I've been using this PC for about two years: a Ryzen 5 5600G with the stock cooler, an ASRock Radeon RX 7800 XT, 32GB of G.Skill DDR4-3200, a 1TB SSD, and a 1TB NVMe drive. It's running on a 1440p 165Hz monitor inside a Corsair 4000D with the two included case fans.
Most of my games are fine, and in Forza Horizon 6 both the CPU and GPU often run in the high 90% range. I'm mainly interested in better CPU performance for strategy games such as Hearts of Iron IV, rather than fixing a major gaming bottleneck. I've also had occasional crashes or freezes in Battlefield 6, Forza Horizon 6, and Cyberpunk 2077. Reinstalling the graphics drivers with DDU sometimes helps, so I suspect the GPU or its drivers may be involved. Temperatures are around 55°C at idle and 85°C under load.
With hardware prices potentially increasing, I'm wondering whether I should upgrade within AM4, perhaps to a Ryzen 7 5700X3D or 5800X3D, or move to AM5 for a longer upgrade path. My budget is preferably under $300, though I could spend more if the improvement is worthwhile. Would it make more sense to buy a reasonably priced AM4 CPU now and wait for a later platform, or start over with AM5?
3 Answers
AM4 is already at the end of its upgrade path, so it is not the best choice for long-term future-proofing. However, replacing the whole platform is expensive and probably unnecessary if your current games run well. A Ryzen 7 5700X3D is usually the value choice for this system: it gives a meaningful improvement in many games and strategy titles while letting you keep your motherboard and DDR4 memory. The 5800X3D is faster in some cases, but usually not enough to justify paying a large premium.
Before upgrading, figure out the cause of the crashes. Check temperatures, clock speeds, memory stability, power connections, and Windows or driver errors with a tool such as HWiNFO. Your CPU temperature is not alarming, but the stock cooler and only two case fans are fairly minimal, so adding a decent tower cooler and one or two intake or exhaust fans would be sensible. Also test the GPU separately rather than assuming a driver update is the solution.
Move to AM5 only if you are also ready to replace the motherboard and memory, since AM5 requires DDR5. It gives you a better future upgrade path, but within a roughly $300 budget the platform change may provide less immediate gaming performance than buying a 5700X3D and a cooler. For your current RX 7800 XT and 1440p display, keep the existing platform unless you specifically want to build a new system now. Upgrade when you actually hit a performance limit rather than trying to predict several generations ahead.
My temperatures are about 55°C at idle and 85°C while gaming, so I’ll investigate the crashes and cooling before deciding. The 5700X3D sounds more reasonable than spending heavily on a 5800X3D.