I built a PC with a Ryzen 7 3700X and Radeon RX 6700 XT a few years ago, and later upgraded to 32 GB of RAM. I found a Ryzen 5 5500X3D being sold for $130, with the seller providing proof that it is legitimate. Since I mainly play games at 1080p, would this be a worthwhile upgrade, or should I keep using the 3700X? I may eventually upgrade to a Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB, but I would prefer to stay on my current AM4 platform rather than move to AM5 and DDR5 right now.
3 Answers
It depends on what you do besides gaming. The 5500X3D should be noticeably better in games, but the 3700X has more cores and may be better for some multitasking or workstation workloads. If you want to stay on AM4, though, the 5500X3D is a strong value at that price.
If you can find a 5600X3D for only around $40 more, that could also be worth considering because it has higher clock speeds. Otherwise, a $130 5500X3D is still a sensible drop-in upgrade. I would only wait for a 5800X3D if you find one at a genuinely reasonable price; moving to AM5 is a much larger upgrade path rather than a simple CPU swap.
For mostly gaming, especially at 1080p, that is a very good upgrade for $130. The extra 3D V-Cache and newer architecture should improve average and especially minimum frame rates compared with the 3700X. Just make sure your motherboard BIOS supports the chip before installing it.
That is the main reason I am avoiding AM5 for now. The cost of replacing the motherboard and buying DDR5 would make the platform upgrade much more expensive, especially since I am planning a graphics-card upgrade later.