Over the last weeks the recommender got a couple updates I will summarize here. Most important were a couple hardware releases not properly covered in this blog. But they are in the system!
We got finally a serious competitor for the RX 570: Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 Super was released at a great price of around $160 and showed very good performance. So good that it also beat the RX 580 and reached the RX 590.
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT with 4GB or 8GB memory released shortly after. They are also graphics cards meant to replace the RX 500 cards. They use less energy and are faster than the RX 580, not necessarily faster than the RX 590. They have a hard time against the GTX 1650 Super, at least with current prices, since the 8GB version is above $200 and the 4GB version clearly slower in some games.
On the processor side of things there was the Ryzen 9 3950X. Astonishingly that processor matched or beat the older Threadripper processors, and that on socket AM4. And that is in application workloads. The real surprise here is that the 16 core processor is also exceedingly strong in games.
Good thing that Threadripper 3 got released as well and included a big performance boost, albeit with higher prices and needing new and more expensive motherboards. The 3970X has 32 cores, the 3960X 24, both of them got many architecture improvements.
At the low end there was the AMD Athlon 3000G. And we finally got enough proper benchmarks to rank the Athlon 240GE, 220GE and 200GE. Those 35W dual core processors with 4 threads do not compete with Ryzen 3 or Intel’s current i3 line, but they are valid options for low powered family PCs and could work well in a custom NAS.
The site itself got some bugfixes. For example, the cpu cooler sometimes got stuck when trying to use the cheaper/better buttons at its side. There is now a new mechanism to ignore stale prices, which so far seems to work well - it reduces the chance that a price shown here is not valid anymore when clicking through to the shop.
Have fun building and a Merry Christmas!