I'm new to building PCs and am choosing between two similarly priced prebuilt systems for gaming, both using an RTX 5060. One has a Ryzen 5 8400F on AM5 with DDR5-4800 memory, while the other has a Ryzen 7 5700X on AM4 with DDR4-3200 memory. I've seen conflicting advice about their performance and whether AM5 is worth choosing. I probably won't upgrade the CPU for the next four or five years, so I'm worried about paying for the newer platform without getting better performance. Which system would be the better choice?
3 Answers
If you truly don’t expect to upgrade the CPU for four or five years, the 5700X is a reasonable choice. It generally performs at least as well as the 8400F in gaming, and you won’t be paying extra for an upgrade path you may never use.
The 8400F is a budget AM5 processor and isn’t especially strong compared with other AM5 options. Its main advantage here is the platform: later on, you could replace it with a much faster Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 chip without changing the motherboard. If you might upgrade eventually, choose the 8400F; if not, compare the actual gaming performance and overall system quality instead of choosing AM5 automatically.
Since these are prebuilts, make sure the only difference really is the processor and memory platform. Check the power supply, motherboard, cooling, storage, and RAM capacity too. If both have 16GB, that may be something worth upgrading later regardless of which CPU you choose. Between otherwise identical systems, the 5700X is the safer pick for immediate gaming performance, while the 8400F is the better pick only if you value having a newer upgrade platform.
I’m fairly sure I won’t upgrade the processor during the system’s first four or five years, so the future socket support may not matter much to me.