5800XT or 5700x3D? GPU upgrade question

[IAmAndre]

Budget (including currency): €1000

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Mostly AAA single players 

 

Hi,

 

I would like to upgrade my aging desktop which currently has a 2600X, an RTX 3070 and 32GB of RAM. I've decided to skip AM5 and stick with AM4 due to the high costs of a full upgrade. I'm gaming on a 21/9 ultrawide at 1600p.

 

For the GPU, I'd like to get a 9700XT at MSRP or at least very close to it. Until then, I'll stick with my 3070. Hopefully I'll find something on Black Friday or on Christmas.

 

Now my main question is about the CPU upgrade. I'm seeing the 5800XT on sale at around €160, which is almost half the current price of the 5700X3D where I live. I know the 3D cache has its advantages when gaming, but is it worth paying an extra €100 or so instead of getting the 5800X? Would the 5800X bottleneck a 9070XT?

 

Also, while I'll be mostly using this PC for gaming and my laptop for productivity, I might end up doing some productivity tasks on the desktop, including some occasional 3D work on Blender, video animation on After Effects, and some ML model training. From what I'm seeing online, the AMD card isn't doing particularly well on these workflows. On Blender for example, the 3070 is slightly in front. Now, I would like to keep the 3070 around in case the 9700XT struggles with some workflows. Is it possible to have both cards connected to the motherboard, and use the Nvidia one for rendering for example, without having it display anything? Is it possible to have both drivers installed without any issue? What about power consumption knowing that the 3070 would be idling most of the time? Would it be safer to just remove it from the case and plug it back only when the 9070XT struggles with a particular workflow?

 

Thanks!

[Why_Me]

21 minutes ago, IAmAndre said:

Budget (including currency): €1000

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Mostly AAA single players 

 

Hi,

 

I would like to upgrade my aging desktop which currently has a 2600X, an RTX 3070 and 32GB of RAM. I've decided to skip AM5 and stick with AM4 due to the high costs of a full upgrade. I'm gaming on a 21/9 ultrawide at 1600p.

 

For the GPU, I'd like to get a 9700XT at MSRP or at least very close to it. Until then, I'll stick with my 3070. Hopefully I'll find something on Black Friday or on Christmas.

 

Now my main question is about the CPU upgrade. I'm seeing the 5800XT on sale at around €160, which is almost half the current price of the 5700X3D where I live. I know the 3D cache has its advantages when gaming, but is it worth paying an extra €100 or so instead of getting the 5800X? Would the 5800X bottleneck a 9070XT?

 

Also, while I'll be mostly using this PC for gaming and my laptop for productivity, I might end up doing some productivity tasks on the desktop, including some occasional 3D work on Blender, video animation on After Effects, and some ML model training. From what I'm seeing online, the AMD card isn't doing particularly well on these workflows. On Blender for example, the 3070 is slightly in front. Now, I would like to keep the 3070 around in case the 9700XT struggles with some workflows. Is it possible to have both cards connected to the motherboard, and use the Nvidia one for rendering for example, without having it display anything? Is it possible to have both drivers installed without any issue? What about power consumption knowing that the 3070 would be idling most of the time? Would it be safer to just remove it from the case and plug it back only when the 9070XT struggles with a particular workflow?

 

Thanks!

What country are you located?

[podkall]

The difference is mostly the cache, so any games that benefit from cache will be faster. Some games won't be faster at all unless you get like a 4090.

 

Another difference is that 5800x vs 5700x3D for example, the 5700x3D pulls ~60W and 5800x pulls ~100W power while both get around similar fps on average.

[IAmAndre]

5 hours ago, podkall said:

The difference is mostly the cache, so any games that benefit from cache will be faster. Some games won't be faster at all unless you get like a 4090.

 

Another difference is that 5800x vs 5700x3D for example, the 5700x3D pulls ~60W and 5800x pulls ~100W power while both get around similar fps on average.

OK so I've looked further into the reviews and my findings are interesting. In terms of power, they both have the same TDP at 105W and the diference in power consumption is relatively small depending on the game as you can see here or here.

 

As for the games that benefit from the cache, the difference seems to get smaller as the resolution increases. Now, for some reason the big reviewers like GamersNexus and Techspot mostly focused on 1080p apparently to put the cache under good light, but this video shows that the difference becomes negligible as the resolution increases.

 

So in my case, I think I'll go for the 5800X as it's much cheaper and would slightly outperform the 5700x3D in non-gaming workflows while offering similar performance in higher resolutions. I might have gone for the x3D chip if it was cheaper.

[Why_Me]

51 minutes ago, IAmAndre said:

OK so I've looked further into the reviews and my findings are interesting. In terms of power, they both have the same TDP at 105W and the diference in power consumption is relatively small depending on the game as you can see here or here.

 

As for the games that benefit from the cache, the difference seems to get smaller as the resolution increases. Now, for some reason the big reviewers like GamersNexus and Techspot mostly focused on 1080p apparently to put the cache under good light, but this video shows that the difference becomes negligible as the resolution increases.

 

So in my case, I think I'll go for the 5800X as it's much cheaper and would slightly outperform the 5700x3D in non-gaming workflows while offering similar performance in higher resolutions. I might have gone for the x3D chip if it was cheaper.

Look at the 5700X.

[IAmAndre]

28 minutes ago, Why_Me said:

Look at the 5700X.

Yes, it seems like this is the one to get. That's only €20 cheaper than the 5800X but I do like the much lower power consumption.

[podkall]

6 hours ago, IAmAndre said:

OK so I've looked further into the reviews and my findings are interesting. In terms of power, they both have the same TDP at 105W and the diference in power consumption is relatively small depending on the game as you can see here or here.

That's with 4090, it might be less with weaker GPU.

 

Also 5700x3D vs 5800x3D, if we follow the numbers, we'd expect each is 5700x and 5800x "with 3D cache glued on top."

 

So we could assume 5700x3D could be "slightly" more efficient than 5800x or 5800xt: (even if the chart says 5700x)

 

 

 

As far as PBO goes, it's relatively below 5800x, not to mention 5800x can also PBO which could push it down the chart some more as well.

 

5 hours ago, IAmAndre said:

Yes, it seems like this is the one to get. That's only €20 cheaper than the 5800X but I do like the much lower power consumption.

There is some lower power consumption, on average not significant, but if you add it up overtime and with other components the difference could be slightly more noticeable.

 

6 hours ago, IAmAndre said:

As for the games that benefit from the cache, the difference seems to get smaller as the resolution increases. Now, for some reason the big reviewers like GamersNexus and Techspot mostly focused on 1080p apparently to put the cache under good light, but this video shows that the difference becomes negligible as the resolution increases.

About resolution, resolution overall disregards CPU power, however CPU power still enables GPU power and it enables more stable and consistent framerate with average higher 1% lows.

 

But this is fancy stuff that even more demanding people/players don't need. For example, made up difference - 80 vs 90fps 1% lows, still above 60fps consistent, both fps are good, and both imaginary CPUs could tank down below 60fps in specific game and settings anyway.

[IAmAndre]

17 minutes ago, podkall said:

Also 5700x3D vs 5800x3D, if we follow the numbers, we'd expect each is 5700x and 5800x "with 3D cache glued on top."

 

So we could assume 5700x3D could be "slightly" more efficient than 5800x or 5800xt: (even if the chart says 5700x)

I haven't checked the numbers, but the 5700x and the 5700x3D have different TDPs (65W vs 105W) so I would assume that the 5700x is more efficient than the 3D variant, which has the same TDP as the 5800x. But either way, I'll probably just get the 5700x since the extra cache doesn't seem to impact performance at higher resolutions for the games I'd typically way (Blackmyth Wukong, Assassin's Creed, etc).

[podkall]

3 minutes ago, IAmAndre said:

I haven't checked the numbers, but the 5700x and the 5700x3D have different TDPs (65W vs 105W) so I would assume that the 5700x is more efficient than the 3D variant, which has the same TDP as the 5800x. But either way, I'll probably just get the non-3D since the extra cache doesn't seem to impact performance at high resolution for the games I'd typically way (Blackmyth Wukong, Assassin's Creed, etc).

So, the reason why x3D chips have higher TDP, is because the 3D cache adds additional required power/voltage.

 

More cache, more power, can't run cache without power and 3D variants triple the amount of L3 cache compared to non-3D CPUs.

 

Both 5700x and 5700x3D have same everything, but lower TDP on 5700x, and lower rated boost clocks and base clocks on both.

[Mark Kaine]

Keep in mind the 3dcache is a very small difference in games (if at all) more faster cores are a huge difference in productivity...

 

I'd simply go with the most cores + highest speeds I could afford.

 

The difference between my 5800x3d and my 7940HX (16 cores) is ridiculous, the HX rips through stuff like video encoding etc. in fact it's sometimes finished before the 3D would even start (and yeah ik it's different generations, but still)

[IAmAndre]

6 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Keep in mind the 3dcache is a very small difference in games (if at all) more faster cores are a huge difference in productivity...

 

I'd simply go with the most cores + highest speeds I could afford.

 

The difference between my 5800x3d and my 7940HX (16 cores) is ridiculous, the HX rips through stuff like video encoding etc. in fact it's sometimes finished before the 3D would even start (and yeah ik it's different generations, but still)

Absolutely, but 16 cores for gaming is a bit overkill, and 8 cores for productivity is more than okay. I've considered the 5950X, which kills all these CPUs in benchmarks, but that would cost me twice as much and won't be utilizing these cores most of the time. I think a low-consumption 8-core CPU would be the best fit for my use case.

[Mark Kaine]

3 hours ago, IAmAndre said:

Absolutely, but 16 cores for gaming is a bit overkill, and 8 cores for productivity is more than okay. I've considered the 5950X, which kills all these CPUs in benchmarks, but that would cost me twice as much and won't be utilizing these cores most of the time. I think a low-consumption 8-core CPU would be the best fit for my use case.

Yeah I agree if that's your priority a 65w 8 core is a good option too.