It's not in my budget for this year, but maybe next year? I'll probably go overboard just to make my AM4 rig last as much as possible before a complete replacement becomes unavoidable.
That's gonna be a thing for a lot of people. The new CPUs are a little more expensive AND depending on what mobo you have, you're due for a platform swap on top. And the price of good boards has only gone up with each generation. If you have a 500-series board, you can upgrade easily. I'm sure 400's will also get it eventually, unless there's something I don't know about. But if you're still on a 300 series like me, it's a different ballgame because now you're not just shopping for compatibility, you're buying something with more features for more money. Even if they stay AM4 there's no guarantee of support for all of the oldest boards. And it could always be the last one to get backwards compatibility period. So it needs to last, unless you like buying lots of mobos.
It's also a more popular platform than it was during Zen 1 days, when not everybody was hip to what was happening and a lot of people were still writing them off. So if all you want is the CPU power, the value proposition isn't as good this time. It's no longer this little secret to get in on. People really seem to want the shit out of them.
That was sorta my thinking with the 3900x buy. Incidentally, I came from a similar point you're looking at jumping from. I had a 2600 on a basic midrange X370. A GOLDEN 2600 that would do a 4.3ghz all-core and still do a nice 3200/CL14. Loved that thing. But it wasn't *quite* what I was after. I didn't want to be in that position of having to swap the board, so being able to drop the 3900x into my X370 was a really good proposition. $480 had me good to go with what was at the time one of the highest-end normal consumer CPUs. It was a no-brainer. I was thinking "If this works well, that's flippin awesome and I'm keeping it!" You can always wait longer, but sometimes when a good 'endgame' option surfaces for you, you jump on it and have no regrets. All-in.
I mean, that was the first time when I felt like they started dropping what were legit endgame CPU's. So it was like "HERE it is." Before that, they were just getting past being the "builder's favorite" to being the most obvious and generally accepted option. It was simple... if you were going to mess around anyway, the more open cross-plat compatibility allowed you to play around with different chips, which were priced accessibly with surprisingly good bang for the buck. Or just squeeze what you need out on a budget. I was buying them just to try and then tossing them in builds for people when chance came around. Passing on some of the savings to help them out, because it's boring to just sell them and they more than did the job. Ryzen 3000 was more than that. Single core performance and clocks made that leap over the hump. And you won out pretty big if you bought in before, so long as you didn't get the cheapest, earliest B350s or got really unlucky.
I never had problems letting go of Zen+ chips. But looking at Zen 2, it's a lot harder for me to let it go. Not to knock the first two releases, but R3k felt distinctly less like a toy than previous generations, which just weren't as refined. Solid, but still blooming-out with their lower clocks/IPC/memory performance. Many more resonable areas for improvement, though they were very solid and efficient. Beat out better-performing Intel options on price/perf/watt alone, for much of their heydays. As long as you were paying certain things mind, you made off. It was the era of "Hey guys, these things might actually be pretty good!" Whereas now it's full hype machine because there's no doubt they're making major strides with their CPUs.
The way I see it is... at this point, the gains still go up significantly with each gen, but needs don't seem to be catching up as fast. Not for me, anyway. If you're going high refresh, I get it. People who need both lots of cores and faster cores will benefit a lot, too. But R3k already has a lot of common uses covered. Those who stuck it out with R1k or R2k might end up comprising the majority. Or you get it just to get it, because it's cool and it's still a pretty good deal considering the performance seen thus far. It's getting to a point where they're outdoing themselves so much that I don't know what to do with myself anymore.
just a fun poll to see what fellow enthusiasts are planning/not planning in wake of the recent Zen3 announcement and some bold claims from AMD.
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