Working out the best path to take, by way of a new build. I'm on AM4 currently. A R5 3600, RTX2070Super. I know I could put a 5800X3D in my motherboard, but feel the GPU would then be the weak part of the build, and I have nowhere else to go with the rest of it (CPU/Mobo) after that upgrade. Which seems a bit of a waste of £250. I put a few bits together as far as what I /WANT/ (just maybe not need/should get) for a new build. Listed as so... AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D £640 Corsair iCUE H150i RGB ELITE 360mm £165 LianLi O11 D EVO XL £250 (released soon) ASUS ROG Strix X670E-F Gaming WIFI £385 32GB (2x16GB) DDR5/6000mhz Kingston Fury Beast £120 RTX 4090 £1650 - £2000 (£2000 for AIO Watercooled) Corsair RM1000X SHIFT 80+ £204 2TB Kingston Fury Renegade M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD £130ish 4TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5" £160 (x2 £320) What I WANT... is top range parts, for a PC around £4000. Including a 4090 (I have that taking 50% of the £4k). Along with a 7950X3D, However, as of this moment i'm struggling to find the readies for that amount straight off. So, thinking of downgrading other parts of the PC. Straight off the bat I can get rid of the HDD's, as I already have a load of them as nice as it would be to have some better hdds. As I want to go AM5 - for good upgrade options down the line - I wondered if a good idea would be to go for a top of the line great motherboard, with multiple m.2 slots (my current board only has 2 slots, which when both populated it affects the GPU bandwidth). It doesn't need Wi-Fi at all, I don't use it. The Mobo above was simply one that came up for a base price. And go cheaper on the CPU/Coolers/PSU(not too much, needs 4090 powering ability)/RAM etc ? If anyone has some suggestions of better for less options over all of them. I can't find a GPU to upgrade to, that I find has any point to it. 4080 is not much less than a 4090, I may aswell jump up to that price. What would people say? That is a ramble; TLDR; Full build as above - or buy a very good AM5 motherboard with lower CPU/parts+4090 to upgrade as and when. I don't know what mobos are the best - I won't be overclocking, so thinking X670 should be fine for me, not the X670E. TIA! If anyone can decipher that.
5800x3d is a pretty big jump on the 3600, do the 5800x3d and a 7900/4080/4090, save some dough. or drop the 7950 for a 7800x3d if it is for gaming, if you are just running a gpu and cpu for games and need none of the adders from x670 drop that to a mid range board B650 or a really low end 670 that'd save you ~500 with buggerall performance loss. you could also drop the 4090 for a 7900xt(x) to save another 600quid, it doesn't give up much performance for the price delta.
imo, either go for the 7800X3D if it's for gaming or the vanilla 7950 if it's for productivity do you really need the bells and whistles or [potentailly] extra pci gubbins of x670[-e]? i mean *really*? if not b650 will probably be more than enough. 1kW should be fine, but you might want to spec a beefier psu... both seasonic and bequiet's psu widgest recommend 1.3-1.6kW avoid the samsung QVO drives [and QLC drives in general tbh] like the mofoing plague for anything other than maybe media storage.
having taken the jump from am4 to am5 my self , id say stick with am4 and get a 5800x3d amd go for a 7950xt
I know the CPU would be a big jump, but feel sticking with AM4, when AM5 is here and has more upgrade path along the way, would be a bit stupid to limit myself down the line, when i'd need to upgrade it all again just to have a new CPU. I'm definitely looking at the 7800X3D instead, it is only for gaming, so it is a saving. As for the X670E, i'm not bothered on the chipset so long as the board supports multiple good M.2 drives without sacrificing the performance of another part of the board like my current board does (lose the use of 2 sata ports if using both m.2 slots). So i'll look into the B650, found the ROG STRIX B650-A GAMING which looks good, and saves over £100. Will keep searching for better cost/feature(s)(I want) boards. I couldn't care less about WiFi. Why so many have it. Ugh. *X670E - No, I don't. Looking in to B650, so long as enough M.2 slots. Need 3 at least. Looking to get some good m.2 drives. To cut down on the amount of 2.5" SSD's I have (6. I'll avoid the QVO/QLC drives! Still researching good M.2 drives that are minimum 2TB. I have cheap 1TB ones at the moment. Hopefully a few of these possibly. Crucial P3 M2 4TB I am actually leaning towards maybe going for a Radeon. We'll see once I press the button and the direction I go what GPU makes it. Why do you say having taken the jump to AM5? Not much improvement on performance? I'm mainly looking for 'future proofing' of sorts, so that I can put another better AM5 CPU in further down the line. Thanks all so far
Will you, though? Presumably you thought the same thing when you bought your current AM4 system, but now you're looking to move to AM5 rather than upgrade the CPU. What's to say that you won't just jump to AM6 when the time comes for another upgrade? I'm on Team Stick-With-AM4, at least for now.
Having just gone from an R5 3600 with GTX1080 to 5800x3d with 3080Ti I can confirm the performance jump is significant. I'd stick with AM4 for now, and work through the CPU/Gfx card/case etc upgrades first. Platform costs are likely to have dropped by the time you feel you really need to move on from AM4, and there'll likely be even more new AM5 toys to choose from.
I know the draw of new and shiny, almost did the same thing myself but didn't fancy giving my perfectly awesome old gear away for nought! Thing is on the the games side unless you are a million hertz 1080p low details gamer the CPU has far lesser importance than the GPU and as the resolution creeps up the CPU is just waiting about. Here's a 7800x3d vs 5800x3d comparison https://www.techspot.com/review/2692-ryzen-7800x3d-vs-ryzen-5800x3d/ Yes the 7800x3d is superior and if I was building from scratch its a no brainer but if I was gaming at 1440p and greater the margins between the chips are slight and dropping in a £270quid chip and getting a big ass GPU would be be my route. ( well if I wasn't Mr OTT, do as I say man not as I do! ) saving ~100 on CPU, ~250 on mobo and ~150 on RAM, sure you might get a return on your old stuff but the reality is that because of all this cheap drop in upgrade people rarely want it for decent value. AMDs execution has been stellar and no doubt in two years 8/9xxx CPU will launch and be 60% faster with more features at the same price. Though it likely still be a better bet to buy a better GPU in two years than CPU. MY 3080Ti is the limiting factor in my setup for my resolution not my comparatively slow 5950x (when compared to any x3d chip 5xxx or 7xxx for gaming) If I switched up to a 7800x3d despite it being so strong I'd see no bump in framerates, a new GPU on the other hand would see massive jump in framerates. As for the many M2s just get a good big one and be done with it, if you want to store stuff then cheap SATA SSD is where it is at, unless you have a specific need for the bandwidth of M2 NVMes, production work, simulations etc. at which point your board an chip are wrong and you want something with more PCi Express lanes like a workstation setup.
Of course I forgot that AMD having had such a well supported socket for so long you could actually be on an old PCIe 3.0 board that might make the case for considering a platform switch stronger, what are you running?
Yes, I will this time certainly. I didn't think that with AM4 as I didn't know I could put in such a higher end chip for such a gain. I do now (have done for a while anyway) though. At that time I was just upgrading bits. I kept the GPU, HDD's, case, etc just changed my mobo, CPU and RAM. Had no real need for powerhouse GPU or anything bigger. I only played online FPS at lowest of low settings. Now i'm doing more single player, high res (currently 1440p), on highest settings I can. So something that can cope would be much better. Certainly looking at the options. It is certainly weighing on my mind, now that i'm looking to go 7900XTX route, do the rest of it at a later date. If you mean mobo, Strix B350-F is current one. AMD B350 chipset 2 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (x16 or x8/x4) 1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (max at x4 mode) *1 3 x PCIe 2.0 x1 It was one of the things that made me think, hmm new mobo. Seeing that PCIe 5.0 is about, i'm not even at 4.0. I know FPS performance gains are minimal, but would think down the road it would help more with other things.
yeah performance was as big as i thought as it was going to be even tho i was not expecting much. future proof wise when the 5800x3d is meh AM5 will be old
Exactly! What is future proof is spending £2k now and then £2k at some point in the future... We run Ryzen 7900's and 4070's at work, and they're crazy fast! Pulls 400W from the wall, so its whisper quiet and doesn't rinse your wallet or cook your house. I would highly recomend something like this, as the extra performance gained isn;t work the money in the long term when you can just upgrade again sooner...
