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Worth upgrading from 1700X to 3700X?

Worthy

Worthy

Worthy

I haz 4090!
Don
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
8,185
Location
Manchester
Afternoon folks,

Looking for an honest appraisal here from people who have hopefully done similar. I've had my 1700X since release paired with a 1080ti on a Crosshair 6 Hero, all running at stock. I'm getting the upgrade itch and the 3700X is tempting me. I game at 1440p which should be completely GPU limited, but haven't there been huge architecture improvements from the 1700x to the 3700x which should give me a decent increase in speeds?

I know the Zen 3 chips are coming out later in the year, but I'm not sure I can be bothered with a full upgrade, and the 3700x shouldn't bottleneck me by any huge amount at 1440p should it? Meaning it won't be that important to upgrade again this year or next?

Thanks for any advice!
 
It's not really worth it. You'll just gain a 14% improvement in IPC. Same core count. It would be different if you went from a 1600 to a 3700 or from a 1700 to a 3900. Those kind of improvements are worth it.

1700 to 4700 would be worth it because that could be about a 28% improvement in IPC.

I get that you don't want to replace your motherboard but why not wait until Zen 3 anyway and see what your options are? The 3900 might drop in price to what the 3700 is now.
 
I'd say the opposite, going from a 1700x to a 3700x for gaming will be a nice uplift.

It's not just IPC improvement, but more cache on the CPU which improves 1% and 0.1% lows but also the ability to support higher ram speeds from 3600MHz - 3800MHz being common.

However we have the XT's out this month so maybe a 3800XT would be the better choice.

Waiting for Zen 3 would be the smarter option however. Although this could be not for another 6 + months.

As long as you don't have a X370 mobo then this is an option.
 
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I went from Zen+ to Zen 2 and then back to original Zen and honestly the difference for gaming was basically bugger all at 1440p. The 1800X that was the last of those was perfectly capable of powering the 2070 Super I had, though I did have it overclocked to 4GHz and memory at 3466/CL14 (also on a C6H actually). Even with a 2080 Ti you gain barely anything at 1440p, because you're GPU-limited so often:

relative-performance-a5ki8.png


Sure, you can argue about 0.1% and 1% lows and how "smooth" the experience is, but I certainly never felt my gaming experience was anything less than smooth on the 1800X, especially with adaptive sync in play. So no, personally I don't think it's worth it, and that's indeed the reason I sold my 3700X. If you don't have your 1700X overclocked and your RAM tweaked to its full potential via Ryzen DRAM Calculator, just do that instead.
 
I wouldn't upgrade CPU or GPU at the moment, unless you can get a really good deal...
 
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