Is upgrading from a Ryzen 5 5600 to a Ryzen 7 5700X worthwhile for 1080p gaming?

The 5700X is more useful for productivity, streaming, or running several applications while gaming. If you only care about gaming, the upgrade is hard to justify unless you can get the processor extremely cheaply.

Before replacing the CPU, check whether you actually have a bottleneck. If you’re still using 16GB of memory, moving to 32GB may help with newer AAA games and background applications. You could also tune the 5600 with PBO or a mild overclock, although that won’t create a dramatic performance gain.

For a noticeable AM4 gaming upgrade, look at an X3D chip such as the 5600X3D, 5700X3D, or 5800X3D. Their much larger L3 cache can improve frame rates and especially 1% lows in CPU-limited games. Otherwise, keeping the 5600 and saving for a newer platform is likely the better value.

Probably not. The 5600 and 5700X use the same Zen 3 architecture, so the extra two cores and slightly higher clocks usually make very little difference to average gaming FPS. You might see somewhat better 1% lows in a few CPU-heavy games, but it won’t feel like a major upgrade.

The 5700X can help in certain situations, especially if a game is CPU-heavy or another program is using CPU resources in the background. However, with this graphics card, I’d generally keep the 5600 unless you’re seeing consistently high CPU usage or poor frame-time performance.