Question Upgrade from Ryzen 5 1600 to 3600?

[ScottAD]

I was a day one adopter of the Ryzen chipset. Heck I even went all in on them with the stock market too. Both have turned out pretty amazing!

I know Zen 3 will come eventually. Whenever that is. Do I need to upgrade from the 1600? Yes and no. I think the stability of RAM speeds on Zen 2 is more attractive than any thing.

I'd be gutting my system or close to it. Reselling CPU mobo and ram then swapping in new.

It's a 15% performance increase and I'm sure I'm not the only one to ask if it is worth it. I'm looking for input about real world use case.

Have you made that generational jump? I'd love to hear about it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

YES! For 2/3 of my rigs. I do some DC (distributed computing) on the side, along with mining, and for both of those applications, the AVX2 doubled performance and rather large L3 cache (32MB) of the 3600 really help speed those along. Along with the 15% IPC boost, and 4GHz all-core OC. (Which I've dabbled in increasing to 4.1-4.2Ghz all-core, on newest-fabbed editions of the CPU. Works mostly well. But I'm back at stock.)

All things considered, price-wise, you could buy a 3600, and drop it in (after flashing the UEFI to newest version for your board), and sell the 1600, and come out nearly even, as the price increase and lack of supply of the 1600 "AF" have driven prices of the 1600 and 2600(X) to nearly the price of the 3600, even on the used market.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I was a day one adopter of the Ryzen chipset. Heck I even went all in on them with the stock market too. Both have turned out pretty amazing!

I know Zen 3 will come eventually. Whenever that is. Do I need to upgrade from the 1600? Yes and no. I think the stability of RAM speeds on Zen 2 is more attractive than any thing.

I'd be gutting my system or close to it. Reselling CPU mobo and ram then swapping in new.

What board do you have? It's possible that you have 3000-series support already if you've updated the BIOS.

If so, you don't -need- a new mainboard, unless there is a specific feature you want. There is very little difference (except manufacturer support) between X370/X470 or B350/B450. The latter are essentially low power versions of the former, with a few additional features added. Anyway, Ryzen "chipsets" are more like I/O breakout boxes then "real" chipsets.

So you'd need an X570/B550 board for a real upgrade.

It's a 15% performance increase and I'm sure I'm not the only one to ask if it is worth it. I'm looking for input about real world use case.

Have you made that generational jump? I'd love to hear about it.

Made the jump from a 1700 to a 3600. About the same power consumption, essentially the same MT performance. But the 3600 has a massive improvement in single thread performance, due to better boost behaviour and sheer frequency.

That, and my 1700 flat out refuses to run any memory above 2400MHz. Must be a very early sample since I got it on release day.

 

[Shmee]

I would hold onto the current board for now, drop in a 3600, then you could upgrade the motherboard and get a Zen 3 chip when they are out.

 

[ScottAD]

I appreciate the feedback everyone. Going to flip the current board, CPU and RAM soon. Nabbed a decent deal on new RAM from HWS just need to find a CPU and board. The muddy waters of the B550 and X570 lineups are annoying.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I've got B450 Tomahawk MAX ATX boards in my FS thread. In case you were looking at one of those. For a little more than MSRP, but generally much less than Newegg's scalper crew on that board.

Edit: I was toying with the idea of using those with my personal PCs, but they don't have two NVMe slots, and they only have 1GbE-T NICs onboard. I wanted my "new" boards to have faster ethernet.

I was looking at the Asus B550-turned-B450 board, TUF something-or-other, "PLUS S" or something, I started a thread about it in motherboards, with a link and pics. It's only micro-ATX (which is one reason I didn't go for it, I like two GPUs sometimes, plus a faster / add-on NIC card slot), but it DID have a RealTek 2.5GbE-T NIC onboard, which is why I called it a "next-gen B450", because it was basically a B550 mobo, with a B450 chipset slapped on it, which ironically, meant greater overall compatibility (B550 is NOT compatible with 3200G/3400G APUs).

What I did eventually end up going for, was Newegg was advertising some ASRock Fatality Professional X370 boards, which apparently share the X370 TaiChi layout (and 10 SATA ports!), but ALSO, dual GPU slots, and a third slot for a NIC, AND, 5GbE-T NIC from Aquantia AND a 1GbE-T NIC, I think from Intel. Even better than than B550-turned-B450 from Asus! And around the same price. (The Asus micro-ATX PLUS S board was $129.99, this ASRock Professional X370 was $139.99, $10 off.)

So I ordered a qty of them, hopefully they all work. I haven't deployed them yet, still working out what I want to do with the networking. (Toying with the idea of a physically-separate storage-only LAN, and then a 1GbE-T internet-only LAN. I might need some more networking gear and some more cables to pull that off, however.)

Edit: Also toying with throwing in my PCI-E x1 RealTek 2.5GbE-T cards that I got a while ago for $20 ea., shipped from China, whether I want to slap those into those boards in the last or maybe top-most slot, and have a 2.5GbE-T internet LAN, to prepare for FIOS upgrading their service to 2Gbit/sec or more. (Internet e-peen ++++! LOL.)

 

[ScottAD]

Thanks Larry, I am thinking about that. I have the Strix B350-F Gaming in my rig on the latest BIOS so support is there, I was able to snag some Dom Plats 3600 MHz on HWS for $45 and a 3600 on Mercari (of all places) for $90.

Just did not know if there was a need for board upgrades, I usually run at stock anyway.