I'm planning a new build with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and RX 9070 XT, but I'll be buying the parts gradually over the next year. I already installed the Corsair RM850X power supply in my current PC, which has a Ryzen 5 5500, ASRock B450M Pro4 R2.0 motherboard, 32GB of DDR4-3600 memory, a PowerColor RX 6600 8GB, and a 1TB Crucial P3 NVMe SSD. I mainly play at 1440p and use a 1080p secondary monitor. Since the RX 9070 XT is backward-compatible with PCIe 3.0, would it be sensible to install it in this system now and use it until I finish buying the AM5 parts? Are there any compatibility or performance issues I should expect?
4 Answers
Yes, it should work fine. The RX 9070 XT is compatible with your motherboard’s PCIe 3.0 slot, and the RM850X is more than suitable for it. You’ll see a very large improvement over the RX 6600 immediately, especially at 1440p. The Ryzen 5 5500 may limit performance in some CPU-heavy games, particularly at high refresh rates or lower settings, but you can get even more out of the card after moving to the 9800X3D.
PCIe 3.0 will reduce performance in some situations, but the difference should generally be small rather than a major problem. At 1440p, the graphics card is usually the main performance limit. The bigger potential restriction is the Ryzen 5 5500, which could cause a CPU bottleneck in certain games.
Installing the card early is reasonable, and it also lets you test the GPU while it’s still within the retailer’s return period. Before swapping cards, it’s a good idea to remove the existing graphics driver with AMD Cleanup Utility or DDU, then install a fresh version of AMD Adrenalin. A motherboard BIOS update usually isn’t required just to use the GPU, but keeping the BIOS reasonably current is still sensible.
There’s no need to wait for the AM5 platform if you can afford the card now. It will be somewhat underutilized with the Ryzen 5 5500, but it remains a substantial upgrade from the RX 6600 and can carry over to the future system. Just make sure the card fits in your case and that you use the required dedicated power cables from the PSU rather than an adapter or daisy-chained connection.
That makes sense. I was mainly unsure whether I needed to update the BIOS before changing the graphics card.