I'm planning a new build to replace my very long-in-the-tooth i7 920 rig, I've already bought a 1TB 980 Pro NVM SSD and a 2TB Samsung QVO SATA SSD in the Amazon Black Friday sales - return window is end of Jan so I thought I may as well take advantage. I was going to go for Ryzen 7 5800X but I'm thinking the prices of the Alder Lake CPUs will force down Ryzen prices, particularly given the pricing of the i7-12700 which I'd expect will affect the price of the Ryzen 9 5900X - Scan currently have it for £449 (the 5800X was around £400 pre-Black Friday) and a well-specced Asus mobo with WiFi for £180, which is over £50 off it's RRP. It's all very tempting to pull the trigger now but I'm wondering if I wait until January, will those prices be cheaper or at worst the same price as the Black Friday deals now? I guess the question is: do the Black Friday deal prices tend to come back as January sales prices? Are the prices of the Ryzen 9 CPUs likely to fall further in January? The new system will be used for photo-editing, content creation and software development so the 5900X is particularly appealing, especially if it drops to the original price of the 5800X that I used in my original build budget.
One thing you can be sure of is that what ever you buy it will be found cheaper and faster within a few months, that is juts how computer parts buying works if you don't need it wait, something better and cheaper will no doubt eventually come along. That said OCuk has 5800x for £329 ATM, strikes me as decent considering prices elsewhere. EDIT - Ah I see you meant 5900x for £449 and were going to settle on 5800x, sorry misread.
Going by your existing system it seems you're happy to keep your components for a looong time. I would either go 12700k with a DDR4 board and jump on windows 11 or probably more likely X570 (tomahawk wifi is just over £150 pre order on amazon at the moment) with either a 5900X or 5950X. If you're content creating the 5900X is worth the extra over the 5800X IMHO plus the 5900x actually runs cooler and you have the option of swapping to a 5950X in the future if the fancy takes you.
If you're going Intel wait for a decent lower end board. They're all too expensive ATM. Bit mad getting a great value CPU and then pouring a ton of cash into a board you don't really need.
You've been using your current system for 10 years, I think it's worth waiting a few more month for DDR5 price to come down plus Ryzen 3d cache refresh, so you can get price adjusted 12700k on DDR5 platform for longevity.
You could be forgiven for thinking that, but I'm not really. I ended up spending my upgrade dosh on a Surface Pro 4 i7 4 years ago, thinking it'd perform sufficiently well but then finding that the performance is severely limited by the laws of physics, meaning that the thing would heat up and throttle the CPU. Also, the Antec P193 that I'd built my existing system in hindsight wasn't a good case for a 120mm CPU cooler thanks to the mere 140mm max height due to the 200mm side-panel fan which protruded about 12mm inside the case. I even tried the then-newly released Corsair H100 AIO but the radiator size meant that the side panel wouldn't fit, so the only option was an Arctic Freezer Pro cooler with a 92mm fan which meant no OC-ing for me. It was my first build and lessons were learned, but if I'd had a more suitable case, I would probably have upgraded the CPU and mobo once USB3 and SATA3 mobos had established themselves. Please excuse the history lesson though, but I had to get it off my chest With the new planned build, I'll probably upgrade for a radical improvement in CPU performance and/or if whatever comes after USB3 and C is a compelling proposition. Is the MSI board you're referring to this one? I was looking at the Asus TUF GAMING X570-PRO (WI-FI) as I've had Asus boards in the past and they're easy to work with, it costs a bit more than the MSI but I've been reading that the audio on the MSI isn't that great. I'm hoping the 5900X will drop in price to nearer £400 in the next few months, I probably will go AMD for this build though.
The first build is always a learning experience it sounds like you exactly what to look out for this time I was between the tomahawk and Asus Tuf WiFi when building my system the tomahawk was slightly more expensive at the time but has superior vrms ( not that the Asus are bad) I've not noticed any issues with the audio TBH Hardware unboxed do good video on it That said I'm sure you'd be more than happy with either TBH
That's solid logic, but I've gotten impatient I'm really hoping that current Ryzen 9 prices come down in January '21 before the NVM and SATA SSDs I've so far bought in the Amazon Black Friday sales reach their returns window at the end of that month.
One thing that could push Ryzen 5000 prices down will be the launch of "Ryzen 6000" in H1 2022 - The last CPUs to use socket AM4. They will be basically the same as the 5000 ones, but with the addition of "3D vcache", promising up to 25% higher gaming speeds.
I’ve just read a review of the 5800X in June’s Custom PC featuring a CPU showdown including a range of AMD and Intel CPUs, which states:
