At this point just why? Am5 CPUs have slid down in pricing(seems like CPU mining has blown up and even 7950x is back in stock at most retailers at $550 mark) and there are even decent boards at affordable prices for the new AM5 platform along with cheap DDR5 memory. For users of old AM4 platform have quite a decent line of upgrades available for both gaming and productivity use cases.
Well lets check it out. AMD knows their audience (investors AND customers), isn't Apple, isn't stuck on some stupid tunnel vision philosophy of only pushing forward on the current thing, also they have TONS of existing product in bad need of refresh.
I'm one of the few R5 3600 holdouts that built this machine in Oct 2019 and I'm waiting for a real capstone to this socket.
What benefits are there to moving on?
What would that look like?
What does that even mean?
On July 7th 2019 the lineup for these Ryzen 3000 chips launched and it was fantastic. I could theoretically improve my VR gaming performance (frames) by finally making the jump from an FX-8370 to a superior single thread performer like this R5 3600, so after a few days of looking into X570 boards, VRM performance, the kind of PCI-E loadout I want for storage and other 3-5 years down the line, I finally chose a board, CPU, memory and NVMe. Took the Koolance CPU-300 Socket A shims that have been sitting in box since my Pentium 4 days and filed them down to fit my antique Pentium 4 block to Ryzen.
Oh yeah, and it turned out pretty good.
Not even 3 years later we got 5000 series and it's pretty much the refresh we needed but I didn't like the lineup. Enter an experimental SKU, one X3D...In current year I don't have any real reason to dump this CPU for 5000 series or AM5 unless I go into full time professional 1080p60 or 2KVR streaming and the way my storage, network and encoding philosophies are glued together, well it's a headache so that's probably not going to happen without some serious shuffling of cards and soon. A 5900X would be an instant doubling of resources for everything and has a very attractive price. Same with the 5800X3D at the expense of overclocking, which I do sort of want to retain if possible. So now there's this weird schizm in CPU performance and philosophy that puts us in an awkward Mexican standoff where I don't want to upgrade because the SKU doesn't exist and a bunch of screechy randos are waiting for AMD to drop AM4 entirely because focusing purely on AM5 is somehow good business sense when there's clearly a good chunk of us still on entry level AM4 chips???
I don't have a crystal ball for predicting what direction is best suited for my needs or others unless they're already doing what they want. Both directions for these chips are good, like REALLY good but I'm not happy with current performance and there's no guarantee that something new will fix that just yet. This means I'm very prone to choosing something that could be harmful to the way I intend to use a computer (until I jump ship to the next socket, which may be 5+ years). A 5950X just isn't in the cards at the current price and a 5900X3D would be really cool but doesn't seem to exist yet. There's a possibility of waiting to have the performance of a TRX without the workstation price tag and I'm all for it. At that point I would be happy with this build. I just want to set and forget it.
