I see a lot of back and fourth and both have good points. Gotta say though if someone is mostly using a PC for gaming and watching video's and doing light tasks and has an existing AM4 platform; with a gen 1 or 2 Zen, dropping in something like 5600, 5700X or even 5800X3D makes sense. Rather than going full hog on a brand new build/pre-built that will likely cost much more, a small upgrade to a Zen 3 processor, he/she could spend more budget on a higher tier GPU and would be good to go for gaming for a few years, if not several.
And going for a Zen 2 no matter how many cores doesn't make much sense unless you are using it for work, or specific productivity work loads.. as the IPC and efficiency just doesn't cut it these days, particularly for gaming. Take a 5600X its MT performance is a touch lower than a 3700X but its ST stomps it with more cache per CCX and improvements to latency means for much better 3D performance, and most likely a faster experience in day to day desktop tasks.
Not to mention efficiency gains so lower power bill in the long term and cheaper/lesser cooler required. On other other flip of the coin.. spending twice the amount if not more for a prebuild or Zen 4 build for what seems to be a fairly small IPC increase doesn't seem worth it for gaming if you are already on AM4 and have a Zen 3 ready motherboard unless you really want the best.
Also there is no point in getting a 3600 over something like a 5600. The gains are huge over one generation and the cost is so insignificant to the gains that can be had.. so price to performance it makes little sense in looking at old stuff. Better off finding a good price on Zen 3 (listed above) and the rest on the graphics card, gen 4 SSD or whatever.
That's assuming that they are comfortable upgrading bios and swapping out CPU etc.
Last edited by hinch - on 18 August 2022
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