I've been using a Ryzen 7 5800X3D for several years and recently added a Radeon RX 9070 XT. Gaming performance is generally good, but I'm considering moving to AM5 sometime this year. My bigger concern is recording and editing: I capture gameplay at 1440p, and editing or rendering in DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro can be extremely slow. Even 1080p footage sometimes takes hours to process or causes the programs to load slowly. I have GPU acceleration enabled, so I'm not sure whether the problem is my hardware, software settings, codecs, or my workflow. My system also has four 16GB DDR4 sticks for 64GB total. I'd be willing to spend around $1,000, possibly after selling my current parts, but I'm unsure whether an AM5 upgrade would actually solve the problem or if I should troubleshoot my current setup first.
4 Answers
Try generating proxies or optimized media for your 1440p recordings. That lets the editor work with lower-resolution, easier-to-decode files while keeping the original footage for the final export. Also check the recording settings and export codec, because highly compressed footage can be much harder to edit than its resolution suggests. If proxies make the timeline smooth but the final export remains slow, then you can decide whether a CPU or GPU upgrade is worthwhile.
I’d troubleshoot the recording and editing setup before replacing the CPU. Both DaVinci Resolve and Premiere can use the GPU, but that doesn’t mean every codec, effect, transition, or export stage is accelerated. Check that the 9070 XT is selected for decoding, timeline processing, and encoding, and verify that your recording format is easy for the editor to work with. Hardware-accelerated H.264 or H.265 footage can still be unpleasant to edit, so optimized media or proxies may make a much bigger difference than a platform upgrade.
GPU acceleration is enabled already, but I may need to check the individual decode, timeline, and export settings rather than assuming the whole workflow is accelerated.
If editing is the main reason to upgrade, focus on a processor with more general-purpose multicore performance instead of choosing an X3D chip solely for gaming. A midrange or upper-midrange AM5 CPU paired with 64GB of DDR5 could be reasonable, but I wouldn’t buy those parts until you identify whether the bottleneck is CPU usage, GPU usage, storage, memory, or the source codec. Watch CPU and GPU utilization while loading the timeline and exporting, and check whether the media is stored on a fast SSD with plenty of free space.
The 5800X3D is still a very capable gaming processor, especially with a 9070 XT, so an AM5 move would be a fairly expensive platform change rather than an obvious gaming necessity. You would need a new motherboard, DDR5 memory, and CPU. With a roughly $1,000 budget, it’s possible, but the improvement in editing depends heavily on the exact workload. Your current 64GB of RAM is already a solid amount; the fact that it’s four DDR4 modules doesn’t by itself explain hours-long renders.
That sounds more useful than jumping straight to AM5. I’ll compare utilization during editing and rendering and test proxies before replacing the platform.