I bought a Ryzen 7 5700 for a friend, thinking its two extra cores and four extra threads would make it a better choice than the Ryzen 5 5600 for graphic design and rendering. I later realized the 5600 has more L3 cache and PCIe 4.0 support, but returning or reselling the 5700 could mean losing a significant amount of money. The system will mainly be used for graphic design and single-player story games, not competitive shooters or other highly CPU-intensive online games. Is the Ryzen 7 5700 noticeably worse for this use case, or is it still a suitable match for the RX 9060 XT?
2 Answers
It will work fine with the RX 9060 XT. Unless the 5600 is substantially cheaper and changing CPUs is easy, there is no strong reason to replace the 5700. For graphic design, the software and workload matter more: applications that use multiple cores may actually benefit from the 5700's additional threads, while games tend to show only a modest difference.
The Ryzen 7 5700 is perfectly usable for that system. It has enough CPU performance for story-focused gaming and the extra cores can help with multitasking, exports, and some rendering workloads. The Ryzen 5 5600 may perform a little better in certain games because of its larger cache and newer platform features, but the difference usually is not large enough to justify losing money on a return or resale.
So there probably is not a major practical difference for this kind of gaming and design work?