Am I daft for considering buying an AM4 PC now?

Angilion

Angilion

Angilion

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I'm idly considering a whole new PC apart from drives and graphics card. My current PC has an i7-4790K (I've certainly had my money's worth from it), DDR3-2400, 600W PSU that's rather old now. My case is battered and broken (it came that way - I gambled on B-grade from here and lost). So I'm thinking that I may as well get a whole new PC and just move my drives and graphics card over.

I'm using Windows 10 and will probably continue to do so until it's EOL, so the Intel P+E cores CPUs aren't a good fit for me.

I probably won't be upgrading components in place. Building a PC from parts no longer appeals to me, nor does replacing the CPU with another (which entails most of building a PC from parts). If I upgrade again it will probably be a whole new PC again.

The most intensive thing I do on my PC is moderate gaming at 1440 and that's unlikely to change.

A medium-high AM4 spec PC is not that expensive now and would be much higher in performance than my current PC.

AM5 is significantly more expensive due to the higher cost of CPUs, motherboard and memory.

So I've been looking at AM4-based PCs with Ryzen 7 5700X or 5800X and 32GB of reasonably fast DDR4 and a reasonably good PSU with a reasonable good wattage and someone else building it for me...and they're quite reasonably priced.

But then I wonder if I'm daft buying a superseded platform. Then I wonder if I'd be daft to pay a fair bit more for extra performance I probably won't need and future upgradability I probably won't use.
 
Not at all, if the price is right. The 5 series CPUs are still very good. Or wait, could be a while, for AM5 to become more affordable.

Could even be some intel bargains knocking around when new stuff drops.

Win 11 is also decent now, imo.
 
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No you are not daft. This is being discussed in multiple threads across this forum. My PC with 5800x is just as good as it was last month before AM5 was released and it will still be working as well for many years. The 7000 series cpus are amazing for certain productivety tasks but no real difference for gaming or general computing tasks. You can put together a fantastic AM4/Intel 12th gen system for a lot less than an AM5 system so they do offer better value.

On the other hand you can argue that buying into AM5 now is an investment and plan to upgrade in 4-5 years time and have a great PC for a long long time. There is no right or wrong answer, all there are is a multitude of good choices.

If your PC is still working OK then take your time , think and wait for Raptorlake and RDNA3 to be released so you can choose from all the options available.
 
GN made the point in one of their launch reviews that in most scenarios you need a 40 series GPU to even see much of a difference with any modern high-end CPU, so an affordable 5700X (near the £240 price they've kept dropping to/out of) build isn't a bad deal at all. The platform cost of AM5 right now is really not great for a midrange build. You can practically buy a decent motherboard, CPU and RAM just for the cost of the motherboard :o

In a year, when the B boards and non-X / non-K CPUs are out, it'll likely be a different story.
 
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Nope not daft in the slightest.

I bought my 5950x (from 4970k as well) around may/june this year, prices have gone up since then for most of the stuff I purchased but for 'fun' I specced out 'am5 equivalent' if I'd have waited.... I paid around £900 for the motherboard (msi b550 mortar wifi matx), 64gb ram (corsair 3600mhz for 1:1 infinity fabric) and the 5950x.... I would have needed to spend an additional £600+ to get the am5/ddr5 versions if I was to buy now....admittedly I picked a b550 board and b series isn't out on am5 but I also couldn't find any ddr5 6000mhz (the sweet spot) 2x32gb sets on am5 but I'll use those difference as a sort of equaliser.

To me the gains versus extra cost just isn't there, 6 months from now it will likely be a different story though.

Having said that I'd maybe wait a little while to see how the prices move based on Intel's next release because lower down the product stacks Intel 12th gen were offering some great value to performance ratios...

I still don't like windows 11 UI/UX, I've got it on my laptop, but in terms of performance/stability there isn't much between 10 and 11.
 
Honestly, I'm waiting for Black Friday to build a new system for the bedroom, as I already have a set of decent DDR4 and a 3070 waiting. Realistically its vying between AM4 and LGA1700 DDR4.
With current pricing, Intel and a 12400/12600K are in the lead, as I found a 12400 and B660 motherboard, with everything I needed including WIFI (most of the best value AM4 motherboards seem to be out of stock or have gone up in price now) for pretty much the exact same price as a 5600+B550, and I'd also have 13th gen upgrade possibilities down the road.

AM4 seems to have gone up in price a bit recently, BUT with Zen4 now launching, I suspect we could see some pretty tasty discounts come Black Friday period, which will be what makes me the decision.
 
Hi mate, I would suggest maybe taking a look at the 5800x3D chip, in some games it's head and shoulders above others in performance and even against the 7000 series and from Intel's slides on the 13th gen it seems to beat their top chip in some games.
 
cHk4 said:
Hi mate, I would suggest maybe taking a look at the 5800x3D chip, in some games it's head and shoulders above others in performance and even against the 7000 series and from Intel's slides on the 13th gen it seems to beat their top chip in some games.
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I did take a look at it but I don't think it's worth the price for me. It's ~170% of the price of a 5700X and it's a 5700X with more cache. Which does indeed give a significant performance boost in some games, but it doesn't seem worth it to me. Maybe it will in a couple of years time, maybe not.

Right now from reviews I've looked at any CPU from a 5600 (even the g variant, which has less cache than the X variant and performance suffers because of it) or a 12400 upwards is effectively pretty much identical in gaming in most contexts. Certainly in my context - 2560x1440 with a 75Hz monitor. It matters if you want very high fps at low resolution, but that's not what I want. It might matter more in the future, but I don't think it will do so very quickly. Game development is relatively conservative on CPUs because games have to be playable on widely used hardware. They can get away with targeting a faster rate of increasing performance in graphics cards because that's a matter of graphics settings. If a game runs OK at OK settings on average graphics cards at the time, it has the potential to sell more copies. If it runs OK at hyper-mega-ultra settings on the latest ultra-expensive graphics card, that's good for advertising. It's far easier to make a game cover both situations with respect to graphics that it is with respect to CPU requirements. So I think that de facto CPU requirements for games will continue to increase slowly and that it will be a while before a 5600 or 12400 (let alone anything higher) would be inadequate.

To give it more context, I probably won't spend much over £700 on a PC without graphics card or drives (which I'll be moving over from my current PC). Preferably less because I would prefer to keep the total cost under £1000 with a new graphics card (after selling my existing one, which I think I could get a bit over £100 for) and I'm thinking £400-500 for the graphics card.

In that budget, the difference between a ~£200 CPU (5600X) and a ~£430 CPU (5800X3D) is major. I think the sweet spot in my desired budget is probably the 5700X or 5800X. No different in practice to the cheaper 5600X for what I do but the extra 2 cores might well be relevant in a couple of years. Or maybe a 12400 (or 12500 or 12600, depending on price). I'm not ideologically tied to any particular company (although I'm currently very unlikely by an nvidia product because nvidia is too overt in its contempt for its own customers and the future of PC gaming).
 
Joxeon said:
Keep an eye on MM as those chasing AM5 may well look to offload AM4 parts on the cheap.
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I have been doing that, but I'm really not interested in building my own PC any more and the chance of a complete PC without graphics card and without drives and with the specs I want happening to appear on MM for a price significantly less than new and for me to happen to see it before it's already sold is very slim.
 
Managed to snag a 5700X and demote my 3600 to secondary roles.

Absolutely not a daft idea, great value and longevity to be had out of AM4.

TBH it may even last well enough to skip to Zen 5.
 
Joxeon said:
This is the smart play for those rocking older zen CPUs as AM4 is still plenty relevant and offers much more bang for your buck than AM5 right now.
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3600 still holds up very well for what i use it for its just for a little future proofing ive got a 6650xt gpu that doesnt get pushed
 
Indeed, 5*** series, and 12th gen will still be plenty pokey, even with AM5 and soon 13th gen out.
Black Friday this year, even with the dollar, may have some great deals going, if you're willing to go last gen!
 
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Definitely not, as the "older stuff" is slowly being drawn out, you may be get a good deal on some components, vs the AM5 components that are heavily inflated currently.
 
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