Great analysis as always, would you say Ampere is significantly better at 4K vs Big Navi? Do you think there is any benefit to going all AMD vs Ryzen paired with Ampere? Ampere works with AMD's FreeSync correct..?
What are your thoughts on Apple's new M1 desktop processor and its performance (so far)? I wonder how it will affect and or influence PC hardware and gaming.
This entirely will depend on use care scenarios really.
AMD Ryzen 5000 paired with an RX 6000 card will have the benefit of Smart Access Memory. As a feature, for some games it won't matter at all, other games benefit greatly from it (~10% faster, etc.). That said, Nvidia has claimed to also be working on a similar feature that they hope to implement on both Intel and AMD platforms. Future state, both camps should have this feature or a version of it as it's essentially a PCI-E feature that AMD is just now taking advantage of, so for now it is a benefit of Ryzen + Radeon. Personally that is not an end all be all feature for me since both camps will have it in the future and game benefits vary greatly from title to title.
4k definitely favors Ampere mainly due to Ampere's architecture. The way Ampere works, it has a hard time fully utilizing all its cores at 1080p and 1440p, but at 4k can really start making full use of them and thus performs well. So the best way to look at Ampere is to take its 4k performance as a baseline and then see that it doesn't scale down to 1440p and 1080p well. Big Navi on the other hand scales its performance across all 3 resolutions well, however at 4k Ampere does a bit better.
Ray Tracing. If this is a feature you care about in the here and now, then I think you rally have to go Ampere. Big titles like Cyberpunk 2077 have confirmed that Nvidia RTX is the only ray tracing they'll support at launch as they work on implementing AMD ray tracing support in the future. This being AMD's first foray into ray tracing, Nvidia definitely has the performance advantage since this is their second gen. There is also the DLSS factor which will boost frames to help counteract the performance hit. AMD will have a similar feature in the future, but doesn't have it yet.
If you don't care about Ray Tracing, then a straight up rasterization apples to apples comparison at 1080p and 1440p, and even 4k, I think it just comes down to what performs better in benchmarks for what you like to play and also looking at driver states in the coming weeks/months. I will say AMD historically has had rocky launches from a driver perspective but over time tend to get better and unlock more performance. This is often called the "fine wine" effect. No guarantee that will happen here, but I would expect as they continue to optimize and enhance drivers they will get better. Nvidia tends to have more stable drivers at launch and will likewise have enhancements and optimizations, but aren't typically known to have the same "fine wine" effect AMD cards have had. You can see historically that at launch the GTX 680 soundly beat the 7970 but over time that pretty much reversed where the 7970 soundly beat it. More recent the 5700 and 5700 XT competed with the 2060 and 2070 respectively at launch but now the 5700 can compete well against the 2070 and the 5700 XT can compete well against the 2070 Super and 2080.
I don't actually know much about Freesync/Gsync to be honest, so I am not going to comment on that. I don't know the answer to your question there.
As a PC enthusiast I don't really follow Apple much as I philosophically am opposed to a "closed" source model like them. I believe in user serviceability and customization. That said, if I recall their new processors are ARM based? I think x86 definitely has reason to be worried about that. ARM and ARM like platforms are definitely going to get bigger and x86 need to be careful if they don't want to go the way of the dodo. That though, won't happen anytime soon. Also Nvidia owns ARM now so I think you will see some wariness of adopting ARM for that reason and you'll instead see other similar platforms rise up as well. RISC style architectures are definitely going to become more prevalent in my outlook especially with Apple adopting ARM in personal computing laptop/desktop products. For them, I think it honestly makes a lot of sense as they can now apply their mobile App Store and apps across their non-mobile platforms. I'm sure that will need some work on the part of the app devs to adopt their apps to laptops/desktops, and I'm sure we'll have to wait and see how Pro apps end up doing on these chips, but I definitely thinking ARM/RISC has a bright future and x86 needs to be careful.
Thank you for the confirmation. I wasn't sure how good the motherboard, video card might be. Since mom and dad are fronting the money, he is still working on putting together a new list of components for a bigger and better build. lol
Interesting comment about the SSD + HDD. My thoughts were using the current 1TB HD for storage and getting the SSD for software thinking that will help keep things loading quickly. Will have to dig deeper into a higher capacity SSD.
Initial plan was to re-use the Phantom case with the list I linked above. That has been scrapped and he has found a new case that he wants. All I remember is that is a Lian Li and the pic he showed me, it had nine fans installed.
Yes, he has the Sammy and knows the size. When I asked him about another 27", he said too big and that he is looking for a 24" with 1440p capability. Again, the 27" is going to be for schoolwork, web browsing, etc..
Well the OS should be installed on the SSD, and definitely programs/games as well. It used to and probably still largely doesn't matter if a game is installed on SSD vs HDD, but new platforms have technology to boost load times when SSD's are used, so it would definitely be a more future proof path to go on a performance front. You do lose overall capacity though, so there is that factor.
Is it a Lian Li O-11 Dynamic (or XL)? Great case, its what I am using now. It has capacity for 9 fans.