After quite a bit of research, what I've learned about the market & pricing, Intel vs. AMD, and what happens with Windows.
To start with, the marketplace & pricing…
Memory prices remain high, though there are & have been meaningful sales for the first time in a few years. It’s open to debate whether DDR4 memory, the type used in most all motherboards today, will drop in price towards the end of 2018 & going into 2019. Some sources say that there will be excess supply which will lower prices, while others say that the few memory chip makers aren’t that dumb, and won’t repeat past mistakes, producing more supply than needed to fill demand. Think of OPEC & the way members restrict output to maintain oil prices.
When it comes to CPUs there’s competition again, and since AMD’s Ryzen chips have proven themselves viable contenders, Intel’s pricing is becoming more competitive. Intel is also rapidly pushing out new versions, recently releasing their generation 8 chips, with plans for generation 9 at the end of 2018 or early 2019, & with mounting pressure to develop a new design without Spectre-related vulnerabilities – Intel thought they had it licked, but then new Spectre variants were discovered, & this time the cure is about an 8% drop in performance. Adding pressure to keep prices lower, Qualcomm has developed a chipset specifically for mobile Windows PCs, threatening Intel’s stake in that market segment.
At least in the US, retailers have definite seasons when pricing on different categories of goods is reduced significantly. For PC components, mid to late November going into early December is notable for sale pricing, as are the early summer months [like now]. February & March see plenty of deals, but many of those, if not most are to clear out old versions, as new models are released in the spring.
The fire sale pricing of last year’s Ryzen CPUs is mostly over [AMD’s rebates ended May 31], but isolated sales of 2nd generation Ryzen chips, & the latest 8th generation from Intel, are happening somewhat regularly. Intel’s unlocked i5 chips can challenge, & sometimes beat the AMD equivalent in pricing. It’s rarer, but the Ryzen 2700 dropped to $255 US in one sale, while the 8th generation unlocked i7 dropped to the same price in another. Sales of i3 CPUs, & the AMD equivalents are more common.
Motherboard sale pricing gives the advantage to Intel, as there’s more stock of more models from more manufacturers sitting in warehouses. The 2nd generation Ryzen boards OTOH have only been out a month or so, are available in fewer models from fewer manufacturers, and only the more expensive, performance chipset has so far been released. There are still sales, though modest, in the $10-$20 range. That said, manufacturers’ cost for the chips on the board is less than chips from Intel.
* * *
Performance comparisons…
There are plenty of reviews online, each with comparison benchmarks, and it all boils down to what’s important for you the way you use your PC. If what you do uses only one CPU core or thread, Intel’s better. If what you do uses a lot of cores or threads, then AMD has the edge. An easy way to tell whether more cores would matter is to run the free CPUID HWMonitor – you can have it visible or minimized, it doesn’t take much in the way of resources, it lists the clock speed of each core, lists the % used of each thread, & it keeps the highest & lowest numbers for each. If you take a look after doing whatever, or watch it while you’re working, if only one or two cores do all the heavy lifting, you might be happier with Intel, and if most every core &/or thread shows it’s been working just as hard, you might favor AMD.
More Intel CPUs include a built-in GPU for graphics – the AMD CPUs [or rather APUs] with built-in GPUs may have better graphics performance, though there are fewer models to choose from. Without a built-in GPU, or if you want the best graphics performance, you must buy a graphics card, which are only just starting to normalize in price after the last 6 months or so of high demand from cryptocurrency miners. AMD CPUs may be easier to cool, & they also tend to have a higher ceiling temperature [can get hotter safely].
Intel CPUs can reach higher clock speeds – AMD’s Ryzen CPUs can all be overclocked, vs. just the highest end Intel models, but overclocking won’t get you nearly as far. In fact, there are some review sites that state flat out that overclocking Ryzen CPUs may not be worth bothering with. It’s not that it’s that hard to overclock a Ryzen chip, but the extra cooling needed for the modest gain may not be worth it.
Related to both performance & pricing… AMD’s Ryzen CPUs care more about memory clock speeds than Intel’s CPUs, so it’s more tempting to spend more money for faster RAM if you buy a Ryzen chip. However at least one reviewer took the time to do benchmark comparisons, and the increase in performance from the fastest RAM may be overblown in 99% of the articles you’ll read online. I couldn’t find enough info though to say the difference between cheapest DDR4 2133 or DDR4 2400 memory vs. faster, more expensive models was worth the [sometimes Much] higher price.
Last year’s Ryzen motherboards will work with the 2nd generation CPUs, they’re more frequently on sale, and there’s a cheaper chipset available. The new X470 boards include refinements &/or enhancements that can allow better performance, particularly with the X model Ryzen CPUs, but more importantly, they’re compatible with the 2nd generation Ryzens right out of the box – the older boards require a bios update to recognize the new CPUs. Depending on the brand & model, you may be able to update the bios with the new chip installed, or you may need to plug in an older CPU & add a heatsink to perform the update. There is a program from AMD where they will loan you an older CPU just for this, but I haven’t seen anything about how long it takes to get something in hand.
More of a gray area, and a particularly touchy topic for me, since I had several early AMD Phenom boards burn up – one Very literally – the power delivery circuitry is better on the new X470 boards. Some manufacturers also learned from their experience with last year’s boards and made a greater effort to beef up this part of their circuitry. Because I’m so touchy about this, I opted for a more expensive Gigabyte board based on a review of just that part of the board. But that decision also involved a “worry factor” – the extra peace of mind for me was worth it. I can’t say that real world this matters for everyone – there are millions of older Ryzen boards out there, & judging by the lack of problem reports, most are working fine.
* * *
What about Windows?...
Windows 7 is unsupported on newer CPUs. At the least this means you’ll get notices in Windows that Windows Update won’t work – I even see this in my win7 VMs. There is a hack, but it involves a patch that runs a task whenever Windows starts. github[.]com/zeffy/wufuc/tree/micro [scroll down the page a bit]
A bigger problem is that Windows 7 won’t have USB drivers for the newer CPUs. They can be added if you can use a PS2 keyboard, so you can do at least minimal navigation once win7 starts up. You *might* be able to add a driver install app set to start with Windows. And different motherboard manufacturers have utilities that add the newer drivers to a win7 install ISO, so installing win7 fresh works.
I played with the Gigabyte utility to create a win7 setup ISO, finding the USB stick it created wouldn’t boot – I was able to get something working by combining the files off the USB stick with the boot files from a win7 SP1 setup ISO in Nero. I also played with trying to install the new drivers on old hardware beforehand & trying to get driver setup files to run automatically with win7 startup – neither worked for me. In the end, I decided that it wasn’t worth the aggravation and abandoned win7 [except in my VMs]… the reason for running my old copy of win7 was the software already installed, so a fresh install was out, and with that copy of win7 having been installed almost a decade ago, going through 4 CPUs and 5 or more motherboards, I came to feel that its retirement was in order, may it RIP.
Windows 10 didn’t make the transition to new hardware as gracefully as I’d hoped. One culprit was a asio.sys file located in Windows SysWOW64\ Drivers\ folder. I have no idea so far why it was there – it was present on my Windows To Go drive & with the Insider version of 10 I’ve got installed, & neither has much software added. After deleting it, it’s since reappeared in this copy of 10, and doesn’t seem to cause a problem, but win10 would not initially run on this hardware with it present.
Most of the drivers had to be updated in Device Manager – surprisingly the same drivers had to be updated on a fresh install of win10 to the SSD where win7 used to live. I didn’t update these drivers to the latest from AMD, but let Windows search for them online, so if Microsoft had them in its database, why weren’t they used all ready? Setting Device Mgr. to show hidden drivers, I also uninstalled lots of Intel stuff, and despite uninstalling all the old Asus apps before the upgrade, many of their services remained installed. That all done, unexpected glitches are popping up in this, my primary copy of win10, where I’ve been installing most of my software for the last few years. I plan to slowly make the transition to the new installation on the SSD, hoping [maybe naively] that being installed natively to this board it’ll remain glitch free.
I wish I could give a definitive heads up on what to expect with Windows 10 activation, but in this case it’s complicated. I have more than one copy of 10, partly because when it was in earliest beta I hoped that would mean a license for every separate Microsoft account. As it is now, I have one Insider copy for testing new releases or builds. I have one backup copy that I use for all the times someone might use a bootable USB stick. I have this primary copy where I’ve added most of my software. And I have just added the new fresh install as I explained above, that I plan to slowly move to.
A week ago, Sunday, the Insider copy was not activated when I got it started on the new hardware, & when I ran the activation troubleshooter [as advised on Microsoft[.]com], it said it couldn’t activate it now. It started life originally as the earliest Insider build, using the key that Microsoft provided. This primary copy of win10 started as a free upgrade using my win8 pro license that I bought from Microsoft direct. Back in March 2017, I added a key I bought from SCDKey for $12 – at that time I was reading stories of 10 deactivating after a hard drive change & hoped this might avoid that. When I started this copy of 10, also on that same Sunday, it wasn’t activated, & I got the same results from the troubleshooter, so I used a 2nd key I had bought at the same time a year ago March, & it worked. That Monday I started up my backup copy of 10 for the 1st time, and it was activated. The next day, Tuesday, I added the fresh install of 10 to my SSD, and it automatically activated.
One possibility is that Microsoft associates a PC’s hardware ID with 10 being activated, regardless any account(s) used [using its secret formula to get that ID]. The way it works with auto activation of fresh installs to the same hardware, & with using an account being optional, this makes sense. So, if true, you can add as many copies of 10 as you like to a single PC/laptop, as long as one copy’s activated. I have installed 10 fresh to a new VM, using an account that had more than one copy of 10 activated, and that new VM would not activate without a new key, so the account apparently doesn't matter that much.
But win10 should not have deactivated in the 1st place. From what I’ve read, Microsoft *now* allows at least one motherboard change, depending on the license you used to get the free upgrade. The win8 key I bought from Microsoft was not a restricted OEM license. Was it because their activation servers were down that Sunday, and if they were, why did adding a new key work? Was it just coincidence that they came back online when I entered the new key? Was it my fault for adding the key from SCDKey, which *might* well be a restricted OEM license?
I can’t answer those questions, at least yet… My son’s installing my old CPU & motherboard in a new case, & I’ll know more once he gets that running. I’ve also got to replace the hard drive in my wife’s PC, and again I’ll post the results regarding activation. Both are running copies of 10 that are upgrades from win8 pro licenses I bought from Microsoft at the same time as mine, so I’ll have a bit more data