I'm currently using an ASRock A320M-HDV R4.0 with a Ryzen 3 3300X, Radeon RX 6600, 3200-speed DDR4 memory, and a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. AM5 and DDR5 are still outside my budget, so I'm considering moving to an ASRock B550M Pro4—or a similar board—and pairing it with a Ryzen 7 5700X. I also do video editing, so the extra cores are appealing, and I expect to keep the system for at least two more years. Is upgrading within AM4 worthwhile, particularly for better VRMs, PCIe 4.0 support, and faster USB connectivity, or would it be smarter to keep my current system and wait for AM5 prices to come down?
4 Answers
For gaming with the RX 6600, a Ryzen 5 5600 or 5600X is probably the better value. The 5700X’s extra cores won’t improve gaming much unless you also run heavily threaded workloads. You could put the savings toward a future graphics card or simply keep them for a later platform upgrade.
The B550 chipset itself won’t make your current processor faster, but your A320 board has fairly weak power delivery. It should handle a Ryzen 5 six-core without much trouble, but a Ryzen 7 5700X may not consistently reach its full boost behavior. If you choose the 5700X, moving to a board with stronger VRMs is a sensible idea.
If you go with B550, choose a board with solid VRMs, such as the MSI B550-A Pro or another well-reviewed equivalent. The upgrade makes the most sense because you already own compatible memory and a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive; otherwise, the motherboard change alone would provide limited benefit. For your video-editing workload, the 5700X is reasonable, while a 5600 would mainly be the better gaming-value choice.
B550 does offer useful platform upgrades, including PCIe 4.0 and potentially more or faster USB connectivity. Since you already have PCIe 4.0 storage and DDR4-3200 memory, those features would actually be usable rather than just theoretical.
I also edit video, so the additional cores would be useful. Since the 5700X is only about $20 more where I live, that price difference makes it more appealing than the 5600X.