So I had some spend left on my annual budget with my freelance work. With it I decided to upgrade my PC with a meatier PSU and a Zen 3 processor to replace my Ryzen 5 3600. I saw the Ryzen 9 5900X and was tempted but couldn't find any stock. What turned me on to it was the increase in performance for the productivity work I do. Most of that is editing photos in Lightroom and Photoshop, with some video work every now and then. I do game quite a bit too, so gaming performance is important but not as important. As the 5900X seems to be rarer than rocking horse poo at the mo, I thought I'd go with the 5800X. Then I read the reviews after I'd made the impulse buy. It seems I may have chosen badly and would have been better off waiting till the 5900X came into stock. Anyone share their thoughts on this? I have the CPU being delivered by Ebuyer tomorrow, not sure whether to send it straight back or not?
It's still a great CPU and should be an improvement over the 3600. If you had the budget for 5900X (and it was ever in stock anywhere) it would maybe be better, but the 5800X should still be a decent upgrade (and cheaper than the 12 core too). I was after a 5900X, but lack of stock pushed me into getting a 3900X, don't regret it now. (Note - I use PC for fun, not work though)
Surely a CPU you can use today is better than a CPU you can use at some unknown point in the future if it has a noticable improvement on performance?
The 5800X is pretty bad value when compared to the 5900X. But: You have the same chance of finding a 5900X in stock at a normal price as you have of winning two different lotteries on the same day you get eaten by a shark and escape from its belly when it gets struck by lightning. And taking that "little problem" of the 5900X into account the 5800X actually is a pretty good deal.
Enjoy the 5800X, it's a good CPU (but runs a bit hot). Just put a good cooler on it. The 5900X is currently vapourware, so I wouldn't worry about it. I've been watching Scan's inventory update page (here) and they're still waiting for initial orders to be fulfilled on the 5900x from the beginning of November. Several shipments were planned, but never arrived! I gave up long ago and got a Ryzen 5600X when it was in stock (at RRP). I have consequently considered the 5800X, but couldn't justify the expense of swapping for 2 cores that I probably won't use.
Cheers everyone who's replied. Decided to keep the 5800, I'm not the most patient of people so waiting for the 5900 to appear would wear thin pretty quick! I'm sure I'll enjoy the new chip.
So I installed the 5800X, downloaded Cinebench R23 and watched the temps. With it being known to run hot I wanted to make sure my AIO cooler (Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML240L) was up to the job. At 100% CPU utilisation the temps hovered around 82-84°c. Was starting to get nervous when I saw the temps climb quick. I've just tried running a flight with the visuals ramped up to max in MSFS and temps were a more reasonable 68° max. The AIO fans are having to work fast and loud to maintain that temp though, so it looks like I'm going to have to invest in better cooling. At idle, I'm getting 39°c with the balanced profile in MSI Dragon Centre. The AIO fans are definitely audible too.
5800X is still a really good CPU, regardless of its reported "value" compared to the others. It's a good chunk faster than a 5600X in multi threaded workloads, holds an edge in single and beats anything intel desktop has to offer in the vast majority of instances. I'd say at £100-120 more than a 5600X and £100-£150 cheaper (at least) than the 5900X it sits exactly where it should in the price: performance ladder. And as others have said, it's actually available, which makes it infinitely faster than an empty socket. For cooler upgrade options, the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360, Lian Li Galahad 360 and EK AIO 360 (in basic, D-RGB and Elite flavours) all apparently have very similar cooling:noise performance and the stock fans and cover all levels of bling.
I installed an Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360 on Friday. The 5800X still tops out at 80c under full load but the core boost is sustaining at a higher clock speed now. The new cooler fans run much quieter than my old one, so I'm more than happy. I've pretty much got my head around the fact that this CPU runs hot but it's running within AMD's stated TDP and the performance boost over my 3600 is very impressive.
Don't forget that the boost clock behaviour on current Ryzen chips is designed to take advantage of available thermal headroom so they'll always end up running a bit warm no matter what cooling you throw at it. In less words: Toasty temps = working as intended to maximize performance.
