*NOTE: Simulated values calculated on leaked multi-core results. We’re working with MSI to obtain a sample for testing, will update when possible with real values.
Look, there’s AMD congratulating themselves for a job well done, talking to Microsoft, the CEO of HP, Lucasfilm, Lenovo’s CEO, here’s Formula 1 star Lewis Hamilton and Toto Wolff… wow, they brought out all the stops. Except stopping consumers from getting scalped with their new Ryzen 5000 CPUs!
Man, this situation has got my blood boiling. We had a crappy 2020, supply chains and logistics raising prices for everything, sure, but 40%? 70? AMD, you get all the positive press and reviews from huge tech YouTubers at release and 4 months later your top end CPU with an MSRP of $800 bucks is now $1350? Really?
Actually, we’re lucky, because Amazon price history shows a launch at $1600, climbing to $2000 bucks. If you were lucky for two days in January you could have scooped one for $1050. You guys tweet every few days, you care about Texas, Chinese New Year… how about your loyal customers?
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Intel vs AMD- Core i9-11900K Premiere* / AMD 5900x great in gaming/productivity?
With every new generation of CPUs, we try to get access for some testing, so let’s run some Intel vs AMD benchmarks not only in Cinebench and Blender, and some simulated i9-11900K Premiere results with real Ryzen 9 5900X ones to see what kind of performance gains are out there. Out there, to match the hyper-inflated price of AMD’s latest flagships. Team Red fans, come at me bro! But seriously, I’m on your side here, last couple of videos I’ve been singing AMD’s praises.
Anyways, we have an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X in the studio, so today we’ll get into some results so you can decide on an AMD CPU or maybe Intel’s 11th gen CPUs that we’re including in our charts and should be launching March 15 if supply chains aren’t interrupted, and those will match the z590 motherboards appearing on manufacturer’s websites.
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Quick Summary: Intel vs AMD 2021 1H, i9-11900k premiere
Quick Summary: If you’re gaming high-tier, it’s the Core i9-10900K or Ryzen 9 3900X, mid-tier go for the 10700K or 3700X. Budget should pick a 10600K which makes the most sense for a pure gaming build focused on max FPS, but a notch lower is the Ryzen 5 3600. Stay away from the i5-10400. And if you find a good deal near MSRP, please let us know in the comments.
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For content creation, the 5900X should be the winner here, however due to the worldwide silicon shortage, and rampant scalping AMD is doing nothing to control, with a 70% markup on the 5950X and 40% markup for 5900X, this considerably changes our picks. Intel has some minor price fluctuations but is otherwise unaffected so far, and do your part by not buying from scalpers!
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So for high-tier it’ll be the Ryzen 9 3950X or 3900X as their prices haven’t been hit by scalpers so far, with fantastic value. Mid-range the 10900K is still king here, and stepping down there’s the i7-10700K or Ryzen 7 3700X, and budget multi-tasking our pick is the i5-10600K, those saving cash and willing to settle for a more all-around performer with less FPS can go with a Ryzen 5 3600. So far it doesn’t look like the i9-11900K Premiere results will be competitive.
If you’re upgrading to AMD’s latest, we covered the new B550 chipset versus X570, link up here, in our MSI B550 Unify-X video, it’s great for overclocking and shaves off a few bucks, pass on older X470 or B450 boards. For Intel, the new z590 chipset is out for 11th Gen Core CPUs, but if you can’t wait, z490 is the only chipset allowing overclocking CPU and also RAM. Intel pulled a dick move and locked out enabling XMP on the h410, b460 and h470. We saw an online article that Intel may be reversing this poor decision for 11th gen boards, so we’ll see if this actually happens shortly.
Intel vs AMD 2021 1H: Cinebench R15 / R20
With that out of the way, on to testing, and we’ll show you the simulated i9-11900K Premiere results last. For the Ryzen 9 5900X AMD build, we have the MSI B550 Unify-X board, link up here for that review, and it’s a really solid board with good VRMs and the non-X Unify model set a world record. On to productivity benchmarks, we’re added a whole bunch to our charts focusing on the best selling CPUs past and current, hopefully this will cover the one you’re focused on. We’ll do Cinebench, Blender, and cover a little bit of Premiere performance.
First let’s talk about our new arrival, the Ryzen 9 5900X, we’re including Geekbench 5 scores as a percentage and you’ll see why in a minute. The 5900X is hitting above the last gen 3900X by 13%, overclocked the gap widens to 17% more processing power, though it still didn’t overtake the 3950X at stock, though the 4.6 gigahertz overclock nearly catches up to the 5950X at stock. Great news, because you could almost buy two 5900x’s for the price of one 5950X right now.
Right before we went to press we caught news of the first result from an Intel i9-11900K with a Geekbench-5 result of 10934, which places right around the 5800X, and we’ll see likely the i9-11900K Premiere results score, close to the Ryzen 5800X likely. Cinebench R15 has a median average of roughly 23.5% that of Geekbench 5, so it’s fair to speculate it’ll be very close to this spot. Single core is allegedly record setting, but the one-off multi-core score result is 12% lower than the 10900K, keep in mind this is pre-release, with tuning still to be done.
As the 11900K is still on 14 nanometers, the second half of 2021 will see the release of Intel’s 10-nanometer Alder Lake-S CPUs, and the smaller architecture should provide improved power efficiency and die space which means more headroom to turn up the heat on AMD, and we’ll link to the wccftech article in the description we sourced for this.
Into Cinebench R20 and we’ll use this to determine Performance per dollar, and the first takeaway is… okay the points leader is the 5950X, but what happened to the PPD? Also the 5900X is actually getting beaten by the last gen 3950X for value also, which we’ll address in our conclusion.
Good performers on the chart going down the list are the Ryzen 9 3900X, Core i9-10900K, 10700K, AMD’s 3700X, Intel 10600K, and for those on a tight budget, the Ryzen 5 3600, and we’ll talk about this more later.
Intel vs AMD 2021 1H: Blender BMW, Classroom
On to Blender, and the BMW test shows the power of the AMD 5000 series, with the 5950X getting the first time ever under 100. The performance difference between 3900X and 5900X is large here too, with a 26% jump up at stock speeds.
We graciously gave the new i9-11900K the same as a 5800X, though the 11900K focuses on single-core more, so it may come in a spot lower. Standout performers are the 10900K and 10600K, and the 9900K does ok here still, though it’s double the time of a 5900X. The Ryzen 5 3600 is a decent budget performer, getting through in a hair over 5 minutes.
Into Blender Classroom and the 3950X takes second place here, no surprise, as more fast cores have a bigger impact for a longer render. Intel’s chips start their entry in 10th spot with the overclocked 10900K at 5.1 gigahertz, and the stock speed takes 11th place.
We’re being generous again with the i9-11900K, as the pre-release multi-core result places it a good percentage below the 10900K, and depending on how much Intel is able to tune it up, it may hit higher or just match this value. For the i9-11900K Premiere simulated result, let’s continue.
Intel vs AMD- Core i9-11900K Premiere Results*
*simulated, not real result… YET
Here’s a couple of data points rendering a Premiere 4K timeline software only, No CUDA, and no Adobe Media Encoder. Now we gotta be really blunt with you; we have few tested data points here, as we have just a few of these in the studio, one of those is the 5900X.
There’s a strong correlation to Blender Classroom scores, so for now we’ve calculated remaining values, and will fill in data as we get access to the other CPUs. At the chart top and especially bottom, these could vary quite a bit, so don’t take them as definitive. Instead, use this graph as an idea as to what you can probably get with each CPU, at least until we get more testing done in-house.
Results can be dramatically faster, around 60% or so, with CUDA enabled as depending on the timeline, the GPU handles a lot more of the render, so keep in mind these are CPU only results, but based on the preliminary multi-core value, we can guess the i9-11900K Premiere score.
What we can say for sure is that the 5900X runs nearly 4 minutes faster than the 10900K. The test is run off and rendered to an NVMe m.2 drive to ensure there’s no SATA bottleneck. This is a much bigger jump than going from 9900K to 10900K which shaved off just a minute, and we’re speculating the 11900K will likely fall around the 10700K CPU in terms of render performance, this being just an educated guess at this point.
Anyways, now we have a portable Premiere 4K benchmark, we’ll be testing these as we can get a hold of them. If you have an old CPU on the list you can donate, or live in Taiwan and want to lend us yours, please reach out to us on Facebook.
Choosing the right CPU in 2021 1H
So what CPU should you buy, is the i9-11900K Premiere result good? For gaming with strictly the highest FPS, you’ll be good investing in a 10900K or Ryzen 9 3900X, mid-tier gamers should consider the 10700K or 3700X, and for budget the punch-above-its-weight i5-10600K is our pick, though if funds are tight, a step down is the Ryzen 5 3600. Don’t pick the Core i5-10400- even Gamers Nexus have a large Do Not Buy title for this CPU review. The 10600K delivers more power, and with a z490 and easy-to-do overclock, is capable of great FPS, going for just 230 dollars.
On productivity, the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X is the leader, but with a launch MSRP of 800 bucks, it should have a PPD of 13 flat, but instead has 7.7, the lowest on the entire chart. Sure 2020 sucked and supply chains have been affected, but predatory scalping is happening on online retailers and AMD really needs to step in and control it. For our top pick we -should- be recommending the 5900X for content creators with a launch MSRP of 550 bucks and PPD of 15.2, but instead at 780 dollars, value sits at 10.7 instead.
Therefore the CPUs we’re recommending for high-tier will be the Ryzen 9 3950X or 3900X. This is because their prices haven’t been hit by scalpers… so far, with excellent performance for the cash. Mid tier will be the i9-10900K, and we’re not sure that the new 11900K will displace this. Going down we’ll pick the Core i7-10700K or i5-10600K again, and if you survived the horror of 2020 but have empty pockets, the Ryzen 3600 is an okay choice. The i9-11900K Premiere score is likely to not be high enough to compete against last gen Core i9-10900K and especially AMD. We’ll try to update with real testing results as soon as we get our hands on it.
If you have an old PC, now’s actually not a bad time to pick up a last gen CPU, the 230 dollar overclockable i5-10600K is great for triple-A games like Cyberpunk 2077, and is a better choice than the 200 dollar Ryzen 5 3600 which loses against the 160 dollar i5-10400 by a few FPS in more games, and again, don’t get that one. In multi-tasking, the Ryzen 5 3600 can still pull ahead by up to 20% over the 10400, so if that’s your only pick, it’s not too shabby either.
As a fan of free market competition, the Intel vs AMD rivalry benefits consumers, and for a long time Intel was the gaming and creators’ favorite for the power it delivered versus previous AMD CPUs. Last year we were leaning heavily toward team Red, but right now unless you’re going for a top end chip, it’s a mixed bag. The Core i9-11900K Premiere result doesn’t seem to punch high enough to be viable for content creators.
And we should be saying the 5900X and 5950X are fantastic choices, but with the current 40 and 70 percent markup respectively, it’s too damn rich for my blood. Sure, we’ve seen DDR4 prices go up 70 percent in the past due to high demand/shortages and factory fires, but this is different. Hey AMD, you’ve released a great product, and I wanna be on your side here, but… yeah. And we’ll update with real i9-11900K Premiere results as soon as we can.
Thanks go to MSI for the B550 Unify-X and 5900X chip build, which allowed us to get overclocking benchmarks,
and if you decide to pick up a CPU, using our affiliate links below will help us here with no extra cost to you. More videos are coming, so follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook at techspinreview to get notified, and we have companion posts here along with other articles and buying guides.
So looks like last gen is probably the way to go until at least the second half of the year or when AMD steps in and puts a stop to scalpers- and we won’t buy from them and you shouldn’t either. Don’t forget to hit LIKE if you found this video helpful. We depend on your support, so please SUBSCRIBE on Youtube to keep new content coming, and click the BELL to get notified when we put up a new video! We check comments and respond to a lot, so if you have a question or if we missed something, please tell us down below. And let us know what you’d like to see next!
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