i7 vs i9

[DCoffey]

I currently have a dell 8940 with i7-10700 64gbs ram, my pc has just been randomly shutting off. only way to bring it back is to unplug power cable and plug it back end, then it will start as normal so I assume the PS is dieing. Being its a propritery motherboard and PS I m forced to either replace the proprietary PS with another for $100 or maybe its time to upgrade.

I was thinkg of going to the latest i9-14900 or i7-14700

Has anyone been down this road and done research? What made you decide to go 1 way or the other?

I have a 4070ti so I assume I will be upgrading that next year for the 5 series so both cpu's should be in-line with the new GPU.

 

 

[The_Nephilim]

Well the new Intels will be out on Oct. 24th, maybe wait until then I would avoid the 13 & 14th series Intel. I guess you have not heard about the issues they been having.. 

[FR4GGL3]

Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh can have issues (really good chips probably never will have issues, but let us not dive too deep). These Issues lead to really fast aging. As you might know every newer silicon will age and at a unknown point (usually after years), they will need more Voltage or can only reach lower speeds at the same Voltage than before. On a number of Raptor Lakes, this can go really fast. If you do everything wrong, it may be a matter of months. If you just don't know what not to do and what to avoid, it can be a matter of a year or two. Due to the combination of a lot of cores and the higher boost clock speeds combined with higher needed Voltage to reach these, i9s are more likely to degrade than any other line, but it can happen to almost any.*

 

Back to the Question: for DCS it shouldn't matter much if you choose an i7 or i9.

 

But if you haven't bought anything yet and want to have an Intel System, just wait for Arrow Lake - just like @The_Nephilim said. Arrow Lake is right around the corner. Official Release should be the 24th of October 2024.

 

 

 

*if aynone is asking what to look for: definitely keep the Voltages and Temperature down, set a Current Limit that is within spec and don't disable energy saving C-States and do not disable Core Parking in Windows - don't even set High Performance Energy State all the time. If you have an i9, I would also think about disabling the TVB Boost where the system wants to boost one or two cores to ~6 GHz. It might look a bit worse on synthetic Benchmarks, but it won't be noticable in real world performance.

[Aapje]

I agree with the above, although I would also keep an eye out for the 9800X3D processors from AMD. The 7800X3D-CPUs were the best gaming processors, but they are at low stock levels and inflated prices now. But the 9800X3D should be the top-tier gaming CPUs once they release.

[FR4GGL3]

22 hours ago, Aapje said:

 But the 9800X3D should be the top-tier gaming CPUs once they release.

All I have seen for now is that, compared to the 7800x3D it won't be that big improvement. And I didn't mention AMD in this case because the original poster asked for an Intel System (you might have noticed that I wrote "If you [...] want an Intel System"). In DCS AMD might really be the better bang for the buck for now, but there might be other reasons the OP want to go the Intel route.

You can play DCS with both platforms and you won't see much difference if you don't know what is under the hood. It all comes down to your personal preference. No need to put one brand above the other.

[Aapje]

A lot of people seem to have a bias for Intel and assume that the situation is like it was over 10 years ago, where Intel had a clear advantage.

And the reason why I am suggesting the 9800X3D is not because it is necessarily going to be much better than the 7800X3D, but because the latter is in short supply and very overpriced. It looks like AMD misjudged demand late in the 7800X3D lifecycle. So the only thing the 9800X3D has to do is to not be any worse than the 7800X3D, and to actually be in stock and reasonably priced.