I see there's a new type of motherboards and CPUs out now.
I have a AM-4 board... a, ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO (WI-FI).
Can I ask what the difference and how long before the AM4's are redundant?
An AM4 board with a Rysen 9 9050X should be great for years??
Thanks.
The major difference you may know is AM4 is a PGA socket for the CPU, meaning the CPU has pins, and AM5 is an LGA socket, meaning the CPU has flat contact "lands". Some think LGA is better because it removes fragile pins from the expensive CPU and moves them to the motherboard. But motherboards are just as expensive as many CPU's and the pins on them are even more fragile so that never made sense to me. At least bent pins on a CPU can be repaired, even broken ones if you know how. When an LGA socket's had something scrape across it the whole motherboard's usually toast.
Other differences that come with the current AM4 and AM5 boards: AM4 uses DDR4 memory and maximum Gen 4 (chipset/cpu dependent) for PCIe bandwidth while AM5 uses DDR5 memory and maximum PCIe gen 5. AM5 already handles every current generation of PCIe since it's backwards compatible. There's no good reason AM5 couldn't also be use with DDR4 memory. It's just AMD's choice not to design/release a Zen 4 (AM5) CPU with a DDR4 memory controller so there's no reason to do it on the motherboard.
I'm not sure what you mean by redundant, but from a technology level it's obvious AM5 obsoletes AM4 motherboards. That doesn't by any means suggest AM4 is somehow irrelevant since it still delivers solid performance at much more reasonable prices. I suppose we'll continue to see AM4 motherboards until AMD stops producing AM4 CPU's (and the chipsets they need, of course). I don't see how that can happen before AM5 CPU's, DDR5 memory and the motherboards themselves come down in price to make the platform attractive.
Nobody but Intel and AMD R&D knows what they're brewing in their labs and their leaks are very guarded; the rest of the world only has crystal balls to work with and you should know how reliable they are. But when I look at the pace of recent changes I'd have to say they (both Intel and AMD) are reaching very hard to overcome physical limitations attending recent node reductions. Suggests to me Ryzen 9 5950X will remain a good CPU for several years to come unless they figure a way around it.
But that's not surprising, you can go back 10 years and find CPU's that are still perfectly good today. I'm gaming at 1080p on an FX6300 CPU, not the best even for it's time (2012). There are same-era Intel HEDT CPU based systems still chunking out FEMA analysis (mechanical stress simulations) at the place I used to work. Not surprising considering how horrendously expensive they were.
But most home PC purchases aren't based on performance but on status. Older tech is obviously going to have lower status: it's up to you to value it based on it's performance instead.
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