I'm looking for advice on building a gaming PC and I'm stuck choosing between two setups. One consists of a Ryzen 7 5700 paired with an ASUS TUF Gaming B550-PLUS WiFi II and an RTX 5060, while the other has a Ryzen 5 3600 with the same motherboard and GPU. I understand that the RTX 5060 supports PCIe 5.0, but the B550 motherboard only supports PCIe 4.0, and the Ryzen 5 supports PCIe 4.0 as well. The Ryzen 7 5700, on the other hand, only supports PCIe 3.0. My main concern is whether running the RTX 5060 on PCIe 3.0 will notably decrease performance compared to PCIe 4.0. Additionally, should I prioritize the more powerful CPU (the 5700) despite the PCIe limitation, or go for the 3600 that utilizes full PCIe 4.0? I'm focused on gaming performance, but I'm also on a budget. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!
1 Answer
I think the Ryzen 5 3600 is definitely the better option here. Running the RTX 5060 on PCIe 3.0 won't drastically impact your gaming performance right away, but if you run out of VRAM, you could see drops in performance. Plus, the Ryzen 5 has more L3 cache, which helps with smoothness in games. So overall, you might experience less stuttering with the 3600 compared to the 5700. Hardware Unboxed did a good video explaining this too!
This comment really nails it! Thanks for sharing those insights!