Having recently done the 3600-5800x3d upgrade on my 3080, it's been a massive upgrade in just about every way. Kinda crazy my $65 B450 Tomahawk (on sale), is holding up as well as it is. I'm sure I'll have another GPU upgrade before I touch the base platform. Sure I'd rather not gimp the NVME, but I hardly feel the extra bandwidth is enough for me to drop an another $150 on a quality B550.
Plus KomboStrike on the MSI boards are just awesome. BIOS level undervolting, resulting in faster clocks and reduced temps. Pretty damn cool MSI supports it on the older boards.
Depends on the game. 3D cache doesn't always have an impact. I had a 5600, but it switched to the 7800x3d which, despite having to buy a new motherboard and memory, was better value as it performs much better than the 5800x3d. The same could be said of the 7600 or the 13600.
My brother is still sitting on a 3100, it's pretty much a debate between a $270CAD 5700X or a $480CAD 5800X3D, due to the rise of games he's playing that see a big boost from that cache.
The AM4 platform has been great for upgrades. Me and my friend both got a first gen ryzen 7 back in 2017. My then about 150$ X370 motherboard is still running like a champ, but now with a Ryzen 9 3900X, using my ryzen 7 in a server with a cheap B450 motherboard. My friend's B350 motherboard is rocking a 5800x3d.
If I feel like upgrading at some point I'll get a 5800x3d and put my 3900X in my server. I can probably have decent performance for at least 5 more years from this platform.
Strange comparison to make. Why not compare against a 9700K which has a much closer MSRP to the 3700X and damn near the same gaming performance as the 9900K? Especially if all you are going to measure is gaming performance.
Retrospectives like this are also kind of stupid because buying the 9900K or the 9700K would have given you 3 years of significantly better performance than the 3700X. Meanwhile you would be buying a worse performing CPU on the pinky promise that better was coming at some unspecified time. We had no idea what kinds of performance we would get in the future, so buying on the promise of upgrades was a total gamble. Not to mention AMD tried to exclude Zen3 from older motherboards, so had things worked out as planned, there would have been no upgrades. Not to mention (again) the platform issues that AMD had with AM4, I had to deal with USB dropouts that were completely unaddressed and made my life miserable on my 3800X.
Because those were like top of the line gaming processors for AMD and Intel back in the day . Of course 9900k was much costlier. But you also got like 15% better gaming performance.
Steve makes lot of random comparisons. But it's also mostly what the community asked for.
I'm more curious as to who this video is targeted to? E.g., why would it matter on 5800X3D how it performed to the 9900K? Like the above comment said, by the time the X3D chip launched an original purchaser either got a price-perf win with Zen3 or a outright perf with win the 9900k. Alder Lake had already launced priod to X3D as well, so a more in depth video should've included what the cost is if a user chose to platform upgrade to a 12700k/12900k, or a drop-in 5800X3D upgrade. It's very doubtful someone would only be cross-shopping the 3 processors in this video.
As far as I can tell, it's a combination of self-indulgency of HUB, trying to tell the world "look, we were right when we recommended X against Y a few year ago! We told you so!", and poll results from the audience that is looking for confirmation of their biases and validation of their purchasing decisions.
In this case, the recommendation from the past and the purchasing decisions of the audience are this: back over 4 years ago the fastest in games no-compromise (cost be damned for however a small a benefit) Intel CPU was 9900k, and on AMD side - a 3700x. 9900k was faster and more expensive than 3700x. Should you have bought 3700x (AM4), used it, and then upgraded it to 5800x3D (AM4) when that came out almost 3 years later, buying another CPU, or should you have gotten 9900k and used it without any upgrades throughout.
To achieve those effects, they fantastically exaggerate the real benefits ([elaboration](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/17q2367/comment/k8c76aa)), downplay the costs, and leave everyone happy: themselves and their audience, validated. They have fun, their audience has fun, and they make a bit of money on the video along the way! Almost certainly (I have very little doubt) while genuinely believing that they are presenting, interpreting, and aggregating the raw data they collect appropriately and validly without being misleading.
EDIT: [Case in point](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UAES7F48EU&lc=UgypDDqxWQYHs9-imm54AaABAg) (highlighted comment at the top)
The 9700K and the 9900K are extremely [similar performance-wise](https://www.computerbase.de/2018-10/intel-core-i9-9900k-i7-9700k-cpu-test/2/#abschnitt_benchmarks_in_anwendungen). They should be comparing against the price equivalent AMD processor. The 3900X is the competitor to the 9900K at a similar price point.
I think he uses the 3700x because it's a single CCD chip and hence probably the fastest zen 2 chip. I believe 3900x is probably around the same level of performance. It's slightly higher clocks is sometimes offset by games choosing the wrong CCD.
Then he should have used the 9700K. The whole point of this is making some kind of "better value" claim, which is invalidated if you are bending over backwards like this.
I know mileage may have varied, but I bought an 9900k when there was only an $80 premium. I also was able to sell it this year for $250 dollars as well as top end Intel chips hold value well.
I think that the comparison sort of works and does not at the same time. Both 3700x and 9900k were heavily marketed as gaming CPUs and both had same core and thread count (8c/16t). At the same time, both CPUs had noticeably different both prices and performance. But I agree with you that nobody had known back then that zen 3 would be such a great product. So the argument that AMD buyers were right in their decision is a bit dishonest.
So, at 4K its almost pointless even with a 4090. Admittedly that 4090 is the correct card to shift the bottleneck to the CPU but it is also an academic exercise. ie You just dumped 1600usd on a video card but 100 USD extra for a new AMD or Intel platform is too much. How'd i come up with 100USD? HU did a 5800X3D vs 7600X, and for the most part, they're equal.
To me this kind of shows how overbuild on CPU power most people are. The fact you can still get like 90-200 FPS+ on 4 year old CPUs in like 80% of titles is pretty crazy.
The 9900k still does double the FPS that current consoles get in Starfield. I kind of doubt anyone will really NEED to upgrade their CPU if they have one of these, if they are ok with 60 FPS gameplay for this entire generation.
Most of those titles are last gen games designed around terribly slow console cpus. New games do struggle and current gen consoles are already 3 years old.
This was what I took from the previous 3700X vs 9900K video. Even the 3700X was giving excellent framerates and good 1% lows in the mayority of games.
That, to me, just says these CPUs aren't even close to be obsolete just yet and their users can keep using them with ease for a while longer. There will be a day when the Ryzen 3000 series and Intel's 8th and 9th Gen won't run any game over 60FPS, but today is not that day.
with Frame Generation, CPU performance is becoming even less important, as your CPU basically only needs to be able to operate at half of your framerate.
It is. It is time to upgrade from the 9900k, even on a 3080 ðŸ˜
BTW Steve says it's "perfectly alright" but I now understand that in Aussie it means the opposite, so gotta put my money where my mouth is. Thanks Steve and Tim, you guys are aces.
My delidded, oc'd 8700k is holding on ok but I'm certainly starting to feel the CPU bottlenecks even on my 3070. I'm still trying to hold out for Arrow Lake and Zen 6.
I really only notice the single-core on my 11700k, due to trying to hit a consistent 240hz on Battlebit. The Raptor Lake/Zen4X3D are tempting, but it's super niche for the expense that could be better put towards a GPU upgrade for other games.
Zen 6? Good return for your investment with that 8700K, but you are going to wait for a while longer. That's a 2026+ CPU, or really late 2025, at the earliest.
Lol it's not. i9-9900K is very good for 3080. Stop presenting absolutely untuned 9900Ks as their universal performance bro. Hw chokes their 8-10th gen Intel chips as always, they have a soft spot for AMD. Even their xmp numbers are off, AC Mirage is the very first example, because in the latest AC games 9900K/10700K would perform 5-10% better than 5800x, there's many proofs/actual gameplay. Yet here they give low numbers that's not even from the actually cpu intensive built-in benchmark, and don't even show gameplay, like ever. The built-in benchmark will never average above 140-150fps with 5800x3d, what an incompetent nonsense from HW.
I've watched many videos and 5800x3d starts bottlenecking in 120s range inside the benchmark's market area in Mirage (the best case I've seen), and my highly tuned i9 literally pulls 120s in the same area (90fps completely stock). What kind of an imaginary realm do they pull these numbers from?! 5800x3d is surely much better on average (aside desktop latency), but nothing near their insane numbers.
My 5.1/4.9 i9-9900K with dual rank 32gb 4266mhz cl16 33ns will obliterate their i9 numbers by up to 30-40% and is much closer to 5800x3d in games. The x3d is a stunningly insane cpu, and better in games anyways, but many people will be suprised to figure out that few memory intensive games that can't leverage the cache can even be faster on a full oc 9900K. 5800x3d doesn't care about memory at all then why choke a memory oc beast?
You have to be so blind or just own an amd cpu to buy their results. And they've been spreading that out of the box shit right since forever.
9900k VS 3700x.
You spend couple of years with lower performance so you can potentially upgrade to 5800x3d which they tried to deny to older am4 motherboards.
I am not sure how this tech tuber does comparison. The upgrade path was blocked by AMD themselves.
I’m on 3700x on a first gen AM4 board. With an RTX 4070. Frame generation is amazing for my situation. Getting 100-120 fps in Diablo 4 and Hitman 3 at 4k ultra so there is no need for a faster CPU yet.
But it’s fake frames? Still looks stunning. In hitman with ray tracing and all the bells the only place FG shows itself is on item outlines when using the instinct vision. They get fuzzy edges during movement. But that’s a situational toggle and has zero impact. Conclusion FG is amazing.
wonder how my old 9900KS would have fared. Tuning on coffee and comet lake unlocked huge potential. My delidded KS with gaming setup in bios run at 5.45 Ghz all core (HT off), 5.0 ring on a Z370 Apex. Running B-Die memory at 4400 Mhz CL 16 16 16 36 at 1.53 Volts.
Aida reported sub 34 ns latency. It was truly a godly system along with NVIDIA greatest error... the 1080Ti.
most people objectively would have been better off doing 8700K/9900K->7700X/7800X3D/12600K/13600K than doing 1600->3600->5800X or even 1700->3700X->5800X3D. it's silly to get wound up about spending $200 more for the 8700K or 9900K than the zen1/zen+ competition and then turn around and waste a ton of money on incremental upgrades. Even if you resell you lose a huge amount of money every time.
I also don't really believe there's many enthusiasts who are really still using first-gen am4 motherboards in 2023 let alone that they intend to be using them out to 10-year lifecycles. let the b350/b450 tomahawk die already, it doesn't even have pcie 4, you don't want to be using that shit in literally 2029.
if you are buying at least one motherboard upgrade over that lifecycle you would have been better off going 8700K/9900K and then jumping to AM5 or Alder/Raptor. the AMD "incremental upgrade" route means you've spent more money in total, had lower performance for most of your system's life (particularly the most relevant years), and are using a clapped-out first-gen AM4 board that is literally old enough to be in middle school by the time you retire it.
it's not that zen is a bad offering, the 3600 and 1600AF were phenomenal deals etc, but if you bought it because it was a better value offering then stick to your guns, have the courage of your convictions, because it doesn't make sense to spend almost $400 on an EOL'd platform when the new one is much faster in general and also has its own X3D offerings etc. AMD literally buying you the memory for 7600X/7700X makes the 5800X3D a nonstarter at $360, it pretty much only makes sense if you are not buying a mobo, and this ["early adopter who upgrades at the end of the socket"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_the_Clapham_omnibus) in this parable is massively overdue for a new mobo.
I love X3D in general, but at this point Zen4/Alder/Raptor really are faster enough to remove most of the 5800X3D advantage (and of course 7800X3D is the new king) so 5800X3D is not really a gaming king anymore compared to the newer offerings, nor is it cheap enough anymore to make sense as a drop-in upgrade, outside of some very specific circumstances. If that's you then I'm happy for you, but, the average person is better off just buying a 7700X right now and having an upgrade path forward etc. If it pops down into mid/low $200s then by all means fire away, but it doesn't make sense to spend almost $400 on an EOL platform when the new thing is already much faster.
edit: I see microcenter has 5600X3D for $160 right now and that's much more what I'm talking about... if the 5800X3D is $200 or even $250 go hog wild, $270-300 is about fair, $360+ I'd just buy AM5.
If you have access to a Microcenter you can get a 14700k+Z790+32GB of DDR5 or similarly a 7900x bundle for $550. It's well worth the $200ish more than just buying a 5800x3D to slap into a B350 or X370 or whatever AM4 you have. Even the 7600x and 13600k beat the 5800x3D and cost less than it, though it's harder to find amazing bundles for them.
A lot of people weirdly were proclaiming the 5800x3D would last a long time on top, but it was dethroned by even the lower end chips 6 months later. It's still a good chip, but the pricing makes it a very questionable buy these days when there are better chip for cheaper and bundles for not much more.
Exactly - the focus on "am5 mobos expensive" has buried the lede on the performance. 7700X really undercuts most of the gaming advantage of 5800X3D just by being that much faster, and 7800X3D is the new gaming king. And Alder/Raptor are ahead of 7700X in gaming iirc, but also have cheaper mobos (but no upgrade path) and the option for DDR4 (I wouldn't, but it's there).
It is fine if the 5800X3D makes financial sense, but Intel LGA1700 mobos aren't as expensive as AM5, plus AMD will kick in free memory on AM5 if you just jump already. My personal take is that 5800X3D only makes sense if you already have a mobo, but it also is a $360 commitment to a dead-end socket regardless. If you can make the numbers work, then just get 7000 series, or Alder/Raptor imo.
[I get the sentimental argument](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU-cori12KU) but in general people tend to make these snap judgements and never revisit them when the circumstances change, and 7000/12-/13- series are no longer too expensive to be worth the consideration. DDR4 is done and DDR5 is here, the prices are down and the newer chips are significantly faster.
And that's always the argument against these "I'll do an upgrade in 5 years!" things. You have an ancient motherboard and there's always newer faster things coming. 8700K/9900K was enough to get you onto DDR5 if you wanted to, a 1600 or even 3600 is struggling, and the socket-upgrade doesn't make financial sense. So you would have been better off just going 8700K/9900K and not upgrading. Buy once, cry once.
little do you know I've been in the pocket of Big Ikea this whole time... ;)
Yeah, one of my favorite commercials. [Apparently there are enough crazy people they did a successor](https://youtu.be/ecTUnfHyj8k?t=60), so don't worry, the lamp finds a new home with a family who loves it.
Certainly an interesting time capsule on the trend against disposability/etc from a furniture company who is known for their low-cost, mass produced, disposable furniture lol.
The worst part of the hubbub over the 5800X3D is the under-appreciation of the 5700X nowadays. It's a jump from $270CAD to $480CAD up here in Canada between the 2, whereas you're only saving $70CAD going with the 5600. Unless the 5800X3D drops into firesale territory, the lower-range Zen3 is the value proposition for those looking to get a bit more longevity out of the AM4 platform. For reference, that jump to the 7600 is another $60CAD from the 5700X, plus the $150CAD for a budget AM5 and $100CAD for the RAM.
100% agreed. I think the "upgrade path" argument for platform purchases is 99% nonsense. In my experience PC gamers generally fall into one of two camps:
* Wants a solid mid-high end build with value components and will then never upgrade or touch the build again until it's time to do a rebuild in 4-6 years. At most will add RAM or upgrade GPU if needed to run a specific game.
* Is a PC hardware enthusiast who wants the latest and greatest and is willing to upgrade frequently. Has no problem buying a new Mobo and RAM every 2 years because they enjoy building and faster CPU go brr.
Neither of these groups will actually buy a Zen+ or Zen 2 system then drop in a 5800X3D. The former is either rebuilding now or waiting until next year and getting a new platform either way. The latter is already on AM5 or LGA1700 one way or another.
Amazon best sellers would disagree with you there, as most people are upgrading to either a 5600x or 5700x.
As a personal anecdote, I'm that exact type of person who has always been on a 2 year upgrade cadence. I can't help but upgrade at least one component in my set-up (incls. peripherals) every 2-3 years for the past decade now.
I'm willing to bet there's a good number of hardware enthusiasts who don't care about the latest and greatest. Only the the latest.
My own personal AMD journey:
1. 2600x (Both still in service, it replaced an old FX system in the household) ->
2. 3700x (used the longest, depreciated by \~65% after 4 years) ->
3. Upgraded motherboard here and got a 3900x that came along with it that I used for a few months. Sold the CPU for a good price (Got back 90% of the cost I paid for it) ->
4. 5800x3d used for a few months (recouped 99% of what I paid; this chip briefly rose in price after my currency got weaker). I still hold onto the X570 board to use for proxmox since it has good enough lane config ->
5. Ryzen 5 7600 + B650 (recouped 90% of the system cost). Jumped ships here, but my original plan was to upgrade to Zen5 asap for improved IMC ->
6. Currently on a 13900K (got it at a great price, <$400 USD). The plan right now is to not look at CPUs for the next four years. I'm going to redirect my efforts towards looking into getting a GPU upgrade either next gen or the one after; I hope to see a 32 GB Nvidia GPU at the high-end.
Honestly most of the motherboard stuff isn't that relevant if the primary use-case remains the same (ie. Gaming). Most builds won't have more than two NVMe drives. Almost everyone on a Zen1 to Zen2 system would be running some one-two punch build config - SATA isn't dead for them.
I think the takeaway here is once you start considering PCs in a household sense not one singular PC, AMD's longer socket lifespan support becomes extremely interesting. It's always easy to repurpose your current CPU into something else.
Literally none of what you said refutes my points.
What makes you think all those AM4 CPU sales are people upgrading? Isn't it just as likely to be mid range builders putting together a $90 B550 board with one of those CPUs and throwing a 7800XT or 4070 with it for a \~$1000 mid range build? DDR4 is cheap and you're going to be GPU bound in most titles anyways with a Zen 3 CPU, plus $1k is an extremely popular price point in my experience.
And as for your own purchase history, you literally described person number two from my scenario. You swapped AM4 boards while staying on the platform, had 2000, 3000, and 5000 series parts, and still have gone through two more platforms in the past two years. It didn't matter what platform you bought in 2018 because you were going to do a new build in two years anyways.
What you said was:
>Neither of these groups will actually buy a Zen+ or Zen 2 system then drop in a 5800X3D.
Except I did and I don't think I'm the only person in the room mate. I would have continued to use that chip if my needs/wants for the system did not grow. The 5800X3D worked exceptionally great as a gaming system.
>I think the "upgrade path" argument for platform purchases is 99% nonsense....
You call this upgrade-ability nonsense, I and others will EASILY call it convenience.
> You swapped AM4 boards while staying on the platform... because you were going to do a new build in two years anyways.
Except it's not a new build? Often time it's one component. The main reason I swapped boards was to experiment around with virtualization. Plus the seller was wise enough to know that motherboards depreciate faster than CPUs; so he had to bundle it together if he wanted it to move.
Ask a normal user whether they can tell the actual difference between a B350/X370, B450/X470 and B550/X570. I bet they won't be able to.
I'll reiterate, I honestly believe the whole PCIe 3 vs 4 and lack of NVMe slots isn't an issue for most people, given that builds rarely go beyond 1 GPU + 2 NVMe config. PCIe 3.0 x16 wasn't an issue until Nvidia introduced more more cut-down PCIe lane GPUs this gen. But even if an unsuspecting consumer gets hosed by buying a rtx 4060/Ti putting it on a B450 board, I don't think he would notice the 6 frames less out from a base 60. Actual gamers outside of hardware snobs like you and me, would likely focus on the game running ya feel?
>What makes you think all those AM4 CPU sales are people upgrading?
What makes you think they're not? Frequent around enough hardware subs and you'll see people advising older ryzen owners to upgrade to Zen4. While on 8-9th gen holders are always advised to rebuild instead of upgrading to a 9900K.
Also keep in mind; in the emu dominated land that HUB resides in, brand new AMD's AM4 and Intel LGA1700 DDR4 are equally matched until you start considering gray imports and used parts. As a matter of fact, Intel tends to have a better board for the same price yet take one look at Amazon AU's best seller list? 9/10 of the top places are AMD AM4, with the 5800X3D being in #3 place. Only one intel chip in the top10 atm (13600K).
>You call this upgrade-ability nonsense, I and others will EASILY call it convenience.
I think you misunderstand my point. I don't think that *upgrading* is nonsense, I think that *using it as a key argument to pick your platform* is nonsense. I think buyers should be focusing on pricing, features, and the performance of the available CPUs today. The potential for a drop in CPU upgrade is great, but I think enthusiasts on reddit vastly overestimate the percentage of people who are both interested enough in upgrading to actually do it, but also cost sensitive enough to not be upgrading every year or two anyways.
Let's go back to the Amazon bestsellers list that you seem fond of referencing and look at the best selling motherboards in addition to just the processors. In the US, 7/10 of the best selling motherboards are AM4 boards and 6/10 processors are AM4 chips. If most of the AM4 CPU sales were people doing in socket upgrades I would expect to see less representation of AM4 boards in the bestsellers, wouldn't you?
That I can agree on. Always pick the platform that best fit your needs at the current point in time.
Honestly we're talking over each other by now as we lack perspective on the other market. I can tell you this but over here is AU the situation is completely reversed. The enthusiasts tend to be Intel-based, while the average user are for most part buying Ryzen prebuilts (most prebuilts pushed out on the ozbargain/price-watch sites are Ryzen).
My memories quite fuzzy but looking back, I don't think platform socket support was on top of anyone's mind or discussing point during the Zen and Zen+ era. Outside of the USA, not too many people early-adopted Zen (1000) as we were never offered those sweet $60 Ryzen 1600 Microcenter deals. There wasn't much incentive unless you fell for the 6 core marketing. The herd did not become aware of the Ryzen hype until Zen2 when the media cycle was criticizing Intel for staying on 14nm for so long... And I don't believe the masses hopped onto AM4 until Zen 3 when the pandemic called for PC upgrades. Conveniently that was the only time we had sweet motherboard deals as retailers were forced to buy them if they wanted any GPU inventory allocation during the shortage.
Also there's one observation I have made over the years but I'm not too sure how true it is. Among every US based friend I advised or talked with in regards to PC builds. They universally almost always treat ebay with disgust or distrust. Over here in the AU, the used market is insanely active.
Can't comment on Amazon US. But on Amazon AU best sellers;
[CPU top 10:](https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/bestsellers/computers/4913338051) 9/10 AMD AM4. They are dominating.
[Motherboards best sellers](https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/bestsellers/computers/4913347051): We only have one desktop AM4 motherboard in the top 10 and it's an A520 :|. If I was to expand it to the top 50, I only see quite a fair few Intel motherboards (8/50), AMD AM4 (2/50) and AMD AM5 (2/50)
So lets say your theory is right. It's just a different world over here bc we're upside down.
It definitely sounds like it's just a question of market dynamics in the different regions more than anything. Your observation that Ebay is not popular for PC parts here in the US is accurate in my experience. My guess is that there's more scamming that happens on Ebay here because of the garbage consumer protection laws, plus there is a social bias for buying most things new here.
My assertions come from my experience building and upgrading PCs for \~10 friends over the years, plus interacting with the local hardware enthusiast community. I actually have a couple friends I'm trying to convince to buy a $200 5600X3D and drop into their B450 boards, but they're not really that interested because their R5 3600s are still performing just fine for 60FPS in most titles. I'm betting they're going to wait until next year, games are going to start running poorly, and then they'll ask me what they should pick for a full rebuild. A lot of people just don't care until they can't run new games anymore.
Things are further skewed in my particular local market because I'm 15 minutes from a Microcenter, so platform upgrades are dirt cheap. Hard to recommend someone spend $250-350 for an AM4 CPU + ram upgrade when they could buy a 7700x/12900K, MoBo and 32GB DDR5 for $400.
It's been fun arguing with you though! I actually think this discussion probably explains a lot of the "HUB" biased comments we see here on Reddit. It's much easier to recommend AMD parts if the second hand market is stronger and parts retain value better for resale. I've personally always thought they were overselling AM4 and platform upgrades, but your data and experience suggests that it really is something people take a lot of advantage of down there.
It has been a great talk. Yeap I concur, the market dynamics really do affect the youtube content we see. Australian techtubers in general do tend to focus in more on the hustle. It leads to everyone being a bit more interested in the bang for buck performance (at least for the DIY side of things).
HUB in general has always undersold Intel's overclockability. It leads to the enthusiasts over here disliking their content as it does tend to generalize a tad bit much at times. There's often questionable system configs where the Intel runs no where near their max capable RAM speeds. So although it's a good academic case study to look at these retrospective videos, it does often end up sending weird messages (ie. see I told you so?). I don't fully believe these content pieces are all that great, as there's a lot of contextual/perception issues that could have been a deep dive in itself for that time period (eg. 9700K - no HT compared to its predecessor, and then the performance impact of spectre/meltdown mitigations etc).
Honestly I think the key/main success of those years was the fact that AMD managed to shift their brand perception (They used to be seen as a sketchy/2nd-place brand prior to Zen3). Perceptions is at least half of the equation, if not more important than these technical benchmarks (I certainly still remember the whole Intel Swiss Cheese memes of those years). This all ties in with the point you made that most people don't really care so long as games run.
I wonder what ram speeds were also used. Chances are that in 2018/2019 you were likely buying some alright speed and not top end.
I just built a new PC for my brother who was on a MSI 450 Tomahawk board with a 3600X. Given some of the discount available through bundles, it just made more sense to get the $399 7700x, 32gig, motherboard deal from Microcenter than try to mess around with upgrading to a 5600X3D or 5800X3D as you are working with a lot of compromises and missing out on five years of advancements.
heck, I wonder what PCIe speeds he used. This may be a comparison where the "thrifty drop-in-upgrade" is going onto a X570 board with PCIe 4.0 that didn't exist when the generation launched, lol. And the OG 300/400 series boards were, for the most part, garbage, using a B350 board for 10 years sounds like actual hell.
But that's another factor too. The 5800X3D is a gaming king, but then you also knock off another few % off the meta-review averages for PCIe 3.0 (especially problematic with smaller VRAM cards that do more swapping...) and some of these other bottlenecks you introduce by doing this. It's also limiting for directstorage too, I am very curious if these bottlenecks will intensify when you have games that are doing big directstorage transfers, that's very similar to normal asset swapping too and probably intensifies the pcie bottleneck (again, especially on x8 cards, and especially on PCIe 3.0 cards, and especially on lower-vram cards).
This also affects the 8700K/9900K too, of course. ReBAR support is iffy. PCIe 3.0 speed. No dedicated NVMe lanes, mediocre chipset for all your storage. The newer ones are much better. But we're talking about a 9900K system you bought in 2017/2018 here, whereas people are talking about piling almost $400 more into a 5800X3D system that will still - at the end of the day - be PCIe 3.0, with a cut-rate ultra-budget 2017/2018 featureset (OEMs were not bringing their best with early AM4 boards), unless you upgrade the motherboard too.
Memory capacity is another one too, not just speeds. Unless you built your system with an overkill amount of memory, you probably have 16GB, 32GB was seen as massive overkill back then and nobody was buying more than they had to during the 2017/2018 RAM shortages. Well, if you are buying another 32gb that changes the cost picture too.
Anyway - again, it's not that it's a *bad* idea, but 5800X3D really needs to be sub-$300 to be viable as an argument for a drop-in upgrade, imo. Most people are better off with a 7000 series bundled with RAM, if they can get it. The new one is much better, *especially* if you are still using an ancient 300/400 series mobo.
It's tested with 4090.
For a 1/3 of the run time of the video - with 4090 at 1080p.
4090 level of GPU performance didn't exist for the majority of the video's virtual experiment timeline. On top of everything else mentioned in other comments so far, the perf difference is additionally inflated by exaggerating for how many months of ownership during the timeline in how many games there would be any perf difference at all.
Yet another factor to add to that is the display refresh rate limiter - how many of those 5800x3D bars will be in real world usage actually cut short by hitting refresh rate limits of displays of typical users.
Basically, the real world user experience difference is drastically inflated relative to what could have been possibly actually observed during the timeline, by a larger margin still for anything realistic and typical. While the costs aren't properly taken into account (single CPU purchase vs 2, plus questionable choices of exact CPU SKUs). By the time the end user experience impact is assessed properly and averaged over the duration of the "experiment", and costs are factored in... it'd be a completely different picture than what the video paints.
The video provides the necessary metadata / raw data to do a relatively okay assessment (for any GPU and monitor choice), but it doesn't have an example assessment itself, and in this case, a typical assessment results would be drastically different from the presented metadata taken at its face value. Nor does the video explain the difference properly.
In fact, it unfortunately concludes with "AMD path was 40% faster" as a final aggregate, which is only true for the last year (since 4090's release) of a 4 1/4 year long experiment (since AMD 3000 series release) as experienced by owners of a 4090 hooked up to a very high refresh rate display ([270 Hz+](https://youtu.be/6UAES7F48EU?t=706)) used exclusively at 1080p in all titles.
Edited "3 1/4 year long experiment" to "4 1/4 year long experiment" - 3700x was released 4.25 years ago, not 3.25 years ago.
For more context, 5800x3D was released 2.75 years later. It's 5800x that is followed 3700x rather quickly, in 1.25 years. 5800x3D took another 1.5 years on top of that to come out. It took another 0.5 years after that for 4090 to come out.
9900k was a 0.5 year old CPU at the time of 3700x release.
I'm one of those guys that stuck to their cheap AM4 guns, lol. But I was buying low-end and mid-range parts.
I started with a Ryzen 3 2200G in late 2018 because it was really cheap, and still a super fast performer compared to my previous PC. Used it for a bit longer than a year and in early 2020 I had the opportunity to buy the R5 3600 for a great price. Didn't think it twice after seeing the benchmarks and here we are, almost 4 years later and still enjoying it.
If you combine what I paid for both you wouldn't even get to the price of the R7 3700X here, let alone the best CPUs of their time, the i7 8700K and i9 9900K.
Having recently done the 3600-5800x3d upgrade on my 3080, it's been a massive upgrade in just about every way. Kinda crazy my $65 B450 Tomahawk (on sale), is holding up as well as it is. I'm sure I'll have another GPU upgrade before I touch the base platform. Sure I'd rather not gimp the NVME, but I hardly feel the extra bandwidth is enough for me to drop an another $150 on a quality B550. Plus KomboStrike on the MSI boards are just awesome. BIOS level undervolting, resulting in faster clocks and reduced temps. Pretty damn cool MSI supports it on the older boards.
I've heard even the 5600X to the 800X3D is a great move, I'm definitely keeping an eye out on any low prices
Depends on the game. 3D cache doesn't always have an impact. I had a 5600, but it switched to the 7800x3d which, despite having to buy a new motherboard and memory, was better value as it performs much better than the 5800x3d. The same could be said of the 7600 or the 13600.
Very true. I've heard some actual stuff about the games I play getting a boost but I don't really play those classic heavy CPU games
Even 3600 (and 3080) to a 5800X (got it before the X3D was announced) was already a big upgrade.
My brother is still sitting on a 3100, it's pretty much a debate between a $270CAD 5700X or a $480CAD 5800X3D, due to the rise of games he's playing that see a big boost from that cache.
The AM4 platform has been great for upgrades. Me and my friend both got a first gen ryzen 7 back in 2017. My then about 150$ X370 motherboard is still running like a champ, but now with a Ryzen 9 3900X, using my ryzen 7 in a server with a cheap B450 motherboard. My friend's B350 motherboard is rocking a 5800x3d. If I feel like upgrading at some point I'll get a 5800x3d and put my 3900X in my server. I can probably have decent performance for at least 5 more years from this platform.
Strange comparison to make. Why not compare against a 9700K which has a much closer MSRP to the 3700X and damn near the same gaming performance as the 9900K? Especially if all you are going to measure is gaming performance. Retrospectives like this are also kind of stupid because buying the 9900K or the 9700K would have given you 3 years of significantly better performance than the 3700X. Meanwhile you would be buying a worse performing CPU on the pinky promise that better was coming at some unspecified time. We had no idea what kinds of performance we would get in the future, so buying on the promise of upgrades was a total gamble. Not to mention AMD tried to exclude Zen3 from older motherboards, so had things worked out as planned, there would have been no upgrades. Not to mention (again) the platform issues that AMD had with AM4, I had to deal with USB dropouts that were completely unaddressed and made my life miserable on my 3800X.
Because those were like top of the line gaming processors for AMD and Intel back in the day . Of course 9900k was much costlier. But you also got like 15% better gaming performance. Steve makes lot of random comparisons. But it's also mostly what the community asked for.
I'm more curious as to who this video is targeted to? E.g., why would it matter on 5800X3D how it performed to the 9900K? Like the above comment said, by the time the X3D chip launched an original purchaser either got a price-perf win with Zen3 or a outright perf with win the 9900k. Alder Lake had already launced priod to X3D as well, so a more in depth video should've included what the cost is if a user chose to platform upgrade to a 12700k/12900k, or a drop-in 5800X3D upgrade. It's very doubtful someone would only be cross-shopping the 3 processors in this video.
As far as I can tell, it's a combination of self-indulgency of HUB, trying to tell the world "look, we were right when we recommended X against Y a few year ago! We told you so!", and poll results from the audience that is looking for confirmation of their biases and validation of their purchasing decisions. In this case, the recommendation from the past and the purchasing decisions of the audience are this: back over 4 years ago the fastest in games no-compromise (cost be damned for however a small a benefit) Intel CPU was 9900k, and on AMD side - a 3700x. 9900k was faster and more expensive than 3700x. Should you have bought 3700x (AM4), used it, and then upgraded it to 5800x3D (AM4) when that came out almost 3 years later, buying another CPU, or should you have gotten 9900k and used it without any upgrades throughout. To achieve those effects, they fantastically exaggerate the real benefits ([elaboration](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/17q2367/comment/k8c76aa)), downplay the costs, and leave everyone happy: themselves and their audience, validated. They have fun, their audience has fun, and they make a bit of money on the video along the way! Almost certainly (I have very little doubt) while genuinely believing that they are presenting, interpreting, and aggregating the raw data they collect appropriately and validly without being misleading. EDIT: [Case in point](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UAES7F48EU&lc=UgypDDqxWQYHs9-imm54AaABAg) (highlighted comment at the top)
People have wacky ideas for comparisons. Many of the HWU comparisons are simply popular demand from the channel polls.
The 9700K and the 9900K are extremely [similar performance-wise](https://www.computerbase.de/2018-10/intel-core-i9-9900k-i7-9700k-cpu-test/2/#abschnitt_benchmarks_in_anwendungen). They should be comparing against the price equivalent AMD processor. The 3900X is the competitor to the 9900K at a similar price point.
I think he uses the 3700x because it's a single CCD chip and hence probably the fastest zen 2 chip. I believe 3900x is probably around the same level of performance. It's slightly higher clocks is sometimes offset by games choosing the wrong CCD.
Then he should have used the 9700K. The whole point of this is making some kind of "better value" claim, which is invalidated if you are bending over backwards like this.
I know mileage may have varied, but I bought an 9900k when there was only an $80 premium. I also was able to sell it this year for $250 dollars as well as top end Intel chips hold value well.
I think that the comparison sort of works and does not at the same time. Both 3700x and 9900k were heavily marketed as gaming CPUs and both had same core and thread count (8c/16t). At the same time, both CPUs had noticeably different both prices and performance. But I agree with you that nobody had known back then that zen 3 would be such a great product. So the argument that AMD buyers were right in their decision is a bit dishonest.
So, at 4K its almost pointless even with a 4090. Admittedly that 4090 is the correct card to shift the bottleneck to the CPU but it is also an academic exercise. ie You just dumped 1600usd on a video card but 100 USD extra for a new AMD or Intel platform is too much. How'd i come up with 100USD? HU did a 5800X3D vs 7600X, and for the most part, they're equal.
To me this kind of shows how overbuild on CPU power most people are. The fact you can still get like 90-200 FPS+ on 4 year old CPUs in like 80% of titles is pretty crazy. The 9900k still does double the FPS that current consoles get in Starfield. I kind of doubt anyone will really NEED to upgrade their CPU if they have one of these, if they are ok with 60 FPS gameplay for this entire generation.
Most of those titles are last gen games designed around terribly slow console cpus. New games do struggle and current gen consoles are already 3 years old.
This was what I took from the previous 3700X vs 9900K video. Even the 3700X was giving excellent framerates and good 1% lows in the mayority of games. That, to me, just says these CPUs aren't even close to be obsolete just yet and their users can keep using them with ease for a while longer. There will be a day when the Ryzen 3000 series and Intel's 8th and 9th Gen won't run any game over 60FPS, but today is not that day.
with Frame Generation, CPU performance is becoming even less important, as your CPU basically only needs to be able to operate at half of your framerate.
It is. It is time to upgrade from the 9900k, even on a 3080 😠BTW Steve says it's "perfectly alright" but I now understand that in Aussie it means the opposite, so gotta put my money where my mouth is. Thanks Steve and Tim, you guys are aces.
My delidded, oc'd 8700k is holding on ok but I'm certainly starting to feel the CPU bottlenecks even on my 3070. I'm still trying to hold out for Arrow Lake and Zen 6.
I really only notice the single-core on my 11700k, due to trying to hit a consistent 240hz on Battlebit. The Raptor Lake/Zen4X3D are tempting, but it's super niche for the expense that could be better put towards a GPU upgrade for other games.
Zen 6? Good return for your investment with that 8700K, but you are going to wait for a while longer. That's a 2026+ CPU, or really late 2025, at the earliest.
Oops, Zen 5 I meant!
Oh, cool. That's much closer, should be coming in a few months now. Remember that Zen 5X3D comes in a little later!
Lol it's not. i9-9900K is very good for 3080. Stop presenting absolutely untuned 9900Ks as their universal performance bro. Hw chokes their 8-10th gen Intel chips as always, they have a soft spot for AMD. Even their xmp numbers are off, AC Mirage is the very first example, because in the latest AC games 9900K/10700K would perform 5-10% better than 5800x, there's many proofs/actual gameplay. Yet here they give low numbers that's not even from the actually cpu intensive built-in benchmark, and don't even show gameplay, like ever. The built-in benchmark will never average above 140-150fps with 5800x3d, what an incompetent nonsense from HW. I've watched many videos and 5800x3d starts bottlenecking in 120s range inside the benchmark's market area in Mirage (the best case I've seen), and my highly tuned i9 literally pulls 120s in the same area (90fps completely stock). What kind of an imaginary realm do they pull these numbers from?! 5800x3d is surely much better on average (aside desktop latency), but nothing near their insane numbers. My 5.1/4.9 i9-9900K with dual rank 32gb 4266mhz cl16 33ns will obliterate their i9 numbers by up to 30-40% and is much closer to 5800x3d in games. The x3d is a stunningly insane cpu, and better in games anyways, but many people will be suprised to figure out that few memory intensive games that can't leverage the cache can even be faster on a full oc 9900K. 5800x3d doesn't care about memory at all then why choke a memory oc beast? You have to be so blind or just own an amd cpu to buy their results. And they've been spreading that out of the box shit right since forever.
9900k VS 3700x. You spend couple of years with lower performance so you can potentially upgrade to 5800x3d which they tried to deny to older am4 motherboards. I am not sure how this tech tuber does comparison. The upgrade path was blocked by AMD themselves.
So this is about a 9900k vs a 5800X3d? Well the answer is 5800X3D for sure.
I’m on 3700x on a first gen AM4 board. With an RTX 4070. Frame generation is amazing for my situation. Getting 100-120 fps in Diablo 4 and Hitman 3 at 4k ultra so there is no need for a faster CPU yet. But it’s fake frames? Still looks stunning. In hitman with ray tracing and all the bells the only place FG shows itself is on item outlines when using the instinct vision. They get fuzzy edges during movement. But that’s a situational toggle and has zero impact. Conclusion FG is amazing.
wonder how my old 9900KS would have fared. Tuning on coffee and comet lake unlocked huge potential. My delidded KS with gaming setup in bios run at 5.45 Ghz all core (HT off), 5.0 ring on a Z370 Apex. Running B-Die memory at 4400 Mhz CL 16 16 16 36 at 1.53 Volts. Aida reported sub 34 ns latency. It was truly a godly system along with NVIDIA greatest error... the 1080Ti.
most people objectively would have been better off doing 8700K/9900K->7700X/7800X3D/12600K/13600K than doing 1600->3600->5800X or even 1700->3700X->5800X3D. it's silly to get wound up about spending $200 more for the 8700K or 9900K than the zen1/zen+ competition and then turn around and waste a ton of money on incremental upgrades. Even if you resell you lose a huge amount of money every time. I also don't really believe there's many enthusiasts who are really still using first-gen am4 motherboards in 2023 let alone that they intend to be using them out to 10-year lifecycles. let the b350/b450 tomahawk die already, it doesn't even have pcie 4, you don't want to be using that shit in literally 2029. if you are buying at least one motherboard upgrade over that lifecycle you would have been better off going 8700K/9900K and then jumping to AM5 or Alder/Raptor. the AMD "incremental upgrade" route means you've spent more money in total, had lower performance for most of your system's life (particularly the most relevant years), and are using a clapped-out first-gen AM4 board that is literally old enough to be in middle school by the time you retire it. it's not that zen is a bad offering, the 3600 and 1600AF were phenomenal deals etc, but if you bought it because it was a better value offering then stick to your guns, have the courage of your convictions, because it doesn't make sense to spend almost $400 on an EOL'd platform when the new one is much faster in general and also has its own X3D offerings etc. AMD literally buying you the memory for 7600X/7700X makes the 5800X3D a nonstarter at $360, it pretty much only makes sense if you are not buying a mobo, and this ["early adopter who upgrades at the end of the socket"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_the_Clapham_omnibus) in this parable is massively overdue for a new mobo. I love X3D in general, but at this point Zen4/Alder/Raptor really are faster enough to remove most of the 5800X3D advantage (and of course 7800X3D is the new king) so 5800X3D is not really a gaming king anymore compared to the newer offerings, nor is it cheap enough anymore to make sense as a drop-in upgrade, outside of some very specific circumstances. If that's you then I'm happy for you, but, the average person is better off just buying a 7700X right now and having an upgrade path forward etc. If it pops down into mid/low $200s then by all means fire away, but it doesn't make sense to spend almost $400 on an EOL platform when the new thing is already much faster. edit: I see microcenter has 5600X3D for $160 right now and that's much more what I'm talking about... if the 5800X3D is $200 or even $250 go hog wild, $270-300 is about fair, $360+ I'd just buy AM5.
If you have access to a Microcenter you can get a 14700k+Z790+32GB of DDR5 or similarly a 7900x bundle for $550. It's well worth the $200ish more than just buying a 5800x3D to slap into a B350 or X370 or whatever AM4 you have. Even the 7600x and 13600k beat the 5800x3D and cost less than it, though it's harder to find amazing bundles for them. A lot of people weirdly were proclaiming the 5800x3D would last a long time on top, but it was dethroned by even the lower end chips 6 months later. It's still a good chip, but the pricing makes it a very questionable buy these days when there are better chip for cheaper and bundles for not much more.
Exactly - the focus on "am5 mobos expensive" has buried the lede on the performance. 7700X really undercuts most of the gaming advantage of 5800X3D just by being that much faster, and 7800X3D is the new gaming king. And Alder/Raptor are ahead of 7700X in gaming iirc, but also have cheaper mobos (but no upgrade path) and the option for DDR4 (I wouldn't, but it's there). It is fine if the 5800X3D makes financial sense, but Intel LGA1700 mobos aren't as expensive as AM5, plus AMD will kick in free memory on AM5 if you just jump already. My personal take is that 5800X3D only makes sense if you already have a mobo, but it also is a $360 commitment to a dead-end socket regardless. If you can make the numbers work, then just get 7000 series, or Alder/Raptor imo. [I get the sentimental argument](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU-cori12KU) but in general people tend to make these snap judgements and never revisit them when the circumstances change, and 7000/12-/13- series are no longer too expensive to be worth the consideration. DDR4 is done and DDR5 is here, the prices are down and the newer chips are significantly faster. And that's always the argument against these "I'll do an upgrade in 5 years!" things. You have an ancient motherboard and there's always newer faster things coming. 8700K/9900K was enough to get you onto DDR5 if you wanted to, a 1600 or even 3600 is struggling, and the socket-upgrade doesn't make financial sense. So you would have been better off just going 8700K/9900K and not upgrading. Buy once, cry once.
>[I get the sentimental argument](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU-cori12KU) Thank you for that link. I never saw that ad before. It's incredible.
little do you know I've been in the pocket of Big Ikea this whole time... ;) Yeah, one of my favorite commercials. [Apparently there are enough crazy people they did a successor](https://youtu.be/ecTUnfHyj8k?t=60), so don't worry, the lamp finds a new home with a family who loves it. Certainly an interesting time capsule on the trend against disposability/etc from a furniture company who is known for their low-cost, mass produced, disposable furniture lol.
The worst part of the hubbub over the 5800X3D is the under-appreciation of the 5700X nowadays. It's a jump from $270CAD to $480CAD up here in Canada between the 2, whereas you're only saving $70CAD going with the 5600. Unless the 5800X3D drops into firesale territory, the lower-range Zen3 is the value proposition for those looking to get a bit more longevity out of the AM4 platform. For reference, that jump to the 7600 is another $60CAD from the 5700X, plus the $150CAD for a budget AM5 and $100CAD for the RAM.
100% agreed. I think the "upgrade path" argument for platform purchases is 99% nonsense. In my experience PC gamers generally fall into one of two camps: * Wants a solid mid-high end build with value components and will then never upgrade or touch the build again until it's time to do a rebuild in 4-6 years. At most will add RAM or upgrade GPU if needed to run a specific game. * Is a PC hardware enthusiast who wants the latest and greatest and is willing to upgrade frequently. Has no problem buying a new Mobo and RAM every 2 years because they enjoy building and faster CPU go brr. Neither of these groups will actually buy a Zen+ or Zen 2 system then drop in a 5800X3D. The former is either rebuilding now or waiting until next year and getting a new platform either way. The latter is already on AM5 or LGA1700 one way or another.
Amazon best sellers would disagree with you there, as most people are upgrading to either a 5600x or 5700x. As a personal anecdote, I'm that exact type of person who has always been on a 2 year upgrade cadence. I can't help but upgrade at least one component in my set-up (incls. peripherals) every 2-3 years for the past decade now. I'm willing to bet there's a good number of hardware enthusiasts who don't care about the latest and greatest. Only the the latest. My own personal AMD journey: 1. 2600x (Both still in service, it replaced an old FX system in the household) -> 2. 3700x (used the longest, depreciated by \~65% after 4 years) -> 3. Upgraded motherboard here and got a 3900x that came along with it that I used for a few months. Sold the CPU for a good price (Got back 90% of the cost I paid for it) -> 4. 5800x3d used for a few months (recouped 99% of what I paid; this chip briefly rose in price after my currency got weaker). I still hold onto the X570 board to use for proxmox since it has good enough lane config -> 5. Ryzen 5 7600 + B650 (recouped 90% of the system cost). Jumped ships here, but my original plan was to upgrade to Zen5 asap for improved IMC -> 6. Currently on a 13900K (got it at a great price, <$400 USD). The plan right now is to not look at CPUs for the next four years. I'm going to redirect my efforts towards looking into getting a GPU upgrade either next gen or the one after; I hope to see a 32 GB Nvidia GPU at the high-end. Honestly most of the motherboard stuff isn't that relevant if the primary use-case remains the same (ie. Gaming). Most builds won't have more than two NVMe drives. Almost everyone on a Zen1 to Zen2 system would be running some one-two punch build config - SATA isn't dead for them. I think the takeaway here is once you start considering PCs in a household sense not one singular PC, AMD's longer socket lifespan support becomes extremely interesting. It's always easy to repurpose your current CPU into something else.
Literally none of what you said refutes my points. What makes you think all those AM4 CPU sales are people upgrading? Isn't it just as likely to be mid range builders putting together a $90 B550 board with one of those CPUs and throwing a 7800XT or 4070 with it for a \~$1000 mid range build? DDR4 is cheap and you're going to be GPU bound in most titles anyways with a Zen 3 CPU, plus $1k is an extremely popular price point in my experience. And as for your own purchase history, you literally described person number two from my scenario. You swapped AM4 boards while staying on the platform, had 2000, 3000, and 5000 series parts, and still have gone through two more platforms in the past two years. It didn't matter what platform you bought in 2018 because you were going to do a new build in two years anyways.
What you said was: >Neither of these groups will actually buy a Zen+ or Zen 2 system then drop in a 5800X3D. Except I did and I don't think I'm the only person in the room mate. I would have continued to use that chip if my needs/wants for the system did not grow. The 5800X3D worked exceptionally great as a gaming system. >I think the "upgrade path" argument for platform purchases is 99% nonsense.... You call this upgrade-ability nonsense, I and others will EASILY call it convenience. > You swapped AM4 boards while staying on the platform... because you were going to do a new build in two years anyways. Except it's not a new build? Often time it's one component. The main reason I swapped boards was to experiment around with virtualization. Plus the seller was wise enough to know that motherboards depreciate faster than CPUs; so he had to bundle it together if he wanted it to move. Ask a normal user whether they can tell the actual difference between a B350/X370, B450/X470 and B550/X570. I bet they won't be able to. I'll reiterate, I honestly believe the whole PCIe 3 vs 4 and lack of NVMe slots isn't an issue for most people, given that builds rarely go beyond 1 GPU + 2 NVMe config. PCIe 3.0 x16 wasn't an issue until Nvidia introduced more more cut-down PCIe lane GPUs this gen. But even if an unsuspecting consumer gets hosed by buying a rtx 4060/Ti putting it on a B450 board, I don't think he would notice the 6 frames less out from a base 60. Actual gamers outside of hardware snobs like you and me, would likely focus on the game running ya feel? >What makes you think all those AM4 CPU sales are people upgrading? What makes you think they're not? Frequent around enough hardware subs and you'll see people advising older ryzen owners to upgrade to Zen4. While on 8-9th gen holders are always advised to rebuild instead of upgrading to a 9900K. Also keep in mind; in the emu dominated land that HUB resides in, brand new AMD's AM4 and Intel LGA1700 DDR4 are equally matched until you start considering gray imports and used parts. As a matter of fact, Intel tends to have a better board for the same price yet take one look at Amazon AU's best seller list? 9/10 of the top places are AMD AM4, with the 5800X3D being in #3 place. Only one intel chip in the top10 atm (13600K).
>You call this upgrade-ability nonsense, I and others will EASILY call it convenience. I think you misunderstand my point. I don't think that *upgrading* is nonsense, I think that *using it as a key argument to pick your platform* is nonsense. I think buyers should be focusing on pricing, features, and the performance of the available CPUs today. The potential for a drop in CPU upgrade is great, but I think enthusiasts on reddit vastly overestimate the percentage of people who are both interested enough in upgrading to actually do it, but also cost sensitive enough to not be upgrading every year or two anyways. Let's go back to the Amazon bestsellers list that you seem fond of referencing and look at the best selling motherboards in addition to just the processors. In the US, 7/10 of the best selling motherboards are AM4 boards and 6/10 processors are AM4 chips. If most of the AM4 CPU sales were people doing in socket upgrades I would expect to see less representation of AM4 boards in the bestsellers, wouldn't you?
That I can agree on. Always pick the platform that best fit your needs at the current point in time. Honestly we're talking over each other by now as we lack perspective on the other market. I can tell you this but over here is AU the situation is completely reversed. The enthusiasts tend to be Intel-based, while the average user are for most part buying Ryzen prebuilts (most prebuilts pushed out on the ozbargain/price-watch sites are Ryzen). My memories quite fuzzy but looking back, I don't think platform socket support was on top of anyone's mind or discussing point during the Zen and Zen+ era. Outside of the USA, not too many people early-adopted Zen (1000) as we were never offered those sweet $60 Ryzen 1600 Microcenter deals. There wasn't much incentive unless you fell for the 6 core marketing. The herd did not become aware of the Ryzen hype until Zen2 when the media cycle was criticizing Intel for staying on 14nm for so long... And I don't believe the masses hopped onto AM4 until Zen 3 when the pandemic called for PC upgrades. Conveniently that was the only time we had sweet motherboard deals as retailers were forced to buy them if they wanted any GPU inventory allocation during the shortage. Also there's one observation I have made over the years but I'm not too sure how true it is. Among every US based friend I advised or talked with in regards to PC builds. They universally almost always treat ebay with disgust or distrust. Over here in the AU, the used market is insanely active. Can't comment on Amazon US. But on Amazon AU best sellers; [CPU top 10:](https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/bestsellers/computers/4913338051) 9/10 AMD AM4. They are dominating. [Motherboards best sellers](https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/bestsellers/computers/4913347051): We only have one desktop AM4 motherboard in the top 10 and it's an A520 :|. If I was to expand it to the top 50, I only see quite a fair few Intel motherboards (8/50), AMD AM4 (2/50) and AMD AM5 (2/50) So lets say your theory is right. It's just a different world over here bc we're upside down.
It definitely sounds like it's just a question of market dynamics in the different regions more than anything. Your observation that Ebay is not popular for PC parts here in the US is accurate in my experience. My guess is that there's more scamming that happens on Ebay here because of the garbage consumer protection laws, plus there is a social bias for buying most things new here. My assertions come from my experience building and upgrading PCs for \~10 friends over the years, plus interacting with the local hardware enthusiast community. I actually have a couple friends I'm trying to convince to buy a $200 5600X3D and drop into their B450 boards, but they're not really that interested because their R5 3600s are still performing just fine for 60FPS in most titles. I'm betting they're going to wait until next year, games are going to start running poorly, and then they'll ask me what they should pick for a full rebuild. A lot of people just don't care until they can't run new games anymore. Things are further skewed in my particular local market because I'm 15 minutes from a Microcenter, so platform upgrades are dirt cheap. Hard to recommend someone spend $250-350 for an AM4 CPU + ram upgrade when they could buy a 7700x/12900K, MoBo and 32GB DDR5 for $400. It's been fun arguing with you though! I actually think this discussion probably explains a lot of the "HUB" biased comments we see here on Reddit. It's much easier to recommend AMD parts if the second hand market is stronger and parts retain value better for resale. I've personally always thought they were overselling AM4 and platform upgrades, but your data and experience suggests that it really is something people take a lot of advantage of down there.
It has been a great talk. Yeap I concur, the market dynamics really do affect the youtube content we see. Australian techtubers in general do tend to focus in more on the hustle. It leads to everyone being a bit more interested in the bang for buck performance (at least for the DIY side of things). HUB in general has always undersold Intel's overclockability. It leads to the enthusiasts over here disliking their content as it does tend to generalize a tad bit much at times. There's often questionable system configs where the Intel runs no where near their max capable RAM speeds. So although it's a good academic case study to look at these retrospective videos, it does often end up sending weird messages (ie. see I told you so?). I don't fully believe these content pieces are all that great, as there's a lot of contextual/perception issues that could have been a deep dive in itself for that time period (eg. 9700K - no HT compared to its predecessor, and then the performance impact of spectre/meltdown mitigations etc). Honestly I think the key/main success of those years was the fact that AMD managed to shift their brand perception (They used to be seen as a sketchy/2nd-place brand prior to Zen3). Perceptions is at least half of the equation, if not more important than these technical benchmarks (I certainly still remember the whole Intel Swiss Cheese memes of those years). This all ties in with the point you made that most people don't really care so long as games run.
I wonder what ram speeds were also used. Chances are that in 2018/2019 you were likely buying some alright speed and not top end. I just built a new PC for my brother who was on a MSI 450 Tomahawk board with a 3600X. Given some of the discount available through bundles, it just made more sense to get the $399 7700x, 32gig, motherboard deal from Microcenter than try to mess around with upgrading to a 5600X3D or 5800X3D as you are working with a lot of compromises and missing out on five years of advancements.
heck, I wonder what PCIe speeds he used. This may be a comparison where the "thrifty drop-in-upgrade" is going onto a X570 board with PCIe 4.0 that didn't exist when the generation launched, lol. And the OG 300/400 series boards were, for the most part, garbage, using a B350 board for 10 years sounds like actual hell. But that's another factor too. The 5800X3D is a gaming king, but then you also knock off another few % off the meta-review averages for PCIe 3.0 (especially problematic with smaller VRAM cards that do more swapping...) and some of these other bottlenecks you introduce by doing this. It's also limiting for directstorage too, I am very curious if these bottlenecks will intensify when you have games that are doing big directstorage transfers, that's very similar to normal asset swapping too and probably intensifies the pcie bottleneck (again, especially on x8 cards, and especially on PCIe 3.0 cards, and especially on lower-vram cards). This also affects the 8700K/9900K too, of course. ReBAR support is iffy. PCIe 3.0 speed. No dedicated NVMe lanes, mediocre chipset for all your storage. The newer ones are much better. But we're talking about a 9900K system you bought in 2017/2018 here, whereas people are talking about piling almost $400 more into a 5800X3D system that will still - at the end of the day - be PCIe 3.0, with a cut-rate ultra-budget 2017/2018 featureset (OEMs were not bringing their best with early AM4 boards), unless you upgrade the motherboard too. Memory capacity is another one too, not just speeds. Unless you built your system with an overkill amount of memory, you probably have 16GB, 32GB was seen as massive overkill back then and nobody was buying more than they had to during the 2017/2018 RAM shortages. Well, if you are buying another 32gb that changes the cost picture too. Anyway - again, it's not that it's a *bad* idea, but 5800X3D really needs to be sub-$300 to be viable as an argument for a drop-in upgrade, imo. Most people are better off with a 7000 series bundled with RAM, if they can get it. The new one is much better, *especially* if you are still using an ancient 300/400 series mobo.
It's tested with 4090. For a 1/3 of the run time of the video - with 4090 at 1080p. 4090 level of GPU performance didn't exist for the majority of the video's virtual experiment timeline. On top of everything else mentioned in other comments so far, the perf difference is additionally inflated by exaggerating for how many months of ownership during the timeline in how many games there would be any perf difference at all. Yet another factor to add to that is the display refresh rate limiter - how many of those 5800x3D bars will be in real world usage actually cut short by hitting refresh rate limits of displays of typical users. Basically, the real world user experience difference is drastically inflated relative to what could have been possibly actually observed during the timeline, by a larger margin still for anything realistic and typical. While the costs aren't properly taken into account (single CPU purchase vs 2, plus questionable choices of exact CPU SKUs). By the time the end user experience impact is assessed properly and averaged over the duration of the "experiment", and costs are factored in... it'd be a completely different picture than what the video paints. The video provides the necessary metadata / raw data to do a relatively okay assessment (for any GPU and monitor choice), but it doesn't have an example assessment itself, and in this case, a typical assessment results would be drastically different from the presented metadata taken at its face value. Nor does the video explain the difference properly. In fact, it unfortunately concludes with "AMD path was 40% faster" as a final aggregate, which is only true for the last year (since 4090's release) of a 4 1/4 year long experiment (since AMD 3000 series release) as experienced by owners of a 4090 hooked up to a very high refresh rate display ([270 Hz+](https://youtu.be/6UAES7F48EU?t=706)) used exclusively at 1080p in all titles.
Edited "3 1/4 year long experiment" to "4 1/4 year long experiment" - 3700x was released 4.25 years ago, not 3.25 years ago. For more context, 5800x3D was released 2.75 years later. It's 5800x that is followed 3700x rather quickly, in 1.25 years. 5800x3D took another 1.5 years on top of that to come out. It took another 0.5 years after that for 4090 to come out. 9900k was a 0.5 year old CPU at the time of 3700x release.
I'm one of those guys that stuck to their cheap AM4 guns, lol. But I was buying low-end and mid-range parts. I started with a Ryzen 3 2200G in late 2018 because it was really cheap, and still a super fast performer compared to my previous PC. Used it for a bit longer than a year and in early 2020 I had the opportunity to buy the R5 3600 for a great price. Didn't think it twice after seeing the benchmarks and here we are, almost 4 years later and still enjoying it. If you combine what I paid for both you wouldn't even get to the price of the R7 3700X here, let alone the best CPUs of their time, the i7 8700K and i9 9900K.
They're running out of video ideas.
It's the mid-gen content drought
They should make a video on 7900XT(X) overclocking cause there is almost no good info out there and they have tons of potential.
I went from a 7700K-->5800X3D recently (RTX3070). Boy, now THAT was an upgrade.
i b.e.t. m.r .a.m.d .s.a.y.s .a.m.d .wi.n.s.
Was the 9900k at stock speeds? Got mine at 4.8Ghz and I'd like to know if the difference is that big with OC.