Maybe the release of the new intel line will shake things up a bit, also if i understood correctly they also plan to launch their 10 mm at the end of this year ( i hope i remember this wrong and that it is actually end next year but with how ryzen is pulling of .. ya know )

My hope is by summer, the B450 BIOS is stable enough that it doesn't cause any problems, so I can flash the BIOS and get a 5000 series. If I can afford it, I will pick up a 5800X. There should be some good deals for the 4th of July.

If not, I'm not in a rush. The main reason I want a better CPU is because it takes a while to encode videos for YouTube.

Happy New Year!
I mean, I'm not one of those people who prefer monopolies, so if Intel releases its next line in time for 4th of July, it helps me because it means the 5000 series will be even cheaper, if temporarily.

Just because I don't like intel doesn't mean nobody should buy them. It's obvious that there's a place for both chip manufacturers.

My current gaming computer is a Ryzen 2700. I will probably upgrade it to 5000 series, but like many other people in this thread, I'm not in a hurry at all. Maybe I'll do it later this year. I'm not sure I'll even notice the difference without running benchmarks, but I also have a Ryzen 1700 machine that will get the 2700, so it will be a double upgrade. That machine is for audio and video stuff, but it's stuck with a B350 motherboard because I have a PCI sound card I don't want to part with. AFAIK there aren't any B550 motherboards with PCI, so a 2700 will probably be the endgame for that machine.

I'm actually hoping for a 65 watt 8 core to be released in the 5000 series. The 1700 and 2700 are 65 watt TDP.

What would you experts recommend for an upgrade?

My comp is 10 years old and I want to get a new cpu and mobo, as well as ram. I have a new 500w psu and rx 570 vid card, as well as hard drives. Don't know anything about SSDs.

It looks like the 5600x is a good buy for cpu (I prefer AMD). Does it matter what mobo to get with it? Since I'm probably going to use this for another decade without upgrades, I'm thinking four 8gb sticks (32gb) for ram. Any thoughts?

If you're still on a spinning hard drive, switching to an SSD will be a major quality of life improvement when it comes to using the computer. It won't improve game performance, but it will still significantly improve your experience. In particular,
* The computer will boot *much* faster. Furthermore, it will be significantly less time before it becomes usable. (I'm thinking of how Windows will show the desktop, but you won't be able to interact with it because it's still busy loading stuff? That time is greatly shortened.)
* Programs will load faster.
* Load times in games will significantly decrease.
* Even if loading stuff from a spinning hard drive, having the OS on an SSD will still provide some benefit, as the OS and the thing you're loading won't be competing with each other for disk access (though it won't be as good as having everything on a fast SSD, of course, but remember that SSDs are more expensive than spinning hard drives).

If you go with a 5600X, you'll want either a B550 or an X570 motherboard. Don't get the x470 or B450 because they don't work out of the box with the 5000 series (Nor do most work out of the box with the 3000 series either).

Depending on deals and vendor, you could probably get a B550 motherboard and a 5600X for $350-400, but that's just a guess.

Hard drives, specifically SSD's, are helpful but not necessary unless you want to do heavy gaming. Newer games will start requiring SSD's more and more. So for the next decade, you'll want an SSD to go with it, but it's up to you what type. A good starter SSD is the hybrid SHDD which is ssd and hdd together. Something like the Seagate Firecuda, you can get a 2tb for around $75 if you time it right.

That would be enough to get you going. I'd hold off on upgrading the graphics card until prices come down a little more, but you might want to get a new PSU around 650-700 watts to future proof in case you want to go big on the GPU.

32gb of RAM is what I use and I love it. I used to use 16gb, and having 32, even at a slower speed compared to others, really makes a difference. I also encode videos, so the extra RAM helps.

I hope this helps out a little bit. I'd offer to DM you but I have chat turned off because randos keep asking me for money.

-Pal

I have two new 2TB 7200 drives. If I get an SSD, which seems a pricey option, it would probably be to move the OS over. I've already noticed that win10 boots much faster than win7 so I don't know how much faster an SSD would be. I only use the computer for games.

The price for the 5600x is $300 USD, even though it seems to be out of stock everywhere. That's fine. When it does come in stock, assuming the price remains, that's what I plan on getting, barring info of a superior cpu choice. As I said I prefer AMD, and the 5600x is the cheapest of their new zen 3 models, which I've read offers a decent speed increase all by itself over zen 2 models. It also seems a solid (budget) choice for a cpu I don't plan to change for a decade.

As I said, I just got the hard drives and vid card so yes, they're staying. : ) As for overclocking, I have zero plans on doing that. I guess for mobo I should make sure it has a slot for an SSD? Again, don't know much about them or what the relevance of NVMe is. Lastly, the 5600x is apparently AMD's only new cpu that comes with a cooler, so I should be good there.

How would games require an SSD? I don't play anything online, no multi-players, and as I'm here on gog, mostly older games. I looked at the firecuda while shopping for my recent HDs, and found them too pricey. Wound up getting seagate's barracudas instead. : ) If I did wind up getting an SSD, what size do you think is good? One mark against an SSD is I imagine it putting more demand on the PSU, which I don't plan on upgrading. The 5600x cpu is 65w TDP, incidentally the same as my current a8-3800.

It would be nice to have a fat ram amount. I currently have 6gb ddr3. 32gb ddr4 should be heaven.

And shame on you for calling your relatives randos. : p

I would advice against filling all your memory slots from the start, you would get yourself in a less convenient upgrade path: I would go with two modules instead, like 2 * 8, initially and upgrade to 4 * 8 down the road if you need more RAM.
Keep in mind that DDR4 is on its way out so likely there would be some nice deals in the end of 2021 and during 2022.

16GB are enough if you don't do much but if you need to multitask then 32GB is much better and 64GB would be ideal, my next build will have 32GB or maybe 64GB RAM for sure.
Additionally AMD's CPUs love multitasking and don't break a sweat when multiple heavy propgrams run at the same time.

SSD would be nice but not necessary at all: with 2 HD you have options.

The benefit is that you can split the data between them.

A simple and dumb configuration to get much faster load times: use one of them just for the OS and data you rarely use and the other one for programs and games.

The ideal would be to make a partition for the OS' that is 1/10th or 1/20th of the total capacity and put your OS there, the remainig part of the drive could be used to store photos, videos or whatever you don't use frequently, put programs and games on the other disc instead.

Or you could RAID 0 them and get a lot of performace out of your hard drives but this this may have drawbacks and issues and/or may not fit your needs.

Or you could RAID 1 them and get the same write performance and much faster read speed with the safety of a redundant copy of your data, you give up the capacity of one HD.

5600X is a nice and powerful CPU, you could go for an 3800X as well if your workload benefits from more cores.

Newer games require SSD's specifically open world games and games with a lot of loading textures. It's not necessary, but it does help especially on loading times.

The difference you're going to see off a 7200 RPM is substantial. Honestly, an SSD is going to be more expensive than a hybrid drive, which is why I recommended a 2tb Firecuda HOWEVER I understand you might want a straight up SSD. Given you said you play mostly older games, anything from 500gb to 1tb should last you a while, and hard drives are so easy to install that if you have to upgrade, it's no biggie.

Also LOL. No, randos asking me for money and free games on GOG are definitely not my family. BUT I appreciate the humor ;)

Have a great day and if you have more questions, let me know. 32gb of RAM is total heaven, especially if you ever decide to stream or do YT videos.

Take care!
-Pal

Mobo should not be to hard, i worked 10 years on a 120 euro costing asus board , the p120 or something coupled with a i7 , it worked quite well, no again i have a asus board only slightly more expensive at 180 euro's, i'm curious to see how long this will stack and certainly if i jump the coming i9 on it :)

but yea, asus and EVGA belong to the most trustworthy i belief , MSI works pretty well too, gigabyte and asrock seem to be more challenging in terms of quality price now and then

for most users it seems to boil down to only a couple of choices, do you overclock for example and do you like integrated wifi

personally i use 8 sticks of ram too .. that is 4 x 8 though for the overclocker it is recommended to only dual channel

but these are my pennies of course ;)

So with the news of an upcoming $1,400 stimulus and soon to be filing taxes (and getting a refund) in the US, I was considering getting a 5600X because I did some research and it smokes the 3800X I was going to get.

Then IRL hits, and not to get into my personal stuff, but it looks like I have to penny pinch this year due to unforeseen circumstances.

By the time I'm ready to get a 5000 series, the 6000 series CPU will be out XD

This thread has really helped me out a lot and hopefully helped other people out.

If you've gotten a 5000 series and you want to share how it performs for you, please contribute here. If you've already contributed, thanks :)

I have the money for a 5600X now, but there's none in stock anywhere. Anyway, it's a marginal improvement over my 3600, so I think I'm going to hold off till next year's tax season and either buy a high performance laptop or build a new desktop.

This was a fun, eventful thread. I really appreciate most of the contributors to it.

There's basically no difference between a Ryzen 5600X and a 3600(X), for gaming, if you play on higher resolutions (1440p, 2160p) or have a GPU slower than an RTX 2080 Ti / RTX 3070, or RX 6800.
4 Years of Ryzen 5, 1600X, 2600X, 3600X vs. 5600X

Did some more investigations. There's no point in upgrading anything other than my GPU until another generation or two of processors comes out.

I had my eyes on a 3060 Ti but it's a somewhat lateral upgrade over a 5700 XT for the money. Definitely looking at going Nvidia next time, though.

However, I'm going to have to wait for scalpers and miners to stop their obsession with stockpiling GPU's until I can get one.

Also regarding the 5xxx series.... I had the money in hand and had a 5800X available to put in the cart. Decided I'd rather save up for something better. Like I said, not much of an upgrade in any substantial sense.

Unlike upgrading from the FX 8320 to the 2600, there's no point for me personally since I currently have the benefits of the 3000 series handling of memory, etc.

Just chipping in for a moment to let people know where I'm at with the 5000 series. Also, I'm hearing reports some of the intel chips perform comparably now, and are in some cases cheaper. What a time to be alive, eh?