Beyerdynamic Custom Game Gaming Headset Review
At $1549 the only thing premium is the price because the specs of 8GB of RAM, an Intel i5 and only a 1080p screen from 1990 don't. If you were really serious about security it wouldn't even be an intel process but an AMD. Hard pass on this mobile disaster.
I think it mostly just comes down to build quality, like a shell made out of a solid block of aluminum alloy, for example, as opposed to plastic for the budget models. That can potentially result in improved durability, and the better heat conductivity of such materials may also allow the same hardware to be packed into a more compact form-factor. Of course, it also results in many of these devices being more or less unserviceable on the hardware side of things. You may also see better battery life, better keyboard and screen quality, and so on, that may not be obvious from the basic specs. From a value standpoint, the cheap ultraportable will likely be the better option, but these "premium" options are there for those willing to spend a lot more for something slightly better.
As far as I know, it is the CPU actually that puts it into the business category, specifically because it supports vPro.
The premium category is essentially "Increase profit margins by putting using a case that feels expensive", so basically anything inspired by Apple's business strategy... or what their strategy used to be before the competition blew past their hardware design and they started throwing subscriptions services at the wall to see what sticks. I was looking at a MacBook air yesterday and was pretty surprised to see how much thicker it felt compared to Costco's ultrabooks.
IMHO this is a case of clever engineering mixed that's been muddied by dubious (at best!) marketing. Intel's approach of specifying both Turbo Boost 2 (which all cores can meet) and Turbo Boost 3 (the highest possible clock speed on any single core) is a more transparent approach and one that AMD should adopt.
As you suggest, AMD likely have binning requirements on the "worst" cores, but these should be included in the spec table for the CPU. We should know what they are. On Z390 motherboards you can flick an "MCE" switch and it just works (provided you can cool it), because Intel have a minimum frequency that each individual core must be able to hit. That's the way it should be.
Intel have work to do around transparency too: their stupidly low base clocks and lack of transparency around dual + quad core boost frequencies is similarly misleading at best. But on the issue of this article, AMD should be more open. AMD's response quoted in this article is totally inadequate.
Something to keep in mind is that some Intel CPUs may fail to hit their max turbo speeds as well, albeit for different reasons. Intel is more specific about what the max turbo is for a given number of cores loaded, and some CPUs will only hit their max speed on a single core. The prevailing theory seems to be that with a typical system there will always be stuff going on in the background, such that there's never truly only one core being loaded, and therefore you may never actually see the single core turbo speed.
I know my 6700k won't hit 4.2 GHz at stock settings running benchmarks like P95 or Cinebench single threaded.
Interesting reading this just a few days after the Silicon Lottery binning results.
Given that AMD wants to use as much of the silicon they produce as possible, I wonder if we'll see 6 and 8 core processors that utilize two processor chiplets, where only 3 or 4 of the cores are active.
I'm planning on building a new Ryzen 3000 system towards the end of the year, so I'm hoping that another 6 months sees some improvements made to the 7nm process, and possibly new processor steppings.
Okay, the CPU have been released for a mere 3 weeks. How do we know it is not related to BIOSes? You lost all credibility with Just Buy It!
It's more likely we'll see those put into Athlon as single chiplets, although what you envisage could be suitable for low-end EPYC designed for storage servers. Ryzen isn't the high-end brand, but it's also not the low-end.
Of course, they could do Athlon as a no-graphics derivative of the Zen 2 APU instead, which may be a monolithic integrated design, sans chiplets, as in Zen 1.
I bought a 3600x on day 1 for my x370. I can definitely confirm I cannot reach 4.4Ghz on a single core, but some can reach 4.3+. On the flip side, with water cooling my "base" frequency seems to be 4.2Ghz on all cores (I have never seen 3.8Ghz or under 4.2Ghz under load). I can get it to 4.4Ghz on one core with overclocking (PBO settings and Auto-OC) but the increased voltage and power applied just does not seem worth the extra 100Mhz. Odd that i have to take it "out of warranty" to get what should have been capable off at stock settings.
While it is sad that not all the cores can hit maximum boost, this does show how powerful the Zen 2 architecture really is. People automatically assumed that with a 4.4GHz boost for 1T applications it will hit that and stay there, we now know it is usually 50-100MHz lower than that. The fact that with a 350MHz boost deficiency the 3600X is able to keep up with the 8700K on 1T processes is quite amazing.
I will not pretend to anything but here is my point of view. If AMD starts with biased or double standard specs whether it had been done in the past or not then the company will not see my as a customer.
Transparency is prime gold so uttershittery components does not happen down the road (fast).
I thank you very much Tom's hardware people for test, research, and honesty.
I was considering 3950x but in lights of this article, it's a cold shower enough to wait for i9 10k series and see what comes up. After all i9 9900k is not that far away in spite of "Old tech".
The desktop CPU for Intel's 10Gen is probably going to be yet another Skylake refresh, just with higher boost clocks.
"Not a handsome headset" I completely disagree. It doesn't have the "cool" looking plastic of a typical gaming headset but honestly I find the looks appealing. This is one of the best looking "gaming" headsets I have seen.
If this were my review I would have replaced aesthetics with the lack of imaging as a con. A gaming headset imo must have great imaging. Even if a person isnt into a game right now that needs to pinpoint sounds on screen who knows over the life of a headset what the future will bring.
Report
