Did you hold off upgrading until Ryzen was released?

I have been advising people who have asked on the forum to look at holding off upgrading until the AMD Ryzen cpu was launched…

It’s launched now with the high end Ryzen CPU R7 1800X priced at the $499 mark, and it matches the performance of the equivalent top end i7 @ $1000.

Intel will have to respond with massive price cuts soon.

So did you hold off or if not could you have bought a cheaper or more powerful system now?

More Info Anandtech → AMD Launches Ryzen: 52% More IPC, Eight Cores for Under $330, Pre-order Today, On Sale March 2nd

I have and will continue to hold off. I don’t have the finances to pay Intel for their high end processors and I don’t know enough about Ryzen and the chipsets yet to make a purchase. I need AMD-Vi (IOMMU) support and they haven’t mentioned anything about that yet.

I have started building up parts for my new computer though. Ordered a new case (Fractal Design Define R5) and a new power supply (Corsair RM1000i). I’ll likely end up ordering the CPU, MB, and RAM at the same time just because one of those can always be defective and I need all three to test.

The latest AMD Ryzen news is very exciting (both for AMD users and Intel users hoping for price cuts). There have been people saying for a couple years to hold have on upgrades until after the new AMD CPU is available, but a lot of people needed newer systems (and benefited from getting new systems) instead of waiting. Obviously anybody planning to build a new PC this month should hold off until after March 2. I expect Intel will need to drop some prices to remain competitive, so even people planning to build a new Intel based system would be wise to wait a few weeks at this point.

I built two new Intel based PCs since the original AMD Zen announcement back in 2015, and I am really glad I did not wait. I got a lot of use out of those systems, and still use both systems every day. I could have saved hundreds of dollars by waiting until 2017 for the new AMD CPU, but the productivity gains more than offset the potential savings of waiting.

I am hoping the AMD Ryzen release will spur a lot of PC users to upgrade. There are still lots of old PCs out there. I personally know quite a few people who have older PCs that have largely ignored PC games in recent years because their PCs have been a bit too slow to play the latest titles well. Maybe the release of Ryzen will bring a lot of PC gamers back into the fold.

I am thinking about 1700(x). My PC has now 8320e and it still enough for me.

I dislike Intel because of their extremely overpriced CPU. No Intel for my PC :hushed:

We use two R4s. Fractal Design makes great cases.

I used a Fractal Design case for a PC that I built for my wife. She wanted a really quiet system. The case is quiet and very solid. My only complaint about the case was there was some chemical odor in the case for the first month or so, which I assume was from the sound deadening material inside the case. Did your Fractal Design cases have any initial smell?

2 Likes

Depending on whether their marketing materials is accurate, 1800X might be my next CPU in my PC at work. It’s due for an upgrade - I’m getting sick lately of waiting for Unity to compile :).

2 Likes

I actually just built my first pc last month. At the moment with a 7700k and gtx 1080 im good. If the new intels come in a much cheaper price and nearly dbl the performance maybe I’ll take a look.

I tend to upgrade when I need it, regardless of what the market is doing. It might be slightly more expensive that way. But power now is often better then maybe power later.

7 Likes

Not that I can recall, no. Are you sure it was coming from the case itself and not one of the components you installed?

How long have you been giving this advice?

Long enough that most peoples upgrade cycles have long come and gone.

1 Like

Yes. Both the one I’m currently using and the one for my new computer rig had an initial odor.

1 Like

It was definitely the case in that build, because it had the smell before I installed other components.

Considering that very, very little of what I do is CPU-bound, I see no reason to wait until it is released. I got an i7-6700k last year and I doubt I’ve once used its full capabilities.

my pc is still going strong on a i7 3770k, just popped a better gpu in and 32gb’s a ram, and its still more than good enough.

I’ve had a quad channel CPU for ages, and only put RAM in the last two channels last week. And that wasn’t even for the extra bandwidth, it was because I needed the extra memory itself.

Faster stuff is a no brainer if you can afford it and if it will make you more productive. If both of those things are true then I can’t see any sense in waiting for something better to come along, because you’re losing productivity while you do that.

3 Likes

I decided to splurge and get the Ryzen 1800X. Probably still dev on my fairly recent Intel/Nvidia rig but it will be nice to test on AMD as well to check performance and if there are any differences.

Hmmm, no idea, then. I haven’t experience that. Here is a thread where people are talking about a weird smell from Fractal Design R2 case, but apparently it was fixed. Maybe not. Who knows? A Google search turns up a few other links about smell, having to do with the air filters, etc. Anyway, I love their cases and haven’t smelled anything strange with them.

Well I am waiting to see pricing of the Ryzen PC intended for average consumers and not gamers as I already know of Quad Core 7th Gen i5 PCs that are complete except for a monitor. I don’t need light baking to be that fast to pay a $500 premium for a Ryzen but if some manufacturer passes along a large economy of scale savings to the Ryzen powered PC then I’ll probably try it.At anyrate, I’ll be adding a Pascal architecture GPU and upgrading whatever to 32GB RAM.