how much performance gain will i *actually* see

[Doodman]

So I upgraded my Motherboard, CPU and Memory recently, and my performance increases have been... 'meh' at best.  Everything ive read and been told is that my CPU was bottlenecking my graphics card.  It made sense to me as my CPU was good, but it was 8 years old.  My old MB/CPU was an I7-3930k on an Asus p9x79 Deluxe with 32 gigs of corsair vengence ram. I was able to stably overclock it to 4.2 GHz.

 

I upgraded to a Ryzen 5 3600 on an MSI B450 Tomahawk Max with 16 gig of of g.skill Aegis 3000 mhz CL 16-18-18 memory.  Ive tried overclock the memory as I know AMD is very touchy about the memory used... But it seems no matter what I change, my computer freezes and goes back to default.  Im either ignorant or have bad luck in the silicon lottery...Its a toss up, Ill leave that up to you.

 

https://imgur.com/qhLpqK4

 

These are the performance 'increases' That I got with my testing.  All tests were ran at 1080p at fully maxed out settings and then at the lowest possible settings.  I mainly play AAA single player games, I just threw fortnite and CS:GO to round out my tests.  So now im wondering if I should spend another 30 bucks on memory and hit the "sweetspot" that LTT tested and recommended on memory, or if I should just ship it all back and go back to my old system and save the money.

[PopsicleHustler]

You really need fast RAM for Ryzen, especially Zen 2. Having it at stock 2133Mhz gives you a significant performance decrease.

[Doodman]

its running at 3000Mhz, unless Im misunderstanding you

[PopsicleHustler]

1 minute ago, Doodman said:

its running at 3000Mhz, unless Im misunderstanding you

What are your CPU temps when running games? And can you check RAM speed in CPU-Z just to be sure.

[Doodman]

It gets to about 65c to 70c while gaming and I have confirmed speed and timings in CPU-z

[PopsicleHustler]

3 minutes ago, Doodman said:

It gets to about 65c to 70c while gaming and I have confirmed speed and timings in CPU-z

Is memory running in dual channel? What turbo boost are you getting on the CPU?

[Mira Yurizaki]

Looking over the comparison:

• CS:GO has a default max FPS setting of 300. You could bump this up, but this may cause issues on top of it not really being practical.
• Some newer games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider may be using more cores than older games, so the performance delta between two processors with the same core count may be smaller
• The rest at the low settings look fine, and at maximum (I'm presuming absolutely every setting cranked up to max rather than using a preset and nothing else) you're likely hitting the performance limit of the GPU.

As for bumping up the RAM speed from DDR4-3000 to DDR4-3200 that AMD recommends probably won't get you that much more performance. You should check out  CPU based benchmarks from review sites on the Ryzen 3600 and compare it to what your system gets.

[Doodman]

Turbo boost is 4.2 ghz

https://imgur.com/a/Lx0uaqk

 

These are screenshots of my ram timing screens on CPU-Z and Ryzen Master

[Doodman]

7 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Looking over the comparison:

• CS:GO has a default max FPS setting of 300. You could bump this up, but this may cause issues on top of it not really being practical.
• Some newer games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider may be using more cores than older games, so the performance delta between two processors with the same core count may be smaller
• The rest at the low settings look fine, and at maximum (I'm presuming absolutely every setting cranked up to max rather than using a preset and nothing else) you're likely hitting the performance limit of the GPU.

As for bumping up the RAM speed from DDR4-3000 to DDR4-3200 that AMD recommends probably won't get you that much more performance. You should check out  CPU based benchmarks from review sites on the Ryzen 3600 and compare it to what your system gets.

I have checked other CPU performances (blender and the like) and I know its an increase, I just dont do anything other than surf the web and play games.  Im not a programmer or graphic artist, so im basing the worth of this on my actual usage

 

Edit: and yes i cranked every single detail on the games to the absolute max

[Bartholomew]

12 minutes ago, Doodman said:

I have checked other CPU performances (blender and the like) and I know its an increase, I just dont do anything other than surf the web and play games.  Im not a programmer or graphic artist, so im basing the worth of this on my actual usage

 

Edit: and yes i cranked every single detail on the games to the absolute max

It seems okay to me;

 

Since your prev rig was pretty fast already for its time 8 ys ago it help up for a long time for a reason.

In those 8 years pcs no longer doubled there speed every few years anymore as they did in the years before.

 

So upgrading these days be it gpu or cpu has become way less of a spectacular experience and often a bit underwhelming indeed unless you do productivity and make a big jump in corecount.

 

Since your improvements are more pronounced in low settings: theres your cpu upgrade returns. In maxed out settings in games (esp ultra, which you shoudnt...) and gpu benchmarks in general (duh) you get gpu bound more and the diff in cpu becomes less relevant.

[geo3]

DDR4 3000 @ CL16 is not enough to get all you can out of Zen 2. 3200 @ CL14 or even better 3600 @ CL16 is where you want to be. Though I suspect at least some of your tests are hitting GPU limits as well.

 

Also I assume your tests are just looking at averages. I think if you compare 1% lows you will see a bigger difference.  1% lows effect the overall smoothness of the experience more so than averages.