I'm looking for advice on a budget upgrade. My current system has a Ryzen 5 5600G, Asus Prime A320M-K motherboard, Radeon RX 6600, and 32GB of RAM. I mainly use it for 1080p gaming, streaming, office work, and some coding. I don't do video editing or rendering. I've noticed occasional stuttering when gaming while Excel, a browser, and other apps are open, including in Dead Space Remake. I was considering replacing both the CPU and motherboard with a Ryzen 7 5700X and an ASRock B550M Pro4, while keeping the rest of the system. A 5700X3D is currently outside my budget, and I'd ideally like this upgrade to last several years. Would the 5700X and B550M Pro4 be a good combination, or should I keep my current motherboard?
4 Answers
You may not need a new motherboard at all. Check whether your exact A320M-K revision supports the Ryzen 7 5700X, then update the BIOS before swapping CPUs. The 5700X has fairly modest power requirements, so the board can often handle it at stock settings. Keeping the motherboard would let you put more of the budget toward the processor.
Before buying anything, identify what is actually causing the stutters. Monitor CPU usage, GPU usage, temperatures, RAM usage, and frame times while the problem happens. Also make sure the BIOS, chipset drivers, and game are up to date. Since you’re using an RX 6600, hardware encoding can handle streaming, so streaming alone may not require a CPU upgrade.
For gaming, an X3D chip would generally be a bigger improvement than a standard 5700X, especially for reducing frame-time dips. If a 5700X3D becomes affordable, it would be the more attractive AM4 gaming upgrade. Otherwise, the 5700X still gives you two extra cores and should help with gaming alongside browsers, spreadsheets, and streaming.
The 5700X3D is currently too expensive for me, so I’m trying to decide whether the regular 5700X is still worthwhile.
The B550M Pro4 is a sensible board, but it doesn’t provide much gaming performance by itself. Unless you need its extra connectivity, storage options, memory capacity, or overclocking features, buying it alongside the 5700X may not be the best use of a tight budget. Keep the A320 board if it has confirmed 5700X BIOS support, use the CPU at stock settings, and consider the motherboard upgrade later.
The stuttering is most noticeable when several other programs are open, so the extra cores and threads of the 5700X could still make multitasking smoother, even if the average gaming frame rate does not increase dramatically.