Thoughts on running AM4 – 6 years later

Six years ago, come January, I’ll have made my first major platform upgrade since I had my Intel Core i7 2600K in 2011. That chip lasted me roughly 8 years because of how stagnant the CPU market was during the 2010s due to a deeply floundering AMD and an Intel who simply didn’t have to do much of anything to maintain thorough dominance of the market. The winds shifted, dramatically, when AMD released the first two generations of Ryzen chips. Ryzen 1000 series showed they were back in the game and 2000 series showed they were back to showing off incredible engineering chops that had largely been absent from AMD for years.

In 2019 that meant I bought into second generation Ryzen, specifically I built that machine around the Ryzen 7 2700X, which amused me that I went from 2600K to 2700X. I made a couple mistakes along the way. Firstly, I opted for 32GB, then quickly upgraded to 64GB of RAM. The CPU ran it like a champ, but I chose far too slow of memory, 2400MT when even in 2019 3000MT was commonplace. Even earlier generations of Ryzen saw marked improvements with higher clocked RAM and I basically kneecapped myself to save a few dollars.

Secondly, I bought a massive case because I needed the drive mounting options and by that point full towers full of drive bays were already rarer than hen’s teeth. It’s a mistake that means I’m still using that Thermaltake View 71. It’s a tempered glass monstrosity that’s over 19kg without anything inside of it. Fully built up and it’s around 30kg which is absolutely bonkers. There are other full towers with more disk storage options but it’s still a hot mess for us handful of data hoarders. I’d love to switch to more solid state, and larger drives as well (my largest being a ‘tiny’ 8TB compared to the 20+TB drives available now). But, ultimately, budget constraints make compromises for us all. It’s definitely not a compromise with the AMD platform itself but more a compromise for modern computing as a whole. Ideally, I wouldn’t even use my main computer for storage like this but, again, buying a NAS is also on the (very long) list of things that would be nice.

Along the way, in December 2022, I did something I haven’t been able to do in years: I upgraded my CPU on the same platform I had been running. Whilst AMD released Ryzen 7000 series on AM5 at that time I kept chugging away on my old X470 board and went from my 2700X to a much beefier Ryzen 7 5800X3D. And while I didn’t necessarily need to upgrade my system memory at the time, I thought it best and went from 4 sticks of 2400MT for 64GB to 2 sticks of 3200MT for 64GB to help give the new chip a better balance and less overhead.

The last time I kept platform and got a new CPU was also on AMD back with the Athlon 64 era, roughly 2005, when I went from an Athlon 64 3200+ to the monster Athlon 64 X2 4400+ as my first foray into multicore computing. It’s been a similar story of performance uplift going from the 2700X to the 5800X3D. It’s a fantastic chip that shows the platform is still competitive today whilst far cheaper than AM5. If you are on a tighter budget, my recommendation is to go for a final generation AM4 board (X570/B550 ideally) and Ryzen 5000 series with 3D cache for gaming or possibly one of the higher core count like 5900X or 5950X (12 and 16 core respectively) for productivity.

The fact you can get 16-core/32-thread on an older platform and it’s still got some oomph in multi-threaded workloads is a testament to AMD’s engineering prowess. As of time of writing this (15 Dec. 24) the 5950X is just over $300 and the 5900X is $275. The slightly newer 5900XT which is also 16-core/32-thread is under $350 while the 5700X3D (8c/16t) is just over $200. Paired with the cheaper price of AM4 boards and DDR4 memory and you can get an incredibly powerful system for several hundred dollars less than AM5, letting you spend more on graphics, storage, or whatever else you find needing.

All that is to say I’ve been incredibly pleased with my computer of Theseus from the past 6 years. There are upgrades I’m eyeing, primarily a 4TB NVMe SSD to replace my heavily used 1TB, and probably a tower air cooler to replace the AIO watercooler that I’ve had since 2019 as well. I already made the graphics upgrade, twice in fact. Early in 2019 I also went from my Nvidia GTX 1070 to the most expensive card I have ever purchased, an EVGA RTX 2080 Ti. The entire upgrade path was timed perfectly for me. I built a new computer and bought my first gaming laptop all mere months before Covid brought the world to a halt and blitzed us with massive shortages and price hikes. After the GPU market normalized (kind of at least) I did upgrade that as well, to my AMD Radeon 7900 XT which was a brilliant upgrade over the 2080 Ti.

What I can say is that with my hodgepodge of a computer I’m easily able to run 1440 ultrawide in essentially any game I throw at it. That’s 3440x1440, just a hair under 5 million pixels, about 34% more than 1440p, about 61% of 4K. In my most played game of the last two years, Forza Horizon 5, I see more than double the framerate of the RTX 2080 Ti, from an average of around 60 at native resolution to an average of around 130-140 with the Radeon. That improvement is largely across the board with rasterized titles and is well worth it. I don’t run my 4K monitor anymore, due to it having issues after 6 years (flashing to black, power cycling) and I think that’s probably due to it being a refurbished monitor or simply age at this point. But I am very curious how this card would handle 4K. I know in most titles I play it would breeze through them, think Forza Horizon 5 and many older titles. I have a sneaking suspicion that it would still hit 60 in titles like Cyberpunk, albeit with some upscaling enabled to allow raytracing.

What that all means is that, if you plan your parts today you can get a top-notch experience without forcing yourself to blow your budget as well. Keep Ryzen 5000 on your list. Relatedly, also consider Intel 12^th generation (such as the 12900K/12700K) as those can also be had for a song. Put your money to work through a graphics upgrade as, if you’re gaming, you’ll notice the uplift from a 7800XT/4060 to a 7900XT/4070 or higher over opting for a faster processor. Productivity, such as video/photo editing or 3D rendering get a little murkier but given how much can be offloaded to the GPU today even then you might well be served by upgrade in graphics over CPU as well. And, as I mentioned, if sheer number of threads is what you’re after you can still get some pretty competitive processors on AM4 too.

Most importantly, given the uncertainty of the market due to the drumming of trade wars and tariffs, now might be even more favorable for upgrading than even a few months from now. Even the threat of those will likely cause prices to rise, let alone them actually being implemented. And even if you’re not in the US, having the largest market suddenly shake the proverbial ship like that will cause shockwaves throughout the markets worldwide, especially as companies will strive to make up the shortfalls in the US from outside the US. Don’t blow your budget but consider where you are, and your needs for the next several years, and now might be an ideal time to upgrade to ride out some of this uncertainty that is only going to get shakier given the instability that was the norm during the previous Trump administration.