Opinions on upgrade
Opinions on upgrade
For Christmas I was thinking about improving a family system with some extra components. Their current setup is an i5 7400, Rx580, 16GB RAM and a 1TB drive (type unspecified). My idea was to upgrade to something like a 3700x or 3900x (I have a spare x470 board) and an 2080 Super. I wanted to decide if buying newer parts would be worth it compared to using what they already have without spending too much. For instance, should I go with a 6700xt for $350 versus the 2080 Super, or is it better to choose between 5800x/5900x at $250 each versus sticking with the 3700x/3900x at $350?
The benefit from improving the CPU or GPU isn't enough to justify an extra $300. The only situation where upgrading makes sense is if you can locate a similar model at a lower price than your current Ryzen 3000 and then sell the old one to cover most of the expenses. Even then, it would be risky depending on how much you can get for your older processor.
Do you already possess the 3700x/3900X model? If yes, it's the optimal choice. Otherwise, a fresh 5600x would perform better—fewer cores yet quicker clock speed and IPC. For HDD drives, the biggest improvement comes from switching to an SSD, even a standard SATA one.
The 5600 offers a better choice over the 5600X mainly because of cost, but it only justifies itself as an upgrade from the 3700x if the extra cores aren’t needed. I fully support moving to a faster storage solution—there’s a 1TB PCIe M.2 drive available for about $70, which is significantly cheaper than a Sata M.2 unit.
It doesn't seem logical, particularly when you already possess the components.
I didn’t believe the $350 price tag for a newer model was worth it compared to what was already available. Still, I thought it might be worth checking. I’ll confirm the current storage setup but plan to install a 1 TB WD black NVMe drive plus either two 1 TB Samsung 860 EVO drives.