Downsides of building a Ryzen 9 5900X in 2022

[urayamu]

Budget (including currency): what makes sense to me

Country: EU

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: photo editing, light 3d editing, everyday stuff

 

So... I'm not particularly happy with the rumoured Zen 4 prices, in particular the 7900X which is roughly 2x the price I could pay for a 5900X. Considering I'm upgrading from a machine that is basically lightyears away on the performance side, a 5yo Kaby Lake era XPS 13 (i7-7500U), I'm not scared at the idea of being one generation behind. So the question is, what do you think I am going to compromise if I opt for a 5900X (at outlet price, or used-but-new deal) instead of a 7900X?

 

At the moment I don't have particular performance needs, I just want a good system meant to last 5 years with no gaming in mind to replace my dying XPS 13, which I'd like to be at least 12 cores (ehm, I know is silly, but I don't want to scale down the core count from my previous 2*6-core Xeon Gulftown super-impractical-machine I had for a while). I don't even need an eGPU for now, so I'd be forced to buy one in case I decide for the 5900X. To sum it up I'd say the goals for this build are efficiency, price-performance ratio, complete absence of RGB, no gaming, silence, SFF (maybe an ITX build in a Cooler Master NR200, maybe a Sama IM01 in mATX).

 

 

[Levent]

Only major downside is upgrade path. If I was building a brand new workstation right now, I would just get 5950X, as much ram I anticipate ever needing and X570/B550 chipset. Issue with platforms reaching EOL is that decent motherboards tend to get rarer as time goes by. If you are building an AM4 build right now, anticipate not being able to upgrade easily in the future.

 

I should also point out the obvious that, you dont have to go AM4. LGA1200 still has atleast one more CPU generation coming its way and might be worth considering.

[killawatt]

I just upgraded by CAE/CAD workstation from a 3900x to 5950x. I took a while to decide what to do as the upcoming 7000 series looks as though it's going to be pretty epic, but the fact am5 will not be backwards compatible with ddr4 was a dealbreaker for me. I have 128gb of RAM for running large simulations and this would cost a small fortune to replace in ddr5 format, plus new mb etc. Unfortunately threadripper was out of my budget too, as the quad channel memory would have been very beneficial. I've seen a 20%+ decrease in simulation times with the 5950x however, so it was definitely worth the money, along with much better thermal performance even with an all-core OC.