3900x or 5800x
3900x or 5800x
You're considering upgrading your system for gaming and streaming. Here are some options you might find useful: stock variants like 3900x, 3900xt, or 5800x are available, but the 5900x is currently out of stock. Your current setup runs a 7700k with 16GB G.SKILL RAM (3200MHz) and an MSI 2080TI trio X graphics card. You're aiming for gaming at 1440p at 145Hz and streaming at 936p 60fps. You're thinking of swapping to a 5800x for better performance, especially for gaming, since it offers stronger results than the 3900x. Others might suggest keeping your 7700k as the encoder for streaming while upgrading the graphics card.
For multi-core setups the 3900x performs significantly better, yet for raw FPS in games the 5800X edges out the Zen2 noticeably. When streaming, I opt for the 3900x—it handles 1080p60 at medium settings smoothly, maintaining over 60 FPS in-game. If you're using a 2000 or 3000 series NVIDIA GPU, I suggest sticking to streaming with NVENC and choosing the 5800X.
I ran NVENC on my old 1080TI Strix, and it worked well until I started playing high-VRAM games like Warzone or Battlfield. The stream would lose many frames because of the downsampling from 1440p to 936P at 60 fps. Building a stream PC with NVENC helped. Would your 2080TI Trio perform better?
This has nothing to do with VRAM. These titles often encounter problems when connected to OBS, especially if your GPU is over 98% busy, causing noticeable drops in frame rate during streaming. A newer OBS release may help somewhat, but a quick workaround for my setup is using the latest OBS Studio version and running it as an administrator. Activating Game Mode on Windows 10 also assists. The problem stemmed from WDM (Windows Desktop Management) not correctly deciding whether to prioritize the game or OBS preview, which relies on hardware acceleration. With updated NVIDIA drivers and Windows 10, this should be less of an issue since the system can now handle multiple accelerated apps at once. Generally, the challenge everyone faced is temporary. Try again and keep GPU usage under 95% if possible—lowering in-game settings will improve stability and eliminate FPS drops. The newer 2080ti model uses the NVENC chip, delivering superior quality at the same bitrates compared to the 1080ti, making CPU recording/streaming far less critical since it now matches or surpasses 1080p60 Medium quality with CPU encoding.