I'm currently using an AM4 system with a Ryzen 5 5500, 16GB of Vengeance DDR4-3600, a Kingston 1TB NVMe SSD, and an RX 6950 XT. My monitor is 1080p at 180Hz, since I play plenty of competitive games as well as some AAA titles. I know the graphics card is overkill for 1080p, but I'm clearly running into CPU limitations in some games. Should I upgrade to another AM4 processor, such as a Ryzen 7 5700X or an X3D chip, or would it make more sense to save for a complete AM5 upgrade? I'd rather not spend the full price of a high-end X3D processor, so I'd appreciate recommendations that offer good value.
3 Answers
The Ryzen 7 5700X is a sensible value upgrade if you can find one around £100, especially after selling your Ryzen 5 5500. You’ll get two more cores and much stronger overall performance without replacing your motherboard or memory. It won’t match an X3D chip in CPU-heavy games, but it’s a much cheaper way to improve things now while waiting for a future platform upgrade.
If you want the biggest gaming improvement while staying on AM4, a Ryzen 7 5800X3D is the obvious choice, although roughly £315 is a lot to spend on an older platform. A cheaper Ryzen 5 5500X3D, where available from a reputable seller, can offer much better value and comes fairly close in many games. For competitive 1080p gaming, either X3D option should be a noticeable jump over the 5500.
Before buying anything, check whether your motherboard supports PCIe 4.0 and whether the current processor is forcing the graphics card to run at PCIe 3.0. The RX 6950 XT usually has enough lanes that this won’t be a huge limitation, but it’s still worth verifying. If your main goal is high-refresh-rate gaming, the CPU upgrade will generally matter more than moving to AM5 immediately.
I had no idea the Ryzen 5 5500 was based on a laptop-derived design rather than being comparable to the other full-featured 5000-series chips. That explains some of the performance gap.