TheDankKoosh

The only changes available to AM4 X3D chips are curve optimizer (via PBO2 tuner) and BCLK changes, you cannot raise max load voltage beyond ~1.2v as it's fused at the factory to do so, mostly to protect the 3D cache. Most you're likely to get without a clockgen is 102 BCLK AKA +84mhz to core clocks, best you should reasonably do with your system is to just undervolt via PBO2 tuner to ensure max clocks are getting reached in game, definitely give the ram a tune for less stutter in games.

If he's going to be more or less exclusively sourcing the major parts from Aliexpress then he may as well go with the Erying 11980hk(ES) board which will outperform anything that's been suggested thus far and comes in close to the same price as a chip+ali x99 board. Intentionally cheaping out on the PSU is silly when $10 could mean the difference between a ticking bomb with newly purchased parts and a multiple years steady system, common sense and a little reading will allow you to get a cheap power supply that won't have those issues.

Whichever is at least 6-core with the highest clock speed possible if this is just for gaming, but unless you already have a board for broadwell xeons you're going to be paying a premium for nearly 10 year old hardware.

If you want a cheap 1080 based rig and you already have the card and nothing else, grab a lenovo P520 from ebay with a W2135 and 32gb of ram, you'll get more cores/cache along with quad channel and skylake arch for better IPC. Whole systems without drives can be had for $200 and a $40 dollar nvme will make it a very capable gaming rig.

TDC being high doesn't necessarily mean that your chip is actually pushing 140% of its typical amperage except under the most intensive scenarios like P95 small ffts, I'd say you're gonna be hovering around 100A at 1.25v (aka 125w) for your nominal max power draw unless you're under a good AIO or custom loop.

Best results will be had from your chip by utilizing PBO2 overclocking options, maxed out power limiters and +200mhz PBO settings will give you the best performance on Zen 3. A little extra performance to be had by tuning with a negative curve optimizer offset, all of this should be set in the BIOS though. After that focusing on memory/fclk and tuning timings will give you much better gaming performance. Test out the above settings I suggested with something like a -10 all core CO offset and see how you chip is boosting, if everything looks good I can assist in memory tuning, but I will need info on your memory config and what ICs your memory is using. Thaiphoon Burner is generally a good tool for this

Using both zen and zen+ chips I could not get a brand new b450m ds3h to do anything above 2133 mhz memory which was very limiting with my 2600. Even now on this B550 UD AC I have lesser issues with the on-board usb 2 refusing to function even at bone stock settings and kinda wish I would've coughed up the $200 when I saw a B550 unify-x up for sale

Easily the 5500, zen 3 cores and no cross ccx latency make the 5500 overall a stronger chip despite half the cache. The 5500 being a monolithic zen 3 design can also do crazy memory speeds which will make a pretty good difference in gaming if you learn how to tune ram, access to curve optimizer is also very handy as you should be able to do -30 all core without issue since the 5500 only has a max all core boost of 4.25ghz.

The earlier wraith stealth coolers have a copper slug in the middle which performs a bit better than the all aluminum model that gets thrown in the box now. Either way using a -30 PBO curve optimizer offset should tame any temp and boosting issues.

A maxed out curve optimizer offset of -30 all core will be highly recommended then, the newer AMD stock coolers are only slightly better than non-k intel coolers.

It wouldn't kill your rig to go 16gb but you may get limited in some scenarios. The midrange and up models are generally decent, but low end gigabyte on AM4 has only ever given me trouble, which is anecdotal, but this notoriety is not just coming from me. Do you already have a cooling solution or are you sticking with the stock cooler?

Either of those two alternative boards will be far much less of a nightmare compared to that S2H, I'd wager the msi model will be the best of the bunch and with good memory you can do 4400mhz+ without much tweaking (2 dimm only). Are you able to budget in a decent 32gb kit of memory to finish it off?

In that case the info I placed below would likely be your best bet, would you be able to squeeze out enough for a better board at least?

This well and honestly depends on what country you're located in and whether or not you'd be comfortable with getting hardware from aliexpress as I believe they have some far better deals for hardware that would give you much better price/perf. If you're set to the R5 5500 then I'd try to shoot for a slightly better board to pair with it, low-end gigabyte AM4 boards are very temperamental and have only given me issues on both b350 and b450. Try to get as good of a memory kit that's within your budget as the zen 3 APUs can do very high memory clocks in 1:1:1 mode and this makes up for lack of cache compared to the chiplet zen 3 parts.

Semantics aside I believe PBO must be enabled for curve optimizer to take effect, as you are modifying the stock V/F curve of PBO for your chip. There is no inherent reason to disable PBO unless you're extremely temperature constrained in something like a passive system, otherwise adjusting the TDC, EDC and PPT to your liking is a much preferable option to retain performance.

PBO is an algorithm that uses on chip logistics and monitoring to best provide extra clock speed when more performance is requested by programs, also controlling when the chip needs to scale things back. This happens very quickly in few millisecond spans and is generally is optimal state of any Zen products after Zen 2. You generally cannot achieve equivalent light-load clock speeds when manually overclocking since the chip typically better determines when and how clock speed and voltage shifts need to happen. PBO can and will generally use higher voltages since the chip will be allowed to stretch it's legs from relaxed voltage and amperage requirements, this is not inherently harmful to the chips. X3D chips have more stringent limits placed onto them due to the relatively fragile nature of the stacked cache, the extra cache also has the added deficit of running 10-15c hotter than their non stacked counterparts. As such these chips are multiple hundred megahertz short and limited to ~1.2v during heavy operation, at stock they tend to throttle slightly even if you're on a good cooler. Thankfully with the 7800x3d, AMD allowed support for one of the best PBO features Curve Optimizer, which allows you to adjust the voltage/frequency algorithm and effectively undervolt your CPU for every given frequency while still retaining the benefits of PBO itself. You'd likely see a 200-300mhz bump from just using curve optimizer to dial the algo down and give you the proper max clocks that your chip can handle at that same 1.2v limit. Hope this explains a majority of what you're looking to find with this topic. Take it from me, someone who has watched for over 10 years, Linus has a generally poor understanding of hardware and there are far better sources to read/watch if you want something properly informative.

The 5700x regularly retails for $180 brand new and will play every game and run any programs you want at full speed, the performance deficit in games vs the 5800x3d can be made up with a +200mhz PBO offset and tuning your memory settings, overall a much better chip for the price. Here is an example build that I would go for at ~$1000 this would play any game without issue even at 1440p https://pcpartpicker.com/list/vtrJyg Sorry to hear about the cancer, that crap runs in my family to an extent and I've had to watch them suffer due to it, hopefully you find this helpful.

The board and cooler you have should be sufficient and if kombo strike 3 is working fine then bclk and memory tuning are your next avenues for extra performance I just got my 5800x3d system fully tuned up on a B550 AD UC and H150i for cooling, board won't boot beyond 102 bclk which will give a max clock of ~4.55ghz, but that doesn't square everything away. The 5800x3d will want too much voltage to hold those max clocks under load, so a curve optimizer offset using PBO2tuner (or kombo strike) is necessary. My chip is likely top 5% on the cores as -30 CO and 102 bclk is rock solid stable, and would likely do 4.8ghz with a delid and a board with an external clockgen. My memory controller/infinity fabric on the other hand aren't as peachy, and I've been stuck to 3733 C14 on my dual rank bdie kit (2x16) at 1.5v vdimm, this might be the fault of the board though, despite that I was still able to attain sub 60ns aida memory latency after getting subtimings punched in.

The 11600k will be sufficient for most games paired with a 3080 ti at 4k, even with quality level upscaling, but CPU heavy titles are going to be begging for your rig to be tuned to attain relatively high and stable framerates. If you're on good cooling, have a decent mobo and a good dual rank kit of ram, you shouldn't have any issues. You are stuck to a dead platform though, so any gpu upgrade would necessitate a platform change as well.

After tuning with multiple DDR4 platforms (including AM4) extensively I have never been unable to get any functioning kit of memory to work no matter how obscure the manufacturer or motherboard. Sometimes boards are disagreeable and will not want to function with the XMP profile correctly, but manually keying in the proper voltages and memory timings if necessary have never failed in my book.

QVL should not matter if the motherboard is verified for the specific memory chips on the dimms themselves, those are definitely a bin of hynix cjr/djr or micron rev e/b. The voltages I posted above should be able to stabilize even the worst of memory controllers and/or infinity fabric at 3600. Anything short of the board attempting to use a crazy procODT value or the dimms themselves being faulty should be able to work in this configuration.

Voltages should be configured as followed for 3600+ on ryzen 5000 SOC: 1.1v VDDG CCD: 1v VDDG IOD: 1.05v VDDP: 1v This has given me the best results on my new 5800x3d system, core voltages shouldn't need to be touched at all.

Unfortunately that model does not come with BIOS flashback, so the board is basically a brick unless you think you're capable of successfully using a BIOS programmer, you're likely out of luck on this one, sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

After the most recent agesa bios revisions most single CCD chips (R5 and R7) should be able to do 6400 1:1 if you're willing to tune and tinker with SOC/IOD voltages and memory timings. If you're looking for plug and play, 6000 is basically 100% without touching anything, 6200 might be possible without much issue as well. 2:1 mode is never worth it on anything but the R9 chips, where those are more able to utilize the extra bandwidth generated at higher memory speeds like 7200+