Question Gaming Purposes: 5800X3D or 5950X

[Dave3000]

I noticed a recent price drop on the 5800X3D, now $400, and the 5950X, now $480, at MC. If I do upgrade to a better CPU now, I will skip Rocket Lake and Zen 4. Is the $80 more spent worth it for the 5950X over the 5800X3D if mostly gaming. I also use my system for office work from home, so it's actually a Gaming/Work PC.

 

[Markfw]

I noticed a recent price drop on the 5800X3D, now $400, and the 5950X, now $480, at MC. If I do upgrade to a better CPU now, I will skip Rocket Lake and Zen 4. Is the $80 more spent worth it for the 5950X over the 5800X3D if mostly gaming. I also use my system for office work from home, so it's actually a Gaming/Work PC.

Well, you kind of answered your own question. If gaming is more important, than the 5800X3D of course. If work is muti-threaded and important than the 5950x.

 

[Frenetic Pony]

Is there a question here? I'll take a stab and try to answer:

AMD is releasing an entirely new platform that should be more future proof, and Intel already has but how upgradeable it'll be beyond rocket lake is questionable given Intel's history. Either way PCI Express 5.0 looks like it's mostly there to support the newest generation of GPUs going forwards, being associated with the new ultra high power delivery standards. Of course these powerdraws are getting so high that you might be concerned about your power bill, though that'll only be applicable to the top end cards. But if you're not interested in $1kish+ gpus then that might not matter.

There's also the question of what office work you do. If it's just standard stuff then the system might not matter much, if you are waiting on your PC to finish tasks then you might legitimately want Rocket Lake and its 24 cores. And then there's the question of upgradeability. If you don't care or do it that often, sure a 5800x3d will sit you just fine. But if you want to upgrade beyond that in the next 8 years you'd probably be better off waiting for a Zen 4 CPU and getting a new mobo.

Hope that helps!

 

[HurleyBird]

I'd take the 5950X any time if I did even 5% productivity and 95% gaming. You'll notice the extra cores for productivity. Unless you're a competitive esports player, you're unlikely to notice any difference between the two when it comes to gaming. Another exception could be if you play a lot of 4X games, since then you're looking at turn times and/or simulation speed more than frametime. In this instance, the 5800X3D tends to do really well (eg. Stellaris), but the 5950X will probably be a better pick in future, better threaded games.

That said, unless you need a new computer right this moment you might as well wait the ~2 months for AM5.

 

[ZGR]

Dave, you mentioned your favorite game is X-Plane which is extremely CPU bound. There is very little data to even say if a 5800X3D improves frametimes in that game. I would definitely save your money for AM5 and hopefully the 7800X3D or even 7950X3D will be available soon. In my experience, these CPU heavy games scale really well with high speed, low latency memory. We saw that with ARMA 3 and Fallout 4 when DDR4 was getting faster and faster each year.

I got the 5800X3D because several of my favorite games scale really well on it, and my previous CPU was half the performance of a 5600X with mediocre DDR4 in games. Your current CPU is a 5800X, right? I'd be content.

 

[Dave3000]

Test • AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D vs Intel Core i9-12900KS

Test des processeurs AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D et Intel Core i9-12900KS Comparaison avec les processeurs Intel et AMD de dernières générations sur des jeux, encodage, traitement d'image et vidéo, rendu 3D, compression, encryptage, compilation et divers benchmarks synthétiques et énergétiques.

www.comptoir-hardware.com

This review shows that 5800X3D performing much better than a 5800X in FS2020 but a chart shows that in X-Plane 11 the performance is the same between these two CPUs at 1080p. I sometimes play FS2020 but I still prefer X-Plane 11, especially for flying commercial jets (maybe in the future that will change as more 3rd party airliners for FS2020 get released). It seems that 12700K would give me a more consistent upgrade based on the charts I saw online, but even then I think I will skip Alderlake and wait for Rocketlake or Zen 4. I'm most likely going to get DDR5 as well for my next CPU upgrade.

 

[DrMrLordX]

5800X3D is generally the best gaming CPU available. Zen4 may not meaningfully exceed it in all games. 5950X is better for work. Well, some work. There are a few desktop/workstation non-gaming apps that actually do extremely well thanks to the huge L3 on Zen3D. Ultimately the choice should be made based on which specific games/applications you intend to run on the system.

As a catch-all gaming PC, though, 5800X3D hands-down.

 

[Shmee]

I would wait a bit, either for Raptor Lake/Zen 4, or possibly for a 5900X3D upgrade, which I have heard several times may be coming soon.