[SOLVED] AMD Ryzen 7 3700x or Ryzen 9 3900x

Ben Meekin

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Nov 19, 2014
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Hi all, i typically only use my pc mainly for gaming in 2020 and will only do a light amount of work on it as well as doing web browsing

In terms of gaming in 2020 and the next few years, is it worth spending more to get the 12 core or is the 8 core unit plenty?
 
Solution
3700x, decent b550 board and a decent 140mm aftermarket cooler is the sensible option.

That gives you enough futureproofing to not worry imo when most people are going with the 6c/12t 3600 series.

The 3900 may have an extra 33% cores/threads but it also cost approx 33% more.

That will pretty much be wasted money considering your planned uses.
Hi all, i typically only use my pc mainly for gaming in 2020 and will only do a light amount of work on it as well as doing web browsing

In terms of gaming in 2020 and the next few years, is it worth spending more to get the 12 core or is the 8 core unit plenty?

I went with the 3900. But you need really good cooling if you want to use all those cores at once and a decent motherboard. X470, X570, B550 chipsets.

That said

There are more and more games using more cores. And it's always nice to be able to download a game at the same time as playing one.

If you run vm's you can dedicate one machine to run in the background. You could quite literally have one box be a router (pfsense/untangle), a second as a file server (nas4free, unraid), and a third as a 8/16 core game machine.

I try to over spec so there's room to grow. I still have 3770k that is perfectly fine for gaming that I gave to my younger son. It's lasted this long because I spent a bit extra early on and updated the video card.
 
3700x, decent b550 board and a decent 140mm aftermarket cooler is the sensible option.

That gives you enough futureproofing to not worry imo when most people are going with the 6c/12t 3600 series.

The 3900 may have an extra 33% cores/threads but it also cost approx 33% more.

That will pretty much be wasted money considering your planned uses.
 
Solution
it depends on what you play.
3700x is better choice for FPS games, 3900x is better for strategic games like total war.

if AMD will not surprise us with another big jump. 3700x will perform like 4600.
That is plenty for most people, so unless you will pick up nvidia RTX 3900, you should have enough horsepower for at least a year of playing at max settings. If you plan on taking NV RTX 3900, I would suggest waiting for new ryzen, as you will need every MHz that cpu can spew to keep up with that monstrosity.
if you don't care about setting everything to MAX, its ~2years of very high easly settings build.
 

Ben Meekin

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Thanks for your input guys, i'm going ahead with the Ryzen 3700x, i watched some test footage from several different gamers and i'm amazed how well the CPU performed against intel, the difference in frames was minor at best and i tend to only game at 1440p as it is anyway.