Upgrade your Ryzen 9 3900X for better performance
Upgrade your Ryzen 9 3900X for better performance
I own a PC with a 3900X built in early 2020. I considered moving to an AM4 upgrade but thought about switching to a 5700X3D because the 5800X3D is no longer available. I've already replaced both the GPU and RAM with 2080 Super → 7900XT and increased memory to 64GB.
The 5700X3D offers benefits for gamers, particularly with its X3D cache and reduced core usage.
Using the 7900 XT for encoding will likely improve performance with the 5700X3D. Online sources suggest Star Citizen gains significantly from 3D V-Cache. However, if you rely on the CPU for encoding, you might experience slower speeds since the 3900X offers more total CPU power, allowing it to handle two tasks simultaneously.
5700X3D lags behind 5800X3D by half a GHz. By this stage, I think AM4 is no longer worth it.
This matters in real-world scenarios. For non-gaming work, the 5700X3D runs roughly 10% slower on single-core tasks and 7% slower on multi-core tasks compared to the 5800X3D. But when it comes to gaming, across many titles, the performance difference is only about 5% slower than the 5800X3D. This is because the V-Cache advantage outweighs the difference in clock speed. Clock speed isn't as crucial as the overall CPU design. AMD's Bulldozer chips once offered a clock speed edge over Intel, but they still lagged behind in practical performance.
You might be behind on the AM4 upgrade. The 5700X3D costs $100 more than the 9600X and doesn’t perform as well overall—slower RAM and other issues are present. Upgrading to AM5 is recommended, though it comes with a higher price for a new board and RAM.
Half a GHz is half a GHz... I prefer quick speeds. 4GHz isn't great, and 4500Mhz isn't much better either. Of course, if you're playing at low resolution, it doesn't make much difference as you go up the frequency range. AM4 isn't fast. By 2025 it really is. I can say your 9900X up to 5850MHz is significantly faster than my 5800X3D boosted to 4550MHz. Now you have a 5700X3D that reaches 4GHz... What frequency does a 9800X3D reach? Something around 5300Mhz, I think. It's noticeable, believe me.
It doesn't really matter. A 5950X running at 6.3GHz with liquid nitrogen might not surpass a stock 9900X in multi-core performance.