AMD Zen Processor Questions!

1. Zen is supposed to be out around Q4 of 2016, supposedly around october/nov but it's still too early to speculate. It's not just an amd issue, intel hit snags that caused broadwell serious delays as well. If amd hits similar snags, it could be longer. Rumors say global foundaries are having issues getting the 14nm process right, similar to the issues that caused intel delays with broadwell.

2. Nothing has been mentioned about price so anything is fair game. It depends largely on the actual performance of zen. When bulldozer came out it was priced higher than it is now and it was expected to perform better than it did. When real performance figures came out prices changed to reflect that.

3. Dx12 will benefit all cpu's not just amd. The lower end cpu's which are currently struggling and cpu's with lower ipc stand more to gain because if they're causing a bottleneck at the moment dx12 will lighten the load on the cpu leaving more cpu power open to process the game rather than tied up in drivers the way it is now. Sort of cutting the middleman out of the path between game code and graphics card with more direct coding. The benefits to higher performing cpu's may not be as noticeable if they aren't having an issue keeping up to begin with.

Keep in mind dx12 will benefit newer games that are coded for dx12, dx11 games will continue to run the way they are now unless a game dev decides to recode already existing games and somehow add at least some dx12 support to them. More than likely extremely difficult and I wouldn't count on older games getting dx12 updates.

4. Unfortunately no way to know until it's here and in actual systems and being benchmarked against existing cpu's to find out where the performance falls. As with bulldozer speculation can be wrong and despite what 'should be', what it ends up to be may or may not live up to the hype. It's not saying zen is already a failure, just that no one knows or can know until it's actually performance tested.

5. No way to know for sure, moving to a smaller process should improve efficiency and it's one of their goals. They're changing from cmt to smt (becoming more like intel's hyper threading) in an attempt to improve core performance. How that actually translates into power consumption is a guess.

6. Pretty much ditto to what kanewolf said. If you're not overclocked you can probably do fine with a stock cooler. It depends on your circumstances. If you live in a cooler region or have a more climate controlled room and do light gaming and general pc tasks like web browsing the cpu won't tend to need as much in the way of cooling. If you have higher ambient room temps (28-30c or more) and you're frequently running intensive games for hours or doing substantial video editing/encoding then you may have a hotter running cpu and require a bit more cooling than stock can provide.

Using a temperature monitoring program is about the best way to determine your needs. If you hear your cpu fan spin up (make sure it's actually your cpu fan, not the gpu or another fan) fairly often and want a quieter cooler an aftermarket cooler would be a good idea. Using a $10 cooler probably won't do much better than the stock cooler.

A budget cooler in the $20-35 range can typically outperform stock coolers. Better than stock coolers in the aftermarket types are able to run quieter if they use a larger or more efficient cooler design where the fan can keep the cpu temps under control without having to spin the fan at full power. You shouldn't need a large cooler if it's not overclocked, the bigger air coolers and aio coolers (like the nh-d14, h100i etc) are more for people with really warm/hot room temps or who are overclocked producing much higher temps than a stock cpu.