I just grabbed a 5800x for $305 yesterday on newegg. Hardware Unboxed did an analysis of new chips on older boards, and the 5000 series performed surprisingly well on an old x370 board similar to mine thanks to some recent BIOS updates in the past month or so. It looks like my old Noctua CPU cooler will also still work on this CPU, which I also have used with the 1800x and 2700x. AM4 has been a hell of a socket. So again I can add a significant component upgrade without any additional purchases other than $5 for paste. I will also get an additional performance boost from Smart Access Memory given it will be an all-AMD setup, which will probably be worth an additional 5% to 20% depending on what is running.
I don’t understand how intel hasn’t figured out that they would sell more CPUs If they reused the same socket across generations the way AMD does.
Just got my upgrades installed this evening and tried out my new setup in Cinebench. 2700x/ 2080 Super: 118.36 frames 5800x/ 6900 XT: 237.71 frames Seems to be a satisfactory improvement so far.
I bought an extra couple of sticks of my old G.Skill Flare X RAM that are thankfully only about $100 now to max out at 32 GB. Seemed like that was probably overkill, but much to my surprise over this weekend I alt-Tab-ed out of Elden Ring to check something and noticed nearly 15 GB of system RAM was being utilized at the time. I'm sure there are more taxing tasks than running Elden Ring. 16 GB might not always be enough now, and my system RAM upgrade may have been more needed than I realized.
I might be wrong but I think Windows 10 is just better at using free RAM which makes sense. Unused RAM is wasted RAM, but that makes it a little difficult to know if you'd actually benefit from more ram. I'm still at 16 GB and I've never felt like I'm experiencing any kind of slowdown from it.
Zen 5 has had some early issues, which I suspected would be the case, so I decided to wait a bit on a rebuild and grabbed a 5800x3D on sale at Micro Center instead for $300. It seems unreal to me that I can actually drive to one of these stores in 9 minutes now when most of my life that was like a ~250 mile trip. I already own the base 5800x, but the large cache seems to make a massive difference in benchmarks, and this is the most I can upgrade my PC without a complete rebuild. I'm not sure when the Zen 5 x3D card is coming, and I'm skeptical everything will be running smoothly in terms of software that will make it worth spending a ton of cash right now. I'm thinking checking things out at the end of the year during big holiday sales or maybe wait until Zen 6 for a complete rebuild.
I was thinking about upgrading my 5600X. Those Microcenter bundles with Mobo and 32GB memory look pretty good. 7700X is $400, 7800x3D is $500. Agreed that the new Zen 5 isn't looking that great. I don't expect much more than 5% increase from the 3D versions.
I've used the same CPU cooler, case, RAM, PSU, and motherboard for the 1800x, 2700x, 5800x, and 5800x3D. The savings from the AM4 platform have been beyond anything else I've used before. I think the new chiplet architecture will get better over time. I think the upcoming x3D models will be very decent performers, but I'm waiting for awhile until they get this sorted out. Zen 5 was delayed on top of being a new architecture...and it's AMD, who doesn't have the best history with launches.
I jumped on the Microcenter 7600X3D bundle for $450. My Microcenter is an hour away, but it was worth it to save a few hundred. I switched back to air cooling because the power efficiency of this chip is pretty crazy.
Miami Microcenter had the Ryzen 9 9900X, MSI Tomahawk X870E, and 32GB Gskill DDR5 for $550 as an in-store only deal. I found that too good to pass up since it's both a high end CPU and a high-end mobo so I bought it. Should be a really big jump from a Haswell 4770K. I am going to buy a Radeon 9070 XT when they become available this week.
I recently upgraded in a Micro Center deal for the 9800x3D, Asus Rog Strix x870E Gaming Wifi, and G.Skill 32Gig RAM, in a Phantek NV9 case. I kept the same Sapphire 7900XTX Nitro.
Their in-store bundle deals are hard to pass up. I would have paid close to $800 for the same stuff if I had ordered it online from Amazon or Newegg. You are basically getting the motherboard for free or nearly free. My 4770K will be 12 years old this year. It's also not supported by W11. So I figured it was time to upgrade. I also bought a Cromax black Noctua cooler and a Samsung 990 Pro SSD. I think I'll build it next weekend once I have the video card. My son wants to help. He's curious how computers work.
I had a case, PSU, and some fans from my Sandy Bridge build. The motherboard was from when I did my 1800x build. The internal components are all new now with the exception of the 7900 XTX, which is only last generation. Everything was working, but I didn't want to wait until something went haywire and potentially short circuited other components.
I have a Seasonic 1000W Platinum PSU, but it's 12 years old. I don't know how much life is left in it. I'll probably replace it.
It's a tough call deciding when to retire a perfectly good PSU. I almost upgraded last year to something larger but turns out I didn't need it. I delayed a bit because the ATX 3.X standards were quietly being changed due to the Nvidia power cable fiasco. I haven't looked in a while to see if it was ever finalized, but for a while certain PSU labeled as 3.X could be 3.0 or 3.1. Looks like prices have gone up a bit. Checkout the brand Superflower. They make/made some of the EVGA PSU but now sell direct.
I snagged a 9070 XT for the $599 MSRP this morning at Microcenter. Now I just need to build the thing. It was a busy launch with a huge line, but they had plenty of them in stock. RTX 4080/RX 7900 XTX performance for $600 with 16GB RAM and a 256-bit bus seems to be a crowd pleaser. Dumb question. The CPUs are a lot bigger than they used to be. What thermal paste method are you guys doing? Penta-dot, X, or spread?
That may be the best GPU of 2025 if they can keep at least some of the models close to $600. It wouldn't have been much of an upgrade for me from a 7900 XTX, and I do need the VRAM for the ultrawide monitor I have. The $599 models sold out fast this morning. I checked online and saw some were at my local Micro Center, but they were gone quick. It should have very good ML upscaling and significantly improved ray tracing compared to past AMD cards (Sony persuaded AMD to use some of the same tech in the relatively new PS5 Pro), probably around the 4000-series quality ray tracing from Nvidia. Sony and AMD are sharing ML model info to get the AI models developed and implemented more effectively with their Project Amethyst. I think last time I used Arctic MX-4 paste for the CPU and use the X method.
Last I checked most any method works but X has the advantage. I did the X method the last few times. The only method that doesn't work is forgetting to remove the protective plastic sheet on the bottom of the CPU cooler. If you do that you have to take a pic and shame yourself online.
AMD and Sony are praising each other regarding the development of their co-development of ML upscaling technologies, and PlayStation architect Mark Cerny is claiming a version of the neural network used for FSR4 used in the RDNA4 cards will be implemented on the PS5 Pro next year. https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pla...-be-implemented-on-the-ps5-pro-191802108.html "The neural network (and training recipe) in FSR 4's upscaler are the first results of the Amethyst collaboration," according to Cerny. "FSR 4 and this next evolution of PSSR are a paradigm for our future," Cerny tells Digital Foundry, "going forward we expect to have our own implementations of each of the algorithms developed through the collaboration." I wasn't expecting that due to differences in architecture, but I do recall him brining up some of the same specs from previous comments that has been part of his plan with ML. The collaboration seems to have helped AMD catch up to Nvidia's DLSS more rapidly than expected. Digital Foundry's early analysis of FSR4 found it to be superior to DLSS3 but behind the new DLSS4, which is a massive jump from where they were with FSR3.