Pleasantly Surprised at the Generational Uplift between AM4 and AM5
I was planning on skipping this generation of CPU / Motherboards, being quite content with my Asus TUF Gaming X570 Plus WIFI AM4 with AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 3D.
In 2023, I found the cost of upgrading to the latest and greatest that AMD and Asus had to offer was too high. Besides, I already had one of the fastest gaming rigs that I could hope for.
Somehow, I stumbled across the opportunity to obtain a Ryzen 9 7900X 3D, Asus TUF Gaming X670e Plus WIFI, and Corsair MP700 Pro Gen 5 2 TB SSD all second hand / refurbished for around $650. While I would have preferred to get the AMD Ryzen 7800X 3D, I could not justify the $400+ premium for the performance gain as prices and scarcity is on the rise. I just needed to buy a good 32 GB DDR 5 RAM kit for around $100 and I was set. I had an old RTX 3080 laying around doing nothing, so I threw that in my old PC and put my new RTX 3080 Ti into my new build.
I haven't benchmarked anything yet, but Windows 11 runs noticeably smoother and snappier as well as the few games that I play. While there is no such thing as "future-proofing", I'm pretty confident that I can pass on the AMD Ryzen 9000 series and the future Intel Arrow Lake.