I have been using an AM4 system for several years. It originally had a Ryzen 5 5600X, 64GB of DDR4 memory, and a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, but I later upgraded to a Ryzen 7 5700X3D and a Radeon RX 9070 XT. I considered moving to AM5 last year, but rising DDR5 prices put that plan on hold. Since my current CPU and memory have also gained resale value, upgrading would effectively cost less.
I have found a €700 bundle containing a Ryzen 9 9900X, MSI B650 Gaming Plus motherboard, 32GB of DDR5-6000 CL32, a Thermalright cooler, and a 1TB Lexar NM790 SSD. I mainly play at 4K, especially open-world games, so I expect most titles to remain GPU-limited. However, I also play CPU-heavy games such as Cities: Skylines II.
Would this upgrade provide noticeable improvements in CPU-bound games, frame-time consistency, system responsiveness, or general performance? Is the bundle a good deal, especially if I can sell my current 5700X3D, DDR4 memory, and SSD for around €600?
4 Answers
I would probably wait unless you are also moving to 64GB of DDR5 and a genuinely high-end gaming CPU. In the games you described, the upgrade is unlikely to produce a major improvement, since 4K gaming is generally limited by GPU performance or available memory capacity rather than CPU speed. More RAM may help with especially demanding simulators, but 32GB is not much of an upgrade from your current 64GB.
At 4K, gaming performance will usually be very similar because your RX 9070 XT will be the limiting component. A 9900X can be faster in some CPU-heavy situations, but the difference from a 5700X3D is not consistently large, and a few games may perform about the same or even slightly worse. It is not a bad platform, but it probably will not transform your gaming experience.
The 9900X is more of a modest gaming upgrade over the 5700X3D, so €700 is difficult to justify based on gaming alone. The bundle could make more sense if you need the extra CPU cores for productivity or can resell your current parts for close to €600, reducing the effective cost to roughly €100. Otherwise, the improvement probably will not be noticeable enough.
I estimate I could sell my 5700X3D, DDR4 memory, and current SSD for about €600, so the effective upgrade cost would be around €100.
I would skip it for now. The parts are solid, but replacing a 5700X3D with a 9900X is not a major gaming leap, especially at 4K. You would be more likely to notice an improvement by upgrading when you can move to a stronger gaming-focused CPU, more than 32GB of memory, or a platform change that gives you a clear performance advantage.
What made you upgrade from a 5700X3D in the first place?