EDIT: The 5000 series desktop processors will be buyable on the 5th of November. They are skipping the 4000 series name. According to AMD they will be from just under to quite a bit better than current Intel for games while drawing a lot less power. Prices increased :-(
Intel's next desktop processors are expected first quarter of 2021 and they also seem promising.

Original text:
Are you about to buy an AMD Ryzen based desktop? Well, I suggest waiting until AMD's press information on the 8th of October where they will announce something Ryzen related. They have already promised the next generation of Ryzen for desktops for this year so a good guess is, that is what will be announced, hopefully with availability following soon after.

If you want a laptop or notebook and four cores are enough for you, I suggest waiting for the Intel 11th Gen 'Tiger Lake' as those should show up in PCs in shops any day now. Very promising chips made on an improved 10nm process with way less heat than the fast but hot 10th generation. The higher core models will come later, possibly December but probably next year.

Well I already have a ryzen desktop.. though the idea of building a new one sometime soon-ish seems lucrative :)

FWIW I have early first gen 1800X which still has some of the stability and segfault issues they had back at launch. Doesn't really bother me daily but it's not ideal.

The same should be said for AMD's graphics cards. The announcement for the new generation should be on the 28th.

I don't know, am I? I mean, whenever I decide to get a new machine, I'll most likely go AMD again - at least unless I get a sudden influx of capital and have the funds for a Talos II or Blackbird. My 8-core AMD FX and Radeon 570 are sufficient for a while yet.

I want eight cores because isn't that what the next gen consoles will have? So I gather that to be on the safe side, better to have at least the same as the consoles, if some crazy cross-platform developers get an idea "well we thought the PC version should expect 8 cores as that is what the console versions have" and less cores gives some issues... that is merely my layman's thinking of it, I don't know for sure if it will ever really matter if your gaming PC has 4 or 6 or 8 cores.

For now, I consider over 8 cores an overkill for gaming because of... what I just said.

Anyway, there are promising 8 core ryzen gaming laptops already, but now all this NVidia GTX 3000 hulabaloo has made me wait some more, to see if any of that materializes to gaming laptops in some form, or what AMD brings to the table with GPUs.

It is never a good time to buy a gaming PC. Now even GTX 3080 cards seem to be crashing because apparently some manufacturers have tried to save bucks by using cheaper capacitators on their 3080 (and 3090) cards...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6bUUEEe-X8

Sucks to be you if you have one of those cheaper 3080 cards, I guess. I'd probably try to get a refund.

EDIT: Then again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhyCdraz54s

I'm probably going for at least 12 cores, maybe 16 if they can keep the base clock high enough.

I would personally also go for at least six cores/twelve threads but some people only play games that are very undemanding on the processor or no games at all. A game like FTL or Neverending Winter* can be plenty fun too.


* Forgot the actual name but it matters little.

There is confirmed leaks from credible sources already showing the AMD Ryzen7 5800X 8 core beating Intel's 10 core i9 10900k and I think the 12 core clocking to 5ghz with all chips hitting 15% to 20% IPC. If this is actually accurate information than AMD Nailed this generation of chip well and the final generation of Ryzen will be a major bang.

I'm more interested in the 16 core chip clocks at higher frequencies.

I really need to build a whole new PC around Ryzen 5900X and RTX 3080 or Big Navi depending on how they turn out as fast as i can but i'm not certain i can manage to actually buy these new parts anytime soon because "SOLD OUT".

Back to trusty laptop in meantime.

I may eventually be interested on a APU for this precise reason but it seems they are very far away. Hope my motherboard can run them, hate to buy a new one (even if I don't really like my actual board).

Already have a desktop with 3990X.

Not going to buy AMD video card because their driver problems and super bad OpenGL support in windows. Situation is better in linux but still you'll have more problems with AMD video cards than with Nvidia. Also i had problems with running Win10 on a laptop from late 2014 with AMD video card - video chip wasn't working at all. Had to make a frankenstein build of older win8 drivers to make it work. Seriouly... not supporting 5 years old video chips when nvidia started to phase out support for cards from early 2000s with legacy drivers still available and working fine.

AMD should really change their support strategy and maybe hire new driver team for their cards to be less of a headache.

This will be interesting because I'm wondering how my 3600 will hold up after new consoles come out, but if it throttles my framerates I'm split 50/50 on whether to slap a 3700x into my existing mobo or upgrade the lot for whatever comes next. Either way it's not a priority any time soon really, I don't think we'll have demanding "next gen" games for a while, but I'm looking to see what they focus on improving. How many cores does one need, really.

Just get a b450 with an nvme drive slot and you should be good, IMO. I have a 350 and it's given me no problems with my 3600x. I don't think the more expensive features will be used much for a while.

It may be a good idea to wait and check motherboard compatibility with newer CPU's, to leave a future upgrade open. Although DDR5 should be close, so it might not mean much. 8-core-ish :P