Question Upgrading to next month to upcoming Zen 3: Should I start buying some parts now?

[blckgrffn]

I am helping my dad refresh and we are carrying over the GPU and NVME drive.

So far we have purchased, on sale: Case, PSU, Heatsink, Additional Case fans

I plan on buying all the rest together in one shot at Microcenter in case I need to return and also because their combo deals are amazing. If the stock is good, we'll get Zen 3. If they run awesome deals on Zen 2 and Zen 3 stock is tight, we'll get Zen 2. My dad wants stability over absolute performance, and I am pretty sure that an XT CPU will meet my goal of being good enough for 60+ fps 1440p gaming for ~6 years.

 

[Dave3000]

BTW if you want to know for sure what memory is compatible with Ryzen and at what timings this is a great page on AMD site (it lists both JEDEC and XMP timings):

https://www.amd.com/en/products/ryzen-compatible-memory/ready-for-3rd-gen-amd-ryzen

If you're dead-set on going for JEDEC, then by all means go for it

What I would strongly recommend however is to get any ram, with a serial number listed on that page, that can do 3600 MHz with XMP. On 99% of the motherboards these modules will just be plug-and-play (you just have to enable XMP). When running on JEDEC timings you'll leave the processor's fabric clock (FCLK) running at 1600 MHz (instead of 1800 MHz) leaving considerable perfomance on the table. Besides JEDEC 3200 Mhz modules are notoriously hard to find and relatively expensive.

I would recommend kits with Micron E-die (as they are usually cheap and work well) or Samsung B-die (if you can still find it but not produced anymore).

If you want to search memory to buy based on the serial number listed the first link, this search here helps immensely (just insert it into the search box on the right):

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/memory/

Example build:
Last year I built a Ryzen 3600 + Tomahawk B450 MAX rig to a friend with these ADATA XPG Gammix D10 modules (AX4U360038G18A-DB10 to be exact, though any AX4U360038G18A would do as it's either Samsung B-die or Micron E-die, see AMD's link). All I All I had to do was enable XMP and has been working like a charm since.

AX4U360038G18A is available and quite cheap on pcpartpicker (but there are multiple other modules that would also work well). Anyway just buy 4x8GB modules and you're good to go. 4 modules might seem odd, but extra ranks actually add performance on Ryzen 3xxx series (see my 3700x with 4x8GB (E-die) vs 2x8 (B-die) in geekbench as a reference).

Well I just ordered the standard Crucial DDR4-3200 32GB kit. Do you know if the infinity fabric bandwidth on the 5800x will have less of an effect on performance than it did on the 3800x since all 8 cores on the 5800x are in one CCX?

 

[Gideon]

Well I just ordered the standard Crucial DDR4-3200 32GB kit. Do you know if the infinity fabric bandwidth on the 5800x will have less of an effect on performance than it did on the 3800x since all 8 cores on the 5800x are in one CCX?

Can't really say before benchmarks but the unified L3 will surely make it less relevant in some apps (if Zen 1 -> Zen 2 is anything to go by). As you already have at least 1600 Mhz, I don't think the difference will be very big.

 

[Dave3000]

Return period for the power supply ends in a week. Return period for the case and CPU cooler ends in 2 weeks. RAM has not arrived yet and should have arrived on Oct 29th. I now would prefer a 5900x over the 5800x. I can't find a 5900x or 5800x in stock anywhere and I'm not going to buy one from a scalper. There is a good chance I going to buy the i7-10700k or a Ryzen 3600 (until I can get a 5900x and then swap CPUs and resell the 3600) instead as I want to build my system within the next 5 days and I don't expect a 5800x or 5900x to be in stock by then. Also since I will still have my old power supply, I can just keep waiting for a 5900x, and in case the new power supply has something wrong with it, I can temporarily use my old power supply while the new one gets RMA'd to the manufacturer, if end up building my rig past the return period for the power supply. For reference, my old power supply is a Coolermaster 800w Silent Pro Gold and my new one for my upcoming rig is a Seasonic Focus 850-GX.