What AMD CPU's have you been buying? as anyone will tell you, even hardcore AMD fans will have to admit Intel has ruled the roost 2011 onwards, if you bought an AMD CPU between then and Ryzen, the fault is your own for not researching enough, and you still ain't.

Ryzen 3700x has a 65W TDP.


I had a AMD Phenom X4 965 BE, that i bought in 2009, and i upgraded from that to a Ryzen 2700x, was i disappointed? no, never.


Sure Intel has advantages, but i won't support scummy business practices for a meagre % increase.

Both sockets discussed here are in the end of life. Am4 will get a 16 core soon but probaby nothing beyond that.
Am3 lasted 10 years with several iterations, am3+ is backwards compatible but you cant use a Am3+ cpu on a Am3 board (with a few exceptions).

41ºC without context mean absolutelly zero, on some cpus the max temp is as low as 55ºC. The are numerous factors but where and how the temps are read seem to be the greatest factor. Comparing numbers reported by software are kinda meaningless.
To give you a exemple, I had a fm2+ platform that reported 10ºC with a 4core overclocked, stock cooler 15min+ under stress test. The number is correct but I will give you no context why ;)

The reason is the software reported the available ºC until "safe max temp".

Pretty much this.
I liked my Phenom II 955 so when I had the chance to upgrade I decided to go with another AMD, so I got the FX-8350. It worked good for awhile but I kept having trouble with it.
Last year I decided it was time for an update. This time I went with the i7-8700, and man... This thing is sweet!

That being said, whatever you go with it will be a huge difference. A chip from 2012 just isn't going to compare to anything out right now.

But have you found any benchmark that would warrant almost double the cost of the Ryzen 3700x? At most I've seen 6% difference between 3700x and 3600, and that's only when using a RTX2080Ti.

I wouldn't call Ryzen3600 the lower end. I would call it a bargain/best buy/free performance/sweet spot.
They who? I think you mean Intel violets antitrust laws, but from your text it comes across, that AMD violets antitrust laws

So you went from a FX-8350, which is was known to be a sub-par architecture, directly to a i7-8700 and were surprised by the performance difference? It's unfortunate you didn't make the jump to intel sooner, since now Intel is in free fall(and won't have a new architecture until 2021), while zen2+(which is a refresh) will launch next year perfectly backwards compatible with the current AM4 socket.

Having said that:
Are the current Intel chips still competitive with AMD? Absolutely!
Are the current Intel chips overpriced like all hell when compared to AMD's CPUs? ...we all know the answer to that.

Isn't the refresh zen2+ coming next year, also on AM4?

Thanks - that's a useful perspective. Avoiding the X570 board is probably a good idea if I go ryzen (as I'd imagine I wouldn't need the pcie 4.0 performance for at least another upgrade cycle - I'm still running a HDD in my current rig - albeit a WD Black one).

If we look at the 9700 (£340) vs the 3700x (£320), do you think that the £20 saving (plus better threaded performance) offsets the superior single core performance of the 9700?

I hadn't considered a 3600 before - I had been slightly put off by the fact that my FX-8350 has 8 physical cores (I know there's an argument over whether they are more akin to 4 physical cores with 8 threads), with a 4.0ghz (ish) clock. However, I'm assuming that mhz for mhz you get much better performance on a single core on the newer generation products.


As an aside, graphics card wise, I'm probably going for a 2070 Super (as mentioned, this is because I have a gysnc monitor).

If I were you I'd just get a Ryzen 3600 + B450 to pair with that 2070 and spend £100 of the +£200 saved on an SSD:-

1. The difference between the 3600 and the 3700X / 3900X is mostly in productivity not gaming. See these charts? They (and most other tech sites) do them with a GTX 2080Ti. If you're running a GTX 2070, the highest bars of those charts will already be a lot "flatter" and spending £200 more on a CPU for 1-2fps whilst you'll still see a lot of random stutter from running off a mechanical HDD is not a good buy.

2. Pick an SSD. Any SSD. Samsung 860 EVO / MX500 are two good buys (£100-£130 for 1TB). Very reliable, 5 year warranty. Again they're a component where moving from HDD to SSD = a 100x decrease in access times (important for games that stream levels "on the fly") and random reads (important for everything) whilst going higher and higher gains less and less, ie, the first £100 you'll spend on an SSD changes everything for the better. The day I got an SSD is the day a lot of micro-stutter in games disappeared even on dual / quad core CPU's. It also makes your PC actually feel fast with no more grinding to a halt booting, malware scanning, etc. The gap is that large it simply can't be emphasized there's zero point buying a new gaming rig that lacks one.

3. Look at these charts. Even after all these years, most games on most GPU's don't even see much of a PCI-E 2.0 vs 3.0 difference. For gaming, X570's PCI-E 4.0 is mostly marketing and if PCI-E 2.0 isn't a bottleneck, then it'll probably be at least 3x generations before PCI-E 3.0 will be. If you really want an X570 then get one for future proofing, but again, given the choice between a £170 X570 board + mechanical HDD or £70 B450 board + £100 SSD, I'd go with the latter anyday.

I thought my answer was pretty clear, since I addressed almost everything you asked here... :(

While b450 will be enough for ryzen 3000, next year will see the release of zen2+(Ryzen 4000) which will be the last CPU for the AM4 platform. Getting a x570 now, will absolutely future proof your system should you want to upgrade to Ryzen 4000, as a last hoorah.

Imho best value right now is ryzen 3600 on b450 board, but if budget allows go for good x470 and 3700

Adding threads is futureproofing - hardware unboxed made good videos comparing first gen ryzen at release and now vs i7 and i5

Forget about pcie4 - you will do next upgrade before you will use it

Forget about Intel at the moment, they're currently abusing the market.

Ryzen gives you great performance and quality for such a low price that I'm surprised this is a question.

In response to the above:

- Yes, an SSD is going to be part of the new build, probably going to pair a small NVME M2 "boot drive" with a larger SATA SSD and also a high capacity HDD for archiving/classic games

- I'm not overly worried about whether a company has allegedly shady business practices or not; some sources may have accused Intel of price gouging in the past (I make no comment on this), but I'm more interested in the value proposition at the time of purchase. I expect many people will disagree or tell me I am wrong/amoral for this approach.

- Historically, I've never felt the need to upgrade within the socket I have purchased the processor for - usually I run a machine for 5+ years and then do a refresh, so I can probably discount the next generation zen (I find that component compatibility drops off/taking machines to bits generally causes problems with components to crystallise).

- MadalinStroe - your answer was very clear and I apologise for not reading it in enough detail before posting! If I get a 3600 and a better cooler, given I'm terrified of overclocking, is there a way to get added performance without voiding my warranty?

The i7 9700 does not have more single core performance than a Ryzen 3700x, prebably it has less depending on the benchmark test (who would say :D)... Since I didn't test it for myself I cannot argue that but either way we are talking about meaningless differences. There are some games wich run better on Intel hardware, that will show more fps on typical benchmarks. On real gaming, with the fps capped or the GPU maxed out, there will be no difference...

About the SSD thing, try it, you can never go back.

So you're still rocking the fx 8 core? It has nothing to do with the newer Ryzens. Those times are past, let's see what Intel can do, their move.
The newer CPU's are so much more responsive than the old FX series, even browsing the web. A heavy facebook page open faster with a dual core Intel (sandy bridge and above) than a 8 core FX, this is something I never saw any youtube media talking about, usually they just benchmark. Even 1 gen Ryzen had a little less responsivness than Intel CPU's. I cannot quantify this "responsivness", not sure if it shows on any javascript benchmark like the mozilla kraken
I tested with a dual core pentium g3258 at 4.2 GHz and got around 1000 ms (less the better).
Back in the day I was shocked when got a new dual core AMD A6-7400k how slow it was, even a core2duo was faster... Probably browsers became more efficient handling extra threads but at that time the difference was huge. Later when I got a 4 core Athlon 860k, the dual core pentium was still much faster in mundane tasks like facebook scrolling.

Big rant over, my recomendation is you cant go wrong with either CPU and 20 euros (or GBP) doesnt make any difference given the total cost of a entire new platform. Go with whatever you feel more confortable. Just keep in mind 3700x is overall faster than the 9700 except in a couple of games. In most games (maybe except that Assassins creed trash) the 3600 is mostly as fast as the 3700x.
Is likely you wont see any benchmark of the 9700 but the 9700k should be around 10% faster overall than the 9700k(give or take) if you want to do comparatives.

Yeah, it seem so. But wouldn't hold my hands on next refresh as a big improvement. Just speculation of course.
That said I do look foward to see newer zen2 APU's. We know on the GPU side will not get any faster, as is memory bandwith limited, but the 1gen was still a bit sluggish. I do want to build a computer for myself with a good APU to replace the old Pentium g3258 and Nvidia gt1030.
Nex generation may bring the needed ddr5 or whatever :D

I would expect deltas similar to the zen(Ryzen 1000) vs zen+(Ryzen 2000) which was also a refresh.

Yep - had it since 2012. Will probably move it into a separate case and use as a spare machine, but it's approaching its last legs - and the VRMs on my motherboard are overheating and causing throttling, despite having huge fans that push air down on to the board. Mainly bought it because at the time I couldn't afford to go intel, and for the price it seems reasonable. Obviously everything is more expensive now (my GTX 660 only cost about £120 at the time as well!)

Thanks everyone so far for the good feedback - and thanks for not turning this into an AMD vs Intel slagging match!