Sooo, I look at benchmarks and it is not as rosy as AMD made it out to be :-( Intel win some and AMD some but AMD's power draw is lower. We still should choose based on which programmes and games we want to run, if all we care about are frame rate and smoothness.

I am looking at the numbers for MS Flight Simulator and Intel still leads by quite a bit, at least in that title.

If anyone who plays X4 Foundations buys one of these new processors, I am interested to hear about the performance.

Which benchmarks are you looking at? What I saw is that AMD absolutely smokes Intel in pretty much every CPU benchmark by a wide margin. The difference in games is less wide but AMD still seems to win almost every contest. The few where it loses out, it's only behind by a few percent.

I think this is the best summary-at-a-glance I've found yet:

https://tweakers.net/reviews/8270/26/amd-ryzen-5-5600x-ryzen-7-5800x-ryzen-9-5900x-en-5950x-ryzen-9-5900x-vs-3900xt-en-i9-10900k.html

Similar percentages for 5950X:

https://tweakers.net/reviews/8270/27/amd-ryzen-5-5600x-ryzen-7-5800x-ryzen-9-5900x-en-5950x-ryzen-9-5950x-vs-3950x-en-i9-10980xe.html

Just got back and, as expected, no 5000 series are available in my area (many stores sold out within 10 minutes if they were not doing pre-orders).

So I went and picked up a new monitor and oh my god the difference in image quality compared to my previous one.

165 hz/2560X1440/32" curved screen (10" bigger than my previous monitor)

The improvements with just a monitor change.

Some tests where they used RAM at 3200MHz (the officially supported top speed). This shows again how important it is to have fast RAM for Ryzen and also to run it at high speeds.... not just stick it in randomly and be satisfied since the pc starts.

I looked at many shops and several have piles of the 5600X in stock but all other models are long sold out.

Also, when looking at shops, there were two of my favourites that seemed to have shut down :-(

anandtech has some tests for zen 3 here https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-dive-review-5950x-5900x-5800x-and-5700x-tested

I upgraded this past year to a dual screen 27" samsung curved monitor setup. It's nothing crazy, but the image quality is considerably better than my old monitor.

Is this important if I'm looking at something like the 3400G, or does it get to the point where faster ram would be useless because of the slower CPU/GPU? (Or would it provide an improvement, but not enough to be worth the added cost?)

(In other words, is this something I should consider for the computer I'm currently planning to build?)

For an APU RAM speed is very important as it governs both Infinity Fabric speed and the speed at which the vega cores can access memory too. So that's an improvement in both memory access times and being able to 'talk' with the CPU element too from faster RAM.

Would near definitely be worth getting 3200MHz RAM with an APU as there isn't much price differential between it and slower RAM, above that cost benefit drops markedly (caveat, I'm not in the US so price/ benefit may vary).

Heh, saw that link and thought they got their hands on a 5700X. Typo in the URL, apparently...

As for stores, over here seeing two with 5600X and three with 5800X listed as in stock at a glance through those I know of.

Fixed that for you ;-)
Phasmid explains it perfectly.

A 3200G or 3400G would be about the same speed as your current desktop, if that one was not broken. Maybe look at prebuilt 4000 series with built-in graphics.

I went for 64GB of 3600CL16.. not the fastest or best timings :( but anything better costs soooo much.

I don't even know if this will actually run at CL16, I got two 32G kits because there was no 64G kit in stock, but I think they use the exact same dies in both kits. Time will tell.

Fwiw Since the 5900X went out of stock sometime between me putting it in cart and making the payment, I'm testing my old 1800X on the new board & ram now,.. I'll probably stick to stock clock & timings, knowing that the 1800X is very picky about the ram it gets.

Ethernet doesn't show up at all on the board (MSI TOMAHAWK B550). Will have to try a BIOS update after work. Seems that fixed it for some people. For others, putting in a newer Zen CPU fixed it. Whether it works or not, I might buy an intel card anyway because realtek has a history of being difficult.

Yeah, in my country they officially started selling it at 16:00. I have screenshot stamped 16:06 which is when I finished my purchase (taken after the shop's server timed out processing my order after payment). At that point 5900X was already sold out. But it wasn't sold out when I put it in my cart (I have a screenshot of that too, but no relevat timestamp because I took it afterwards, having left the browser window open).

Looks like they had good stock of 5600X though, so my little sister should get a new CPU soon-ish.

They already did that with the 3000 laptop series. The 3400g is pretty much a 3700u with slightly better graphics.
The onlder 2400g is pretty much a 2800h.

The Ryzen desktop APU's are based on the laptop parts, they are not the same as desktop with glued graphics.

In my area not even the 5600x is available anymore.

Pretty much all low-end parts are not available as well, no Athlon's, no R3 3200g, nada... The only parts still available below 200€ mark is the 6c/6t R5 3500x, the 3400g and 3100.
Wich leds me to think we might see 7nm APU's (based on laptop's 4000 series) very soon. I'd be in for a good priced APU, preferably with 6-8 cores.