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.