I would hold off on a 7800x3d personally atm. we know that
just offered to buy him a case or give a large chunk towards one
ummmm gonna have to disagree here, the expense of upgrading mine would be hilarious compared to upgrading to am5, the 5800x3d would only give me 5-15 % on a much higher gpu than i have.
edit: just offered to pay my dad for a new case so can go 7800x3d and stay in the budget, he wants to be ablke to play games at high settings for years to come
Should putr here as gets a bit lost below...I agree for new build, AM5, not AM4
I'd think carefully about going all the way up to 7800x3d for now, if your dad is still sticking with an old gpu in the meantime.
The way I look at it is 7600x on average beats the 5800x3d in av gaming (but by v small% so call it a on a par....and by same argument 5800x3d beating all other 5000 series cpu's, beat all the other higher core cpu's in gaming also) and the 7600 non x is a couple % behind the 7600 x so s/b just behind the 5800x3d...but would still call a par.....and at £194 is cheaper than the 5800x3d by close to £100, which pretty much covers the cost of 32gb 6000 speed ddr5 ram, so difference really is price of mobo....so if your dad is switching from old intel to new complete build amd, then I would 100% go AM5 now...am4 is only worth it for people who already have it on older cpu that can still upgrade.
we also know that the 5600x when it came out beat the 3000 series cpu's that amd had, and yes, the higher core cpu's also...so for me argument about going higher core is an old argument that doesn't stack up...gaming still predominantly is single thread performance lead still
so later this year the 9000 zen 5 desktop series cpu's are being released(if naming sticks to jumping 2 digits, and 8000 series if for the laptop only) and people expecting similar jump in single core performance so last rumour I saw was that the 9600x or equiv will prob beat the 7000 series cpus and be close to 7800x3d in gaming performance. the x3d version always comes out later so wouldn't expect that till next year.
other thing to factor is when testing all the cpu's they of course will use a 4090...so difference in extra fps you'll get drops as your drop down the gpu stack.
So if your dad is not going to upgrade his gpu anytime soon, I doubt he'll see a massive boost in fps unless it's a game that loves the 3d v cache.....hense why i suggested the 7600 cpu, as is still way more than capable with the gpu your dad will use, so you wont be getting any cpu bottleneck i think(though the 7600x being a little quicker that you originally put has a bigger discount, so not that much more, but you'll have to get a cooler whereas the 7600 comes with a basic one in the box i believe)...then when your dad decides to upgrade his gpu, you can take a fresh look at the current cpu range, as i'm sure in a year or so, the newer cpu's will all be wiping the floor with what we have now...7600/7600x will still be in demand as will get a real budget builder on the platform so should still have an ok value on 2nd hand mk.
