Installation
Before I started pulling apart the system, I made sure the BIOS was on a version that would support the new CPU. If you are also thinking of upgrading your Ryzen do this before you do anything else. You don’t want to install your new CPU only to find it no longer posts, and you’re left staring at a blank screen, forcing you to swap the CPUs round again. The CPU swap was about as painless as you can expect. Naturally you have to remove the heatsink, give various bits a clean, do the swap, apply thermal paste and replace the heatsink but I didn’t shred any fingers in the process.
Thoughts
As before, with the 3800X, I won’t go in to scientific benchmarking. There’s plenty of people that do that if you need to compare CPUs. But, as with the Ryzen 3800X over the 1700, there was a very noticeable improvement over the chip it replaced. Flight Simulator 2020, which is a very CPU bound game was the largest benefactor, with higher frame rates at – Well, I must be honest and say I didn’t record the framerates, before and after, but the difference was perceptible enough. And it should be too. The Ryzen 5900X has a much improved single-thread and multi-thread performance, plus the 64MB L3 cache is double the amount on the Ryzen 3800X. All in all, it’s yet another powerful upgrade for a modest amount of cache. Especially with the sale of the 3800X recovering some of the costs. The likes of Transport Fever also enjoyed smoother gameplay.
Along with the game performance benefits, the productivity benefits are also present. Ableton allows me to run even more tracks, with more plugins on the go. Editing and rendering projects in DaVinci Resolve is effortless. Handbrake chews through frames like they weren’t there. It’s been a massive boost.
This will be the final configuration for this machine, as far as motherboard, and CPU go. It’s possible I will upgrade the RAM, and maybe a GPU upgrade. But, with the amount of power available, it will be a few years yet before I start considering an entirely new build.