Finally replacing my CPU/motherboard/RAM

Kiro-San · 1 May 2020 at 10:16

So I've been rocking my Intel 4790k for what will be 6 years in June, and I've decided it's finally time to upgrade the core of my PC. The only component I've fully settled on is a Ryzen 3800X, so I'm looking for recommendations on motherboard, memory, maybe cooling, and maybe PSU.

Starting with cooling I'm currently running a Corsair Hydro 105 and I know Corsair use to make AM4 mounting brackets but no one seems to carry them outside of Ebay sellers, which is fine as it's not a big cost. As far as I can tell the cooler should handle the 3800X nicely, even if the TDP is higher than 4790k. But open to recommendations.

Second, PSU. The PC has been running on EVGA SuperNova G2 750W since day dot. What I don't know is my systems power budget, or if the PSU is even capable of supplying the power the system would need given its age. I assume it would be fine, but assumptions make a blah blah etc.

Onto motherboard and memory, I don't have any particular brand loyalty, but I've always been a fan of ASUS' motherboards. Memory I don't really care, but I'd like to go for 32GB.

The components being ported over are as follows:

Zotac GeForce GTX 1080Ti AMP Extreme
Samsung 500GB 850 EVO
Crucial M500 480GB x 2
Asus Xonar soundcard (can't remember which model)

And lastly budget. Between 500 to 650 for the motherboard and memory, CPU price is set already.

Thanks guys!

Charlatan · 1 May 2020 at 13:06

3800X is a waste of cash over the 3700X. X570 Boards overkill.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

1 x MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX (Socket AM4) DDR4 ATX Motherboard= £109.99
1 x AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Eight Core 4.4GHz (Socket AM4) Processor - Retail= £299.99
1 x Team Group 8Pack Edition 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 PC4-28800C16 3600MHz Dual Channel Kit - Black/= £119.99
1 x Arctic Freezer 34 eSports Duo White CPU Cooler - 2 x 120mm= £34.99

Total: £575.46 (includes shipping: £10.50)

Kiro-San · 1 May 2020 at 13:31

Thanks, I hadn't considered the 3700X but it does make a certain sense. I'll check out some of the B450 motherboards too. More likely to stick with my Corsair AIO though. Thanks again for your input.

Charlatan · 1 May 2020 at 13:54

Kiro-San said:
Thanks, I hadn't considered the 3700X but it does make a certain sense. I'll check out some of the B450 motherboards too. More likely to stick with my Corsair AIO though. Thanks again for your input.

Do yourself a favour, just order that board, it's the best 450 board by a country mile

Adam123 · 2 May 2020 at 12:37

The 3800x is now only marginally more expensive (£15) now a days so I think the 3700x vs 3800x price argument has become out dated. Depends if you can justify £25 for 1 or 2 frames I guess.

I'm in a similar situation to yourself. I'm thinking of going x570, most likely when the new MSI Tomahawk is out (if consumer reviews live up the the engineer sample reviews).

Like you I keep my cpu for 6 years (currently on a 4690k) and the x570 chipset has pcie 4 which I think will be worth having when the next gen GPUs are released along with fast theoretical storage speeds. I think the b450s are the smart choice for now but the x570 will be more "future proof".

I'm looking at x570, 3800x and 32gb ram also.

Edit: 3700x can be found for £260 and 3800x for £285

EsaT · 2 May 2020 at 20:28

Kiro-San said:
Onto motherboard and memory, I don't have any particular brand loyalty, but I've always been a fan of ASUS' motherboards.

Blind buying of brand is the best way to get screwed into rear sooner or later.
Asus basically scams in B450 boards with market PC garbage level CPU VRM and nearly all of them are incapable to properly feeding CPUs marketing claims them to support.
In The Stilt's testing stock 2700X made ga(y)mer hype Strix B450-F overheat throttling CPU in 12 minutes of X264 encoding.
Even 2600X with PBO was too much.
Lowly Asrock B50 Pro4 has sturdier cooler running VRM.
MSI was really the only one paying real attention into CPU VRMs of B450 boards.

In X570 situation turned around with MSI taking the consumer scamming torch carrier role with B450 copypasta VRMs completely garbage for the price.
And while Asus turned ship around in VRMs with even the cheapest X570 model having more than good enough VRM for 12/16 cores, they dropped the ball in weak point of X570 boards, chipset cooling:

Actual heatsink under big marketing covers is small tinfoil origami thing relying on constant airflow from fan.
And chipset cooler is in about the worst spot directly under graphics card and bathed in its heat.

So fan has to be running always and especially during gaming and once fan wears out chipset is going to run very hot, or straight away overheat.
Not exactly the best design for longevity...

Gigabyte and MSI used common sense in chipset cooler design have good size heatsink farther away from graphics card's heat and it's capable to semi-passive cooling.
But MSI has garbage for price VRMs and hence Gigabyte did the best/most balanced design job.
X570 Aorus Elite has overkill VRM for stock CPUs and good well balanced feature set for sense making price:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/giga...4-x570-chipset-atx-motherboard-mb-57w-gi.html

But to really make sense such expensive board would need at least upgrade to 12 core in future.

And in memory you're definitely better off going for absolutely future proof 2x16GB instead of expensive per GB half size kit.
If there's not enough memory it's speeds becomes irrelevant and unless you minimize amount of backjground stuff like close web browsers 2x8GB just isn't good for heavier games.
2x16GB doesn't even cost that much:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/patr...dual-channel-kit-pvs432g320c6k-my-106-pa.html

Nearly all 16GB DIMMs should be dual rank, whose command interleaving gives gaming performance increase per clock speed/latency.
While ranks can't be accessed simultenously, another rank can be given command to start processing while one rank is getting ready to for example output asked data.
That reduced total latency of multiple memory accesses pretty much buffs performance in heavier games:
https://www.purepc.pl/test-pamieci-ram-ddr4-szybsze-2-czy-4-moduly-w-dual-channel?page=0,17
https://www.purepc.pl/test-pamieci-ram-ddr4-szybsze-2-czy-4-moduly-w-dual-channel?page=0,22
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/SYZVDKhjk8poNr7qyW8rGf.png

Also Micron rev.E chips of Crucial Ballistix clocks routinely to 3600MHz CL16:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/cruc...b-kit-2-x-16gb-ddr4-3200-udimm-my-20e-cr.html
Memory subforum has whole thread about their overclocking.
That's better than for example these:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/cors...3600mhz-quad-channel-kit-black-my-4cq-cs.html

Kiro-San · 4 May 2020 at 15:04

Adam123 said:
The 3800x is now only marginally more expensive (£15) now a days so I think the 3700x vs 3800x price argument has become out dated. Depends if you can justify £25 for 1 or 2 frames I guess.

Edit: 3700x can be found for £260 and 3800x for £285

Yeh it's not a big price difference so I'm likely to go for it. £285 is a great price too. It just future proof's the system that tiny bit more. I guess you've been watching the CPU market for years waiting for AMD or Intel to give a reason to upgrade. The new Ryzens do feel like that reason.

EsaT said:
Blind buying of brand is the best way to get screwed into rear sooner or later.
Asus basically scams in B450 boards with market PC garbage level CPU VRM and nearly all of them are incapable to properly feeding CPUs marketing claims them to support.
In The Stilt's testing stock 2700X made ga(y)mer hype Strix B450-F overheat throttling CPU in 12 minutes of X264 encoding.
Even 2600X with PBO was too much.
Lowly Asrock B50 Pro4 has sturdier cooler running VRM.
MSI was really the only one paying real attention into CPU VRMs of B450 boards.l

Thanks for all the info man. When I said I don't have brand loyalty it didn't mean I would blindly buy whatever, just that I'm not tied to a specific manufacturer. Anyhow, that board looks good, both that and the memory are a good price.

EsaT · 4 May 2020 at 15:14

Kiro-San said:
Yeh it's not a big price difference so I'm likely to go for it. £285 is a great price too. It just future proof's the system that tiny bit more. I guess you've been watching the CPU market for years waiting for AMD or Intel to give a reason to upgrade. The new Ryzens do feel like that reason.

Prices seem to vary quite often now, but 3800X is rarely cheap enough to make sens unless you just love paying for bigger marketing number.
Eight core simply won't change from being eight core by that...

Start Citizen puts 12 cores into good use and without help from SMT most cores would be quite fully occupied:
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/dkac5j/i_knew_star_citizen_utilizes_multicore_well/

Adam123 · 5 May 2020 at 01:36

Kiro-San said:
Yeh it's not a big price difference so I'm likely to go for it. £285 is a great price too. It just future proof's the system that tiny bit more. I guess you've been watching the CPU market for years waiting for AMD or Intel to give a reason to upgrade. The new Ryzens do feel like that reason.

I just feel the 4c/4t i5 is starting to struggle a bit recently, it's been fine playing bf3 (my main game for many years) but since updating my game library with 2019/2020 titles such as Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Warzone and Far Cry 5 it's definitely showing its age by hitting 95%+ utilisation causing stuttering and frame drops.

The prices have been fluctuating a lot recently, I think there was just a £5 difference between the 3700x and 3800x yesterday. Then again x570 motherboards and even the b450s have increased by around £30.

Just to throw another curve ball/idea out there... Stick a 3600 in for now which can be found for around £160 (and very very similar in performance to the 3700x and even the 3900x depending on the game) and then replace it with a zen 3 next year when they are released and look at a 4700x or even 4900x (if that's the naming scheme they go with) and keep that for the next few-6 years as that will then be 1 generation ahead of the new console Cpus.

The Intel 10700k (I think it's called, so just a refreshed 9900k) could be tempting buuuut can't justify spending money supporting Intel doing another refresh and as far as I know doesn't support pcie4 at launch. Moving to Ryzen will be my first AMD chip and its amazing they are finally competiting with Intel, even if they do boost to 1.4V when loading Spotify ha.

Kiro-San · 5 May 2020 at 08:08

Adam123 said:
The Intel 10700k (I think it's called, so just a refreshed 9900k) could be tempting buuuut can't justify spending money supporting Intel doing another refresh and as far as I know doesn't support pcie4 at launch. Moving to Ryzen will be my first AMD chip and its amazing they are finally competiting with Intel, even if they do boost to 1.4V when loading Spotify ha.

This will be me going back to AMD, I've probably had about the same amount of AMD chips and Intel chips over the years. My last AMd was an Athlon 3500+ which is going back just over 15 years.

But given Ryzen 3 is coming at the end of the year I might hold off to Christmas time.

Adam123 · 5 May 2020 at 16:22

Overclock your CPU to 4.5Ghz and I'm sure you'll be able to hold on and make it to Zen 3...

Kiro-San · 5 May 2020 at 17:17

Can't remember what it's overclocked to at the moment, I set it ages ago and it's been stable since heh. Will take a look this weekend and see if I can tweak a bit more out of it.