expired Posted by Eragorn | Staff about 2 months ago
Item 1 of 4
Item 1 of 4
expired Posted by Eragorn | Staff about 2 months ago
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X + Gigabyte B650 Gaming X AX v2 MB + 32GB DDR5-6000 G.Skill Flare
+ Free Store Pickup$350
$610
42% offMicro Center
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This bundle is best suited for those building a midrange computer with a focus on general use and/or gaming with a rtx4080 or weaker (though if you purchase a $1000 graphics card you should probably be looking at an x3d cpu). The 7700x is an 8-core last gen (though zen5 wasn't a major improvement for most standard consumer use cases) zen4 cpu. It has fairly strong single threaded performance and good power efficiency under load (especially when limited to a 65w tdp using the "eco mode" bios option), but as a single chiplet zen 4 part is somewhat lacking in raw multithreaded performance compared to similar tier intel cpus (though 13th and 14th gen intel cpus have premature degradation issues that are only now supposedly being fully addressed). Fortunately, the vast majority of users won't require multithreaded performance beyond what the 7700x offers. The 7700x is highly competent for standard office productivity, gaming, web surfing, content consumption, etc. While it's gaming performance isn't top tier, it's slightly faster on average in gaming than the 5800x3d and i9-12900k. Those who require a cpu with extremely strong multithreaded performance for non-gaming productivity workloads (photo/video editing, code compiling, cpu based 3d rendering, etc.) would generally be best served by purchasing a dual chiplet (r9) amd cpu, or an intel cpu (which have significantly higher multithreaded performance towards the lower end of their product stack compared to single chiplet amd cpus) according to their needs. Those whose use cases involve large amounts of video encoding/transcoding will likely want to consider an intel cpu with dual multi format codec engines for intel quicksync. The 7700x alone generally doesn't drop below ~$220 on sale.
The current gen zen5 successor to the 7700x, the 9700x, isn't substantially superior compared to the 7700x in windows for most common use cases (such as gaming, with a performance uplift of ~5-7%). Unless you primarily use linux, or have specific avx512 productivity workloads that are a primary use case for you, the 9700x simply doesn't deliver performance anywhere near sufficient to justify the price premium. Even with the tdp increased to 105w, gaming performance is barely affected, and heavily multithreaed workloads gain ~10-13% performance at the cost of ~60% higher power usage. Memory support remains nearly identical between generations since zen 5 reused the same io die with only minor tweaks. Since I'm sure people will come in here to argue about power efficiency, here's gamers nexus analyzing zen 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wLXQnZ
The motherboard's specs page can be found here:https://www.gigabyte.co
The motherboard in this bundle is a lower midrange (leaning more towards midrange) full size atx b650 chipset am5 motherboard. This board has: the low (but not lowest) end b650 chipset, a 8+2+2 (60A) vrm, three pcie x16 slots (1x gen4 x16 primary slot, 2x gen3 x1), three m.2 slots (1x gen5 x4, 2x gen 4 x4), 4 sata ports, Realtek® 2.5GbE LAN, wifi 6e + bluetooth 5.2 or 5.3 (depending on board revision either Realtek® Wi-Fi 6E RTL8852CE or AMD Wi-Fi 6E RZ616 (MT7922A22M)), an acceptable assortment of usb including usb-c 3.2 gen2, and bios flashback.
While it has many of the compromises you'd expect from cheaper boards (6 layer pcb, cheap realtek audio chip, no pcie gen 5 x16 slot, somewhat limited io, somewhat middling vrm, etc), it's overall fairly competent and should be more than sufficient for the vast majority of users. The lack of a pcie gen 5 x16 slot will be meaningless (excluding a few very niche applications) for a couple of years at least. While not a great board for extreme overclocking (and a 16-core chip will likely strain it if overclocked), it's still more than good enough for a pure gaming rig. One of the primary advantage of building a computer on the am5 platform is that it should have an upgrade path. Amd has guaranteed platform support through 2027, and zen 6 (which is projected to be a major leap over zen5 based off of current leaks) should be compatible with the am5 platform (though amd hasn't officially announced this yet). Similar quality b650 motherboards are at minimum ~$150 on sale.
The included 32gb (2x16gb) ram is ddr5 6000 cl32 using hynix memory chips. The performance difference compared to to ddr5 6000 cl30 is quite minimal, and this ram falls into the current sweetspot for the am5 platform. Overclocking/tuning potential should be quite good (compared to the cl36 samsung kits, and especially the ultra-low tier micron kits) since hynix memory chips are used. Microcenter offers this bundle with 48gb (2x24gb) of ddr5 5200 cl40 for $10 more, that ram is inordinately slower, and should not be purchased. It's important to note that since the ram kit in this bundle includes 16gb dimms, if you wanted 64gb using the included ram kit you'd need to run a 2 dimm per channel (4x16gb) configuration. That can be less stable, potentially even at expo speeds depending on the silicon lottery. Similar quality 32gb (2x16gb) ddr5 6000 cl30 ram kits can be found at around ~$90 on a good sale.
Overall, if you're looking to build a midrange computer in the near term, this bundle at $350 is an absolutely fantastic deal. While I obviously can't guarantee this is the lowest we'll see zen 4 parts drop as Black Friday/Cyber Monday approaches and retailers try to clear zen 4 stock, I doubt we'll see much better in this specific performance tier. It's also worth noting that intel's next gen arrow lake will be releasing relatively soon, so if your specific workloads are more partial to intel cpus, it might be better to wait and see.
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