Yeah, I actually carried my boat anchor out to be dumped recently, 70 pounds for 22 inches is a bit severe these days.

what are the chances that the zen will be any good?

Considering they finally discovered that their single thread performance blows and decided to engineer with that in mind, a lot higher than they were for anything since the Athlon X2.  Don't expect them to leapfrog Intel though, it's highly implausible.  They've been comparing it favorably against Broadwell-E performance, but that line is a dog in the single thread performance category.  The fastest out there taps out with a 3.8Ghz turbo and is dwarfed by the 4Ghz Haswell E, and the soon to be released 7700K will smoke the previous king of the hill anyway.

If they match the Broadwell refresh in clock speeds while exceeding it in performance per clock only slightly, they could still end up a good 20% behind Intel anyway.

On the other hand, regardless of how well it fares, they finally have an acceptable product for something other than budget computing.  Their processor line hasn't been remotely useful for people with money to burn for over a decade, it's been kinda sad.

alaknebs

reply 227

what are the chances that the zen will be any good?

I certainly hope it's a lot more competitive against Intel than many expect it will be.  I don't believe Zen will surpass similarly rated Intel CPUs, but I think they will be the strongest alternative to Intel for quite some time.  I have both an Intel and AMD, so I'm not a fanboi of either, and could possibly look into building a new machine with a Zen CPU in 2017 if the line fares well in terms of speed and performance.

Unless AMD is outright lying, it actually is surpassing Broadwell-E CPU's in at least rendering, they just haven't given us any indication that it can meet or break the speeds Intel is reaching.

To be honest, I don't place too much value in company claims or benchmarks when a CPU hasn't even been released.   I ended up getting an AMD FX 8350 and an Intel i7 4770K, both of which are great units, not because of any company spiel but rather real world assessments.... actual user reviews, etc.

Monitor turned up today....seems there was a run on them and they were out of stock.

So, 2 and a bit weeks....but it was worth the wait.....it's a classy piece of kit that now keeps up with the rest of the machine.

Still no rumblings from the 980 fan as yet....running Gsync for FSX in 2560x1440 at frame-rates around 90+ ..... [though FSX is more about CPU than GPU].

I've left the old monitor connected as well....so my very first foray into multis.....

So much screen real-estate .....gonna get lost in it...

Hey Starkers I was reading the last few pages. You do know Microsoft said Windows 10 is the last version they will put out right? So no 11 or 12 or more. They will just release a anniversary update every year. 

Lots of 'fun'....

Thought I'd use a screen magnifier to make life easier....got several....one of the better ones interferes with Fences....

Meanwhile.... my old trusty Sysmetrix has stopped..... seemingly doesn't like the new monitor.  I noticed its times were wrong....and that the hands weren't moving....and the only way to get it to go is to move it a bit....and hold cursor focus on it.

Quite odd...

12 months on and all's well.

A Win update for the nVidia driver has messed with the 'magic pink' in ye olde Sysmetrix...so the pink is now just......pink.

My eyes/comfort has accustomed to the new screen res.

I only use/see the old monitor when I'm booting....still a one-monitor man....

I use two, generally: one for general use; the other for watching videos, etc.  However, both mine are 32" UHD TVs that I mounted on mounted monitor stands rather than the original stands that take up desk space.  With moving I haven't had a chance to set it all up yet - hopefully today - so I'm using my trusty li'l HP 2-in-1 for now.  Yup, this new computer room/man cave is huge and I'm gonna have fun setting it up without the space restrictions of the other place.

Anyhow, another cuppa and I had better get back to work/unpacking/settling in.... otherwise we'll never get the pics done to show off this fabulous house.

It's a type of SSD that connects directly to the motherboard.... or to a PCIE adapter.

Yea M.2 is definitely a good way to go. transfer speeds are very nice on them.