Intel 6700k -------> 5900X or wait for Zen 4?

Whach

Whach

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Just snagged a 5900X and was wondering on opinions regarding waiting for Zen 4. I usually only build a new system every 5-6 years (meaning CPU, Mobo and Ram) & the use case is for everything from editing media to gaming.
Of course, Zen 4 is supposedly ready for next year on a new AM5 socket & more expensive DDR5 (I know, I know, rumor mill etc), so that would mean a 5900x would be a dead end upgrade path (I don't usually upgrade a CPU so that is not a huge issue for me, but the option would be nice).
Also, with the new IPC and new features etc, would it be worth it to just wait it out? My current build is showing its age in daily use, so I'm on the fence about keeping the 5900X. Any opinions and advice welcome. Cheers.
 
5900x will last a long time at this point. However, if the new socket/platform has the life that AM4 did you could wait for that, and still have years of upgrade potential.

That being said, being an early DDR5 adopter will be expensive.
 
For the additional price of a motherboard, you'll have a decent upgrade especially doing multi-core work, and you won't feel pressured to dive into the first round of nextgen/DDR5 hardware which may or may not take some time to really stabilize across the board.

If you were perfectly happy with your current setup I'd tell you to sell the 5900X. As I read it, though, grab yourself a nice B550 and enjoy at least a couple years of the additional performance.
 
Do what you want, but if you wait for AM5, you will still likely be getting a new CPU, motherboard, and RAM when you upgrade again 5 years after that, so the upgrade path point is kind of moot. I say run the 5900x. The difference over a 6700k is night and day. Get a decent cooler and let it boost or enable PBO to boost higher.
 
The best time to upgrade is when you need more performance. You can wait forever for the next thing. Like others have said as well, DDR5 will probably be expensive and perform no better than the DDR4 that we have available right now. It will take a couple of years to be worthwhile as it's a chicken-egg problem. Which do you want to be? Also, most people don't wait 5 years to upgrade the CPU on an existing motherboard. If they go that long, they end up replacing it all for whatever new features are available on the new motherboards and chipsets. The only exception I've ever made to that personally was when I was putting together computers for family members from spare parts. If I had a 10 year old motherboard, I could go out to eBay and buy the fastest cpu that will run on it for $25. I could also load up the RAM slots for cheap.
 
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kamikazi said:
The best time to upgrade is when you need more performance. You can wait forever for the next thing. Like others have said as well, DDR5 will probably be expensive and perform no better than the DDR4 that we have available right now. It will take a couple of years to be worthwhile as it's a chicken-egg problem. Which do you want to be? Also, most people don't wait 5 years to upgrade the CPU on an existing motherboard. If they go that long, they end up replacing it all for whatever new features are available on the new motherboards and chipsets. The only exception I've ever made to that personally was when I was putting together computers for family members from spare parts. If I had a 10 year old motherboard, I could go out to eBay and buy the fastest cpu that will run on it for $25. I could also load up the RAM slots for cheap.
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I've upgraded my CPU 3 times on my higher-end X470 board. It's worked out well with each new generation 2700x->3900x->5950x, and i've got zero need for X570 which really only brought PCI-E 4.0 support. However, it's unknown if AMD will be this kind to us again.
 
Mchart said:
I've upgraded my CPU 3 times on my higher-end X470 board. It's worked out well with each new generation 2700x->3900x->5950x, and i've got zero need for X570 which really only brought PCI-E 4.0 support. However, it's unknown if AMD will be this kind to us again.
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You're right, I guess I should clarify, I've actually upgraded the CPU on my x570 twice, I started with a 3900x, then 3950x, then 5950x. However, that was all in the span of 18 months not 5 years. Most people who upgrade like us don't wait 5 years to upgrade the CPU. By that time, there are normally not any new CPUs being made for the socket. I guess with X370, you could have started with 1700x, 2700x, 3900x, 5900x, etc. over 3 to 4 years. I think x370 may be pushing it for Zen 3 though.
 
That 6700k will bottle neck you heavily in games with a high end GPU. So if you play newer games then it would make a lot of sense to upgrade to a 5900x now. Most likely somewhere between 9 and 18 months until zen4 is released and it is likely that you will have to pay a massive early adopters fee for good DDR5 ram. Typically it takes 12-18 months from a new RAM type hits mainstream market until you get fast low latency memory at reasonable prices. The earliest I would consider going to a DDR5 platform would be late 2022 or early 2023, which would be a long wait if you want to play resource demanding games on a 6700k or do CPU intensive tasks. Went from a 7700k to a 5900x and the difference was massive both in games and in CPU intensive tasks.
 
evhvis said:
That 6700k will bottle neck you heavily in games with a high end GPU. So if you play newer games then it would make a lot of sense to upgrade to a 5900x now. Most likely somewhere between 9 and 18 months until zen4 is released and it is likely that you will have to pay a massive early adopters fee for good DDR5 ram. Typically it takes 12-18 months from a new RAM type hits mainstream market until you get fast low latency memory at reasonable prices. The earliest I would consider going to a DDR5 platform would be late 2022 or early 2023, which would be a long wait if you want to play resource demanding games on a 6700k or do CPU intensive tasks. Went from a 7700k to a 5900x and the difference was massive both in games and in CPU intensive tasks.
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There will be also V-cache editions of Zen 3 processors this year. IMO that's a nice spot to upgrade, you will get the absolutely maxed DDR4 platform.
 
Lepardi said:
There will be also V-cache editions of Zen 3 processors this year. IMO that's a nice spot to upgrade, you will get the absolutely maxed DDR4 platform.
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And the EVGA X570 Dark is due to launch soon, rumor has it that it will be a 2 DIMM slot board. Regardless of how that particular board turns out to be, I think Zen 3 is maturing nicely. Sometimes it pays not to be an early adopter.
 
evhvis said:
That 6700k will bottle neck you heavily in games with a high end GPU. So if you play newer games then it would make a lot of sense to upgrade to a 5900x now. Most likely somewhere between 9 and 18 months until zen4 is released and it is likely that you will have to pay a massive early adopters fee for good DDR5 ram. Typically it takes 12-18 months from a new RAM type hits mainstream market until you get fast low latency memory at reasonable prices. The earliest I would consider going to a DDR5 platform would be late 2022 or early 2023, which would be a long wait if you want to play resource demanding games on a 6700k or do CPU intensive tasks. Went from a 7700k to a 5900x and the difference was massive both in games and in CPU intensive tasks.
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I’m currently using a 3080FE with my 6700k oc’d to 4.7 playing at 4K usung DSR. Other than the 1% lows, it’s not that bad. But that, in addition to the increasing sluggishness and my ever increasing workload, it’s time for my usual 6yr upgrade cadence. I upgrade my GPU much more often. I kept my 980ti SLI config for 5 years and it served me well :)

from so the responses , I’m leaning towards keeping the 5900x once it arrives from Amazon this Friday. Now I just have to make a choice about a b550 or x570 mobo….
 
Whach said:
I’m currently using a 3080FE with my 6700k oc’d to 4.7 playing at 4K usung DSR. Other than the 1% lows, it’s not that bad. But that, in addition to the increasing sluggishness and my ever increasing workload, it’s time for my usual 6yr upgrade cadence. I upgrade my GPU much more often. I kept my 980ti SLI config for 5 years and it served me well :)

from so the responses , I’m leaning towards keeping the 5900x once it arrives from Amazon this Friday. Now I just have to make a choice about a b550 or x570 mobo….
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I have the same decision to make, and I'm leaning towards getting a B550. There are some really good B550 boards if you're willing to do your homework.
 
Whach said:
I’m currently using a 3080FE with my 6700k oc’d to 4.7 playing at 4K usung DSR. Other than the 1% lows, it’s not that bad. But that, in addition to the increasing sluggishness and my ever increasing workload, it’s time for my usual 6yr upgrade cadence. I upgrade my GPU much more often. I kept my 980ti SLI config for 5 years and it served me well :)

from so the responses , I’m leaning towards keeping the 5900x once it arrives from Amazon this Friday. Now I just have to make a choice about a b550 or x570 mobo….
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In the modern games I tried in the week between getting the 3080 and the 5900x I was running around 40s and 50s in several modern games, but I got a 50-80% frame rate increase after swapping the CPU. It is well known though that Nvidia is struggeling with CPU overhead in its drivers, which is why AMD GPUs are generally faster at 1080p. The 7700k was running 4.4-4.5 ghz all core on stock.
 
evhvis said:
In the modern games I tried in the week between getting the 3080 and the 5900x I was running around 40s and 50s in several modern games, but I got a 50-80% frame rate increase after swapping the CPU. It is well known though that Nvidia is struggeling with CPU overhead in its drivers, which is why AMD GPUs are generally faster at 1080p. The 7700k was running 4.4-4.5 ghz all core on stock.
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Out of curiosity, which games in particular?
 
Whach said:
Now I just have to make a choice about a b550 or x570 mobo….
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B550 unless you're going to throw money at new SSD's as well, which I can't recommend unless you are transfer rate constrained (and hardly anyone really is). X570 only gives you the extra throughput to the chipset, which doesn't do a thing for SATA until you load up multiple ports all at once.
 
pitingres said:
B550 unless you're going to throw money at new SSD's as well, which I can't recommend unless you are transfer rate constrained (and hardly anyone really is). X570 only gives you the extra throughput to the chipset, which doesn't do a thing for SATA until you load up multiple ports all at once.
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I was thinking that too. But I tend to recycle storage drives and was eventually planning on having two m.2 drives in the system, with one being a newer pcie4.0 m.2 in addition to my current 3.0 drive. From what I’m seeing, having a second m.2 drive in a second nvme slot reduces the speed of a 4.0 nvme drive and disables some Sata ports on b550. I’m tempted by this ASUS TUF x570 Plus for around $195 on Amazon. I’m noticing that there are some b550 boards that overlap into x570 price ranges & features. Tis very confusing. I’m budgeting around 200 max, but obviously less spent is preferred.
 
Unless you're budget constrained I recommend going x570. Ironically, that doesn't really come into play when talking about b550. b550 boards are expensive for what it supposed to be a budget/mainstream chipset. The only real advantage to b550 chipsets over x570 is heat generation of the chipset. Otherwise x570 is the better chipset.

Since price really isn't a concern between b550 and x570 for the most part (as long as you are looking at the high end x570 boards) the main difference is going to be the featureset of the boards. This is the real advantage b550 has since the board designs are much newer and more likely to have newer or higher speed integrated LAN and such. It's also the same reason b550 boards tend to be as expensive as the midrange x570.

I went with x570 because I expect to be using the motherboard for years and I didn't want to compromise. It has more flexibility and capability which while not coming into play at the moment may come into play a few years down the road.

The features you require and what you know you'll do with the board and what you might do with the board down the line should be the determining factor in what chipset you want. I'm not a fan of how high motherboard prices are but they are what they are. Having a budget is good but make sure you give yourself some leeway in the budget in order to get a quality motherboard. My Gigabyte x570 Aorus Pro Wifi was $270 which is almost twice the price of the most expensive motherboard I'd ever purchased previously but I don't regret buying it.

I had looked at the Asus TUF Gaming x570-Plus when I was researching motherboards. I liked the price and I liked the 8 SATA ports. A big con was the lack of the integrated I/O shield. It seems petty but after the first motherboard with the integrated I/O shield I won't mess with another motherboard without it. Another issue with the board is the VRM setup. It's not anywhere as good as it sounds from what I remember. Asus isn't the most truthful about VRM setups especially on lower end boards and I didn't want to have to worry about having VRMs that end up running hot when I push my CPU especially since I plan to keep the motherboard in service for years. It would probably be fine with the 5800x I ended up with but at the time I had planned on a 5900x and only settled for a 5800x because I was tired of waiting to find the 5900x in stock for MSRP. The Asus also lacks heatspreaders for NVME drives and I believe has worse integrated audio compared to the Gigabyte. That said, if I'd been looking for an x570 motherboard for my server rather than my main system I probably would have gone with the Asus. It's an intriguing board for the price.
 
no issue going with 5900x build, it's on a mature platform. a new platform with DDR5 would take a few years for it to become stable, price/tech wise. Also i'd go with B550 mobo instead of X570 unless you really need the additional features of the x570
 
Personally I would say wait it out, but then again I am convinced there hasnt been a relevant CPU upgrade since ivy bridge/DDR3, so maybe im just biased.
 
Whach said:
From what I’m seeing, having a second m.2 drive in a second nvme slot reduces the speed of a 4.0 nvme drive and disables some Sata ports on b550.
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That's not quite right. The PCIe 4.0 slot on a B550 is wired direct to the CPU. Any remaining m.2 slots are wired through the chipset and would have no effect on the 4.0 drive at all. Whether some SATA ports are disabled depends on the board setup.

I dislike X570 (when not really needed) because of how hot they can run. The lower power X570S board coming any day now might be a good option.
 
kamikazi said:
The best time to upgrade is when you need more performance. You can wait forever for the next thing. Like others have said as well, DDR5 will probably be expensive and perform no better than the DDR4 that we have available right now. It will take a couple of years to be worthwhile as it's a chicken-egg problem. Which do you want to be? Also, most people don't wait 5 years to upgrade the CPU on an existing motherboard. If they go that long, they end up replacing it all for whatever new features are available on the new motherboards and chipsets. The only exception I've ever made to that personally was when I was putting together computers for family members from spare parts. If I had a 10 year old motherboard, I could go out to eBay and buy the fastest cpu that will run on it for $25. I could also load up the RAM slots for cheap.
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My friend bought an Tachi x370 motherboard at launch with a Ryzen 1700.

He upgraded later on that same board to a Ryzen 3950. That’s a pretty monster upgrade on the same AM4 motherboard. If AM5 has an option like that, it’d be worth waiting IMO.

I’m in the same boat as O.P., but about a year ago I decided to upgrade my 6850K to a 6950X for $400, instead of buying a new Ryzen system. Now that 6950X chip is about $300 on eBay. I haven’t found anything that my 6950X struggles on. For games we know CPU doesn’t matter at 4K, and for productivity 10 core/20 thread and x99 is still quite beasty. I think I made the right choice. I’ll likely upgrade to AM5 when it proves out.

I tried briefly a 11700f in a Alienware prebuilt that I bought for the 3080 graphics card but at best it felt like a lateral, and to me it felt like a downgrade in overall capability (less Bells and Whistle features, less PCI-E lanes), so I didn’t keep the pre-built, and resold it sans graphics cards. If an 11700 feels like a lateral, I would assume a 5900 with a 550 motherboard would mostly feel like a lateral too — coming from feature rich x99, So my vote is to max out the processor with a 6950x, overclock it, and upgrade next gen.
 
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Whach said:
Out of curiosity, which games in particular?
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Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p maxed out with DLSS and COD Cold War were the newest games (Cold war came with the card). Went from around 40fps to mid 60s at 1440p with DLSS in Cyberpunk 2077 and in Cold War the FPS went from high 40s to 70+ with the same settings in the same area in SP. Also tried shadow of the tomb raider and remember being very dissapointed by the frame rates on the 7700k and that it ran great on the 5900x, but don't remember the frame rates for that one.

Only ran on the 7700k for around 1 week as I had received all the hardware except the 5900x by the time I got the 3080.
 
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Very happy with my 5900x on a MSI X570 Unify mb with 32G (2x16) of DDR4-3600 ram
 
Well, Amazon is now holding delivery until next month…just my luck after getting myself giddy. Decided to hold off until later this year now. I’ll take it as cosmic sign to wait and gather a new case etc instead
X570s? 5900XT? Lol
 
Whach said:
Well, Amazon is now holding delivery until next month…just my luck after getting myself giddy. Decided to hold off until later this year now. I’ll take it as cosmic sign to wait and gather a new case etc instead
X570s? 5900XT? Lol
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This sounds like my own internal dialog.
 
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My current upgrade path was a Phenom 2 940BE -> Ryzen 1700 -> Ryzen 3900X

The jump from 940BE to Ryzen was a "holy shit, my computer can now run all the things."
The jump from ryzen 1700 to Ryzen 3900X is "Holy shit, now my computer can run everything smooth as silk and fast as hell"

I suspect that jumping immediately into a ryzen 5000 series would be such a substantial upgrade that you'll be extremely happy with it. Instead of waiting a few years for whatever it'll take to make AM5 viable and in stock.
I think that AM5's launch is gonna have motherboard, ram, videocard AND processor shortages. Therefore also price gouging on ALL of these.
 
FWIW, I game at 4K and went from a Haswell-e 5960x (massively overclocked) that could spank the 6700k to a 5950x (more cores than the 5900x, but same IPC) and noticed a rather large difference in CPU heavy games like BFV and MSFS2020. Overall, my entire gaming experience has been much smoother. Average FPS are around the same, BUT my lows are way higher, so I have 0 stuttering now.

I'd say go for it, the 5900x is a great CPU and will last you a long time.

Anyone who has been in this hobby for awhile knows there is ALWAYS something new around the corner, if you wait, you will always be waiting. Personally; I'd give the DDR5 / PCIe 5.0 thing a generation or two to work out the bugs.
 
Oh I was fully ready to jump in after thinking through everything in the end. Until Amazon had to renege on their end. If I can get it I will buy it. Until then, I’ll piece together the other parts. Case, psu etc :)
 
OP, everyone here has already provided great advice on the 5900x.
If you choose to be an early adopter of a new socket/chipset/platform…. You may run into those early adopter issues.
 
Lepardi said:
There will be also V-cache editions of Zen 3 processors this year. IMO that's a nice spot to upgrade, you will get the absolutely maxed DDR4 platform.
Click to expand...
got a link to this i seen it on the 5900x but i thought that was more a dig at intel saying hey F you look what we can do with our cpus, amd is going to actually release this?
 
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Shadowarez said:
got a link to this i seen it on the 5950x but i thought that was more a dig at intel saying hey F you look what we can do with our cpus, amd is going to actually release this?
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My understanding is that zen4 isn't going to be ready in time to compete with the new intel socket and that they are doing one last release on the AM4 socket with V-cache to increase performance. No one knows if intel will regain the performance crown or if the AMD CPUs with V-cache will be faster.
 
it'll be faster in compiling and cpu heavy tasks, but damn i just got a 5950x and its a great sample but that cache is gonna be nice ill see if bestbuy can put me on a wait list for this to grab one. but yeah the upgrade from a 6700k-5900x will be amazing in games,cpu work, just get a good board and your set for a long time ddr5 as others stated will be rough in the beginning but will mature and get better eventually, there is already 10.5ghz samples in testing so be happy with this upgrade and your set for a few years at least, i plan to keep this 5950x rig untill DDR5 becomes a viable replacement wich will be at least 4-5 years.
 
Whach said:
Oh I was fully ready to jump in after thinking through everything in the end. Until Amazon had to renege on their end. If I can get it I will buy it. Until then, I’ll piece together the other parts. Case, psu etc :)
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Newegg has 'em right now.

AMD.com will likely put some up today or tomorrow. Usually between 9am - 11am Pacific Time.

Amazon is charging ten extra dollars, but their page says in stock soon. Which basically means they have a truck on the way, with stock inside and they are simply waiting for it to arrive at a distribution center, to be able to sell it. If you buy it now, it will likely ship within 3-ish days.
 
it seems this is the combo to get Asus Dark Hero,5900-5950x. 3800mhz + mem 1000+ psu 3000-6000 gpu this wasl ike my old 4970x and the old x79 DH board that thing lasted me from 2011 untill i got ahold of a i9 7980xe.
 
I'd keep the 5900X. I recently upgraded from a 8700K to the 5950X and I'm happy with it (I actually ordered the 5900X, but Amazon sent me the 5950X by mistake).

Waiting for the new AM5 platform is probably not a good idea. I was an early Ryzen adopter and things were rough at the beginning (problems with RAM, stability, etc.).

I would not bank on getting first-gen AM5 and DDR5 as it will probably take at least a year for things to stabilize (plus you will be paying a big premium for maybe not much better performance).
 
cybereality said:
I'd keep the 5900X. I recently upgraded from a 8700K to the 5950X and I'm happy with it (I actually ordered the 5900X, but Amazon sent me the 5950X by mistake).

Waiting for the new AM5 platform is probably not a good idea. I was an early Ryzen adopter and things were rough at the beginning (problems with RAM, stability, etc.).

I would not bank on getting first-gen AM5 and DDR5 as it will probably take at least a year for things to stabilize (plus you will be paying a big premium for maybe not much better performance).
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Most def what I’ve decided to do. Whatever I can get tho. It’ll last me for a while methinks
 
evhvis said:
My understanding is that zen4 isn't going to be ready in time to compete with the new intel socket and that they are doing one last release on the AM4 socket with V-cache to increase performance. No one knows if intel will regain the performance crown or if the AMD CPUs with V-cache will be faster.
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I think we do know. AMD wouldn’t be wasting their time messing with v-cache CPUs on a dead platform if they thought they thought their current cpus were good enough to retain the performance crown. That said, even if they don’t, I don’t agree with AMD wasting resources on AM4 at this stage.
 
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