couldn't be happier, even on THE cheapest x570 (Asrock) board.
BUT I do game content creation, and use mostly software that benefits from lots of cores. I don't need nor want overclocking stuff. I just want something that works, and doesn't roast me out of the PC room. No boosting issues on release day BIOS (yeap, still using it!), no buggy this or that, etc. So while some folks bloat their e-peen with painstaking days/weeks of testing their supposedly stable intel OC, all while trying not to burn down the building they're in; your AMD Ryzen processor and chipset will handle it all for you without any input on your part. That's worth a ton when you just want to play games, or like myself, just want to sit down and design a house or two - or a whole city for that matter.
So if you want the excuse to get off the quad core horse, now's as good a time as any, just research if your software will make use of the extra horse-power or not.
@AMDMan2016 Do some research if your games via benchmarks would run faster or not with twice as many cores, or just a video board upgrade.
I'd save up and get something better than a 1050 Ti when you get the new system. The EVGA 2060 KO, 1660 Super, or 1650 Super seem like good cards to get right now depending on how much money you want to throw at it. You won't so much see single-core speed increase going to the AMD, BUT, and this is a very BIG BUT, the whole system being so much smoother over all, is an amazing difference. Keep in mind a 3700x isn't going to sip any more (measurable) power than a 7700k while having TWICE as many cores, and the AMD stock coolers are generally 'good enough' to not warrant upgrading them unless you go for the 3950x (which doesn't come with one), or the 3900x (which is a bit toasty for the stock cooler when pushed hard enough, but nothing close to the absolutely dreadful performance of a 4790k on it's stock cooler for comparison).

While I adore AMD revitalizing the CPU market, thank goodness for little miracles; I wouldn't touch an AMD video card again outside of web usage with a 10 foot goodie. Not going to go there again, but I was ready to throw my Polaris-based RX480 card across the room. I had so many bugs, issues, and the stupid thing would keep going over it's stock GPU core clocks without any input from me on Windows 10, just with the driver alone, crashing my applications and some games (or just causing hitching). Had to lower it 200mhz core-wise, making it even *slower*. Then it finally scrambled the desktop. I'd have thought I was just one-off with the issue, friends who had AMD Polaris cards all started getting the same issues. I firmly said either get rid of it, or be happy with that hot mess and lower the core clock 50~200mhz (depending on model and/or silicon lottery) and live with it and don't tell me about it anymore. I will never, ever, ever buy another AMD Video board again for the life of me, until I have no choice or don't do content creation anymore. That rant having been said, the RTX 2070 Super card I replaced my Polaris card with has been an absolute dream, for content creation, and playing Quake II RTX was a blast from the past and I enjoyed every minute of it. Rendering ray-traced graphic / normal-maps (think bump maps) on the fly with no wait or choppy slowness in Substance Designer, and doing my preview renders in Maya with it are a FANTASTIC pro-bono.
Contrastly the AMD CPU and chipset have been tops, however; and not a single complaint about any of it will be heard from this man. Lots less issues than my 4790k, which the stock cooler was useless (OK I knew that going in), which had to be delidded even with a 100$ air cooler with liquid metal above/below the IHS (found that out).

Ontopic; intel is going to have some serious work to do to get me to ever consider buying their chips full of security holes again, never mind the sky-high prices compared to what they should be. I don't forgive them for trickle-feeding us 2% upgrades every year and sticking it to us with quad-cores for what was the greater part of 10 years, and requiring new motherboards constantly. Never-mind this coming release from intel is going to be another mess, with the PCI-E 4.0 on their implementation failing to meet specifications by the PCI E consortium, hence it being disabled.

Glad I bought into this when I did, and you might feel the same, just read up on some benchmarks in games you play first.

 

I'd advise going for the GPU upgrade as it's definitely the bottleneck in your system. Unless you game at a resolution where the GPU is underworked, you will see a lot more improvement by getting a 1660 than an upgrade to Ryzen.

 

I recently bought at i9-10920X for $700, been very happy with it. I bought a Asus Rampage VI Apex board not long after they released, and a i9-7900X. So this for me was an easy upgrade CPU swap out. Did I need it really, no not so much, but the extra speed and cores is nice for a cheaper upgrade path without having to replace anything else in my system.

I still have my past machines running in my household that I handed down to other family members. My old 3950K on X79 MB my daughter still uses, runs great with RX480 card for what she plays on it. Actually runs 1440p games pretty well considering its age. My old , 5960X on X99 MB with Vega 64 card is being used by my wife. She does mostly Photoshop and Lightroom work on that machine but still runs games very well also. Basically what I'm getting at is these Intel systems have been getting years of use out of them even though they cost a bit at time of purchase they have had great longevity.

I'm sure Intel will pull ahead again or even the field at the least just like they did last time AMD jumped ahead back when they came out of with first dual cores. I remember having a couple Althon 64 FX cpus, the 55-FX and 60-FX (dual core) cpus back in the early 2000's that were better than anything Intel had for gaming at the time. I even remember them costing way more than Intel at the time too. I remember paying $1000 for the FX-60 back then even. A few years later Intel pulled ahead again with its quad core lines. Personally I'm not a fanboy of either CPU or GPU maker I always go with whats best at the time normally, but I have been very happy with how well Intel hardware has held up over time as I said above.

 

@D3M1G0D Yeah gonna go for the Geforce 1660 Super upgrade hopefully sometime next month, I game at 1920x1080 native monitor resolution, previously gamed from 2017 to 2019 on 1600x900. Then see about a major upgrade in a few years i think, may take that long to save money for a major upgrade anyways.

 

@Khronikos
Ur setup with ti@1080p is bottlenecking on the cpu.
A friend of mine switched from intel 47xx to ryzen 2700 and saw improvement in min/avg and max frames.

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/intel-intc-earnings-q4-2019.html

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/50863/000005086320000007/q4-2019earningsrelease.htm

https://www.intc.com/investor-relat...h-Quarter-2019-Financial-Results/default.aspx

well in investors/stock-market view, intel company outlook still strong
now before someone saying intel faking the report... then if it true, its the one will kill intel ... until it can proved otherwise

indeed there none intel cpu that going to be great in next few years, but most is from "PC-builder" perspective

all-in-all its good for AMD and us... amd got chance to be bigger, we get more value/performance products from both company

 

To my knowledge, publicly traded companies can't fake reports like that.

 

Everyone triggered by Intel earning reports just chill please...

First, Intel is a giant mega-corporation with many products in many areas, not just CPUs. Even in the CPU business,they have so many subsections ...
Even if they completely drop all desktop CPU products (laptops too), they'll probably still do fine. (However not so much if they don't sell server CPUs... a lot of their income comes from here. They definitely fear "Rome" much more than "Ryzen" ! Oh... and "Milan", that will probably be a K.O. if they don't do something about it, and quickly !)

Second, earning reports are always delayed from sales, sometimes by a large margin (Could be two full quarters).
Until around September 2019, they were still winning quite strongly in all CPU markets. Even after Zen 2 products became widely available, it still takes time for system builders to actually use them, or it takes even longer time for business to actually switch. Other than "queue in line for release" enthusiasts, nobody else upgrades immediately after some product appears...

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TL;DR:

Let's see those earning reports and market share split in Q3 2020, that's when the skeletons from the closet will show themselves !

 

Also, in the desktop realm a lot of PC sales aren't gaming computers. That's important because the aging i7 2600k still does typical desk work perfectly well. Pretty much need to wait until those computers die for Ryzen to have a chance to step in the office or home work/school PC.
Not an exciting sector like servers, but it's a huge percent.

 

To be honest, I really don't see Intel to worry much since much of the computer markets companies buying are all laptops and most brand work laptops I have seen are all Intel based. For instance, my company all uses Dell Latitude line for every employee and we really don't have anybody using desktop computer at all. For this year alone, we're going to ordering about 26000 new Dell Latitude machines to replace older Windows 7 based laptops so going to be busy for us IT folks.

Still, I am happy with the news that the price of new Intel processor will drop in time for my motherboard/cpu upgrade this fall. But for now I will need to upgrade my graphic card first just in time for my tax return. Happy upgrading everybody.

 

Unless Dell decides to put AMD cpus in those laptops in the future, your company won't care what's in them.

 

Not every company will do/buy the same stuff.
Especially when they arent getting a big discount from intel.
The gov is usually slow to make changes to their line up online/in store),
and even they are already selling ryzen based units for a while now (2xxx/3xxx), no matter if laptop or desktops.

 

True but I have not seen Dell putting AMD processors on any of the Latitude line laptop and I have worked with few other companies over the decades and I have never seen AMD based processor on any HP Elitebook or Dell Latitude laptop. I mean it could change in the future so who knows.

Like I say, I'm not complaining, lowered processor prices which is better for everybody.

 

But you have to remember that amd cpus werent as close to intel as they are now.
Big difference if someone making those kind of decisions and looks at actual performance.