Heyo! Your question led me to check some stuff since my wife wants to upgrade at some point as well.
Since we are slowly moving away from the intel/nvidia/windows ecosphere towards amd/linux/open source, we figured she should go with am5 when she changes her motherboard.
The b650-s and ryzen 5 7600 combined with gskill ripjaws s5 32gig. All together was roughly 500 bucks. The cooler needs to go on top obviously. We already have a gpu but if we needed one I‘d probably go with the amd 7600 since it is fairly new and pretty cheap.
Just so you know, I have put in quite some reaearch on gpus recently but nothing else so I‘m fairly positive about the gpu, a little less certain on the rest. The 7600 is not far from the 6700 xt imo and better in terms of fps per dollar/euro.
The nvidia 3060ti is pretty much the same but I think amd is the better decision going forward since nvidia is being a dick about their drivers forever and amd is more futureproof if you leave windows.
I was playing a ton of Baldur’s Gate 3, but I decided I needed a break on it after getting to Act 3. I’m currently playing Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire for the first time and enjoying it.
Lol I like how you took a break from the sprawling modern CRPG by playing a different sprawling modern CRPG.
I do love the pillars of eternity series though. I think the first game got a little exposition text heavy and could have done with some more character animations during cutscenes, but I loved the story and the setting and I enjoyed the tropical island hopping of the 2nd(though I do wish the ship to ship combat was better they were so close to what could have been a paired down FTL).
I’m going to preface this with this computer will last quite a while, but you won’t have nearly as much of an upgrade path if you went with an AM5 platform (latest AMD CPU socket) on DDR5 (latest generation of RAM). With that said, your use case seems to be one that will not require keeping up with the latest games, so if you want to save some money this is what I would do.
NOTE: Prices are from Amazon, you can likely find a few components cheaper elsewhere.
CPU: You don’t need an R5 7600. I was running an R5 3600 up until a few months ago and the only reason I upgraded was I found a 5800X3D for a good price. I’d go for an R5 5600X which is $60 cheaper than the 7600 and will be more than enough for City Skylines 2
Motherboard: You can now get a B450DS3H board for that CPU for $40 cheaper
RAM: You’ll now be on DDR4. Get a 16GB kit of CL16 DDR4, will be about the same price as the DDR5 you have. May want to go for 32GB of RAM because sim games eat RAM, but ultimately up to you. You can always buy more down the road if needed as a 32GB kit is like $5 less than 2 16GB kits.
Case: The no-name brand cases on Amazon are actually quite good. You can get a nice case for ~$50. Hell, I just found a Thermaltake Versa H18 for that price. Another $55 saved.
GPU: I haven’t kept up to date on GPUs, but I’ve heard good things about the 6700XT, and benchmarks look respectable for BG3 and City Skylines 2. You could likely get away with something a bit less powerful, but price to performance seems to side with the 6700XT.
This brings the price down to $831. You could ditch the aftermarket cooler and get it under $800 as the 5600X comes with a cooler, but I’m never going to knock aftermarket coolers as they tend to be much quieter and less whiny than stock.
I also went down the “is AM4 still good?” Rabitthole and decided because I don’t have a Microcenter near me, I could not get a 5800X3D, so I didn’t want to build it. After watching many videos though, AM4 is a mature platform and so thoroughly developed. Sales are on fantastic products, and the GPU and RAM will remain upgradeable for years, just that upgrading the CPU would require a new MOBO as well. Building AM5, seems OP already knows a great deal, but the news is that it can be finicky and returning products because they don’t work so well is more common than usual.
I only grabbed a 5800x3D at boxing day last year, because I’m running an AM4 board and it was one less thing I’d need to update, well that and I’d have to also buy all new ram and buy in at the peak of pricing.
If I was building from scratch today, I would unquestionably do an AM5 build. If I had an AM4 board and I was otherwise happy with my RAM setup, it’s still a pretty tough choice. You aren’t going to get as much time out of it at this point vs AM5, at least I don’t think. It also means your next build is going to almost for sure need to be entirely a new build, save for the case, the power supply (if it’s big enough) and maybe the storage (which hopefully will be larger and cheaper by then). The hard part, too, is they are already talking about a release window for AM6. So maybe AM5 doesn’t last as long as AM4 does, making this all moot. But you’d probably still have a refresh window with AM5 at that point, and not be totally obsolete.
I was pretty frustrated reading about the Microcenter 5800x3D situation. I am so jealous of city dwellers lately, I’m looking for reasons to seethe about living in the middle of nowhere.
To play devils advocate, I think on a budget Am5 mobo (b650) Pcie 4 x 4 is the main or only storage choice? I think my mobo came with one pcie 5 x 4 m.2 slot, or maybe it didn’t even. And then graphics cards might be on pcie4 for much longer yet as they use 4 x 8 lanes while using a 4x16 slot. There’s been a leak that a Pcie5 card from AMD MAY release soon. Neither OP or I will need it for a 1080p monitor though 😆
I honestly let fears about upgradeability get to me a lot more than I hope OP does. I think there is a sub-$1000 Am5 build that can make a terrific value/longevity out of this situation. But when I did, I talked myself into spending a lot more. 😅
Bringing up AM6 is a terrific point! AM5 high end has some really bad issues right now, and AMD very well might to redesign the chip and/or socket to get better performance.
I think in this case AM4 is fine. I recommended it because OP mentioned the price was a bit much, and AM4 at the moment gets you a lot of value. Especially given they are someone who plays indie games primarily with some heavier games occasionally and isn’t on all the latest AAA games. I’m actually very similar to them where I’ll play the occasional AAA game, but I mainly stick to Minecraft and KSP (which is stupid CPU intensive). My R5 3600 was more than enough for this and my upgrade was 100% unnecessary, so the 5600X should last them quite a while. There is also a decent upgrade path from a 5600X to a 5800X3D or 5900X3D.
We’re starting to see gaps between generations get smaller as Moore’s law fails, so I think parts are going to start lasting a bit longer now anyway. Hell, my 4970k lasted me almost 7 years, and my mom ran it in her work PC I built her for another 3 after that.
I honestly don’t think either path is a bad one, just up to them if they want to save some money or get a little bit more upgradability.
It sounds like Intel is releasing mid-October. I don’t know if Intel is of interest to you, and these are described as flagship cards. I also have no idea if this will effect prices on other cards or not.
Because I’m on Linux I have no interest in Intel / Nvidia, though Intel can have amazing performance on Linux when they give it the proper firmware updates.
Intel’s previous release was not great, by the way. This does throw doubt in my mind this next one will do anything for you other than potentially reflect in the prices of other products. 🤷♀️
Nice!
I’ve always been an Intel guy. But I have owned two AMD computers over the years. Both of those gave me a very unstable experience.
High performance, but unstable.
My latest pc is a Ryzen 9 3900x computer, and im definitely going back to Intel next time.
My ryzen is very warm (which makes the fans become loud, first time I’ve had to switch to liquid cooling to be able to be in the room) and I’ve had a very unstable experience overall. Had to fiddle with energy settings and stuff to get it running properly.
There has been several new games where I had to wait to even be able to play them due to crashes or inexplainable low performance.
Darktide for example, still crashes for me, while my buddies old Intel pc’s runs it great and no issues. Totally missed out on that game as they are now done with it.
Sorry for rant, but Im quite frustrated with this pc.
No hey this is valuable added input. Sorry you’ve had a rough experience, and I’ll take this as a warning that I will most likely have to learn some new skills in dealing with the issues you’re describing.
Quake that people actually play. Like look at the virality of Battle bits Remastered, the Battlefield with block characters so you can have like 200 people in the match. Games need to feel snappy and run on a lot of low tech machines, and developers are mostly never catering to that budget demographic. FPS games have a huge demand for this. The hundreds of thousands of nerds who can infodump about how incredible the Source engine feels is my proof. So yeah I think there is still a market for competitive movement game 2.0 - a team fortress 3, a titanfall 3, a quake / unreal tournament that runs well and allows community mapping. Like unironically last gens engines followed the wrong upgrade paths and there is still more performance to squeeze out (titanfall 2 using highly customized source and it looking like a AAA game rather than a source game as my proof)
I think a DDR5 build at this point is the way to go, but I’d highly recommend getting a bigger power supply for future proofing. I’d also consider a slight bump in the video card. Definitely get a bigger power supply though, as I made that mistake doing a 2020 build, only could get a 2000 series NVIDIA GPU at the time, so I just stuck a 650W in as that’s all it needed. Then once shit calmed down, I decided to catch the 5800x3d discount wave with a 4070ti and I had to get a new power supply. Spend the extra 50 bucks now, rather than spending $150 down the road and cursing yourself the whole time as you have to essentially rewire your whole setup. I wouldn’t go lower than 850W these days, and that’s going to be overkill for your setup right now, but it likely won’t always be.
You’ll also need more RAM soon enough too, but that’s easy breezy down the road, allocate your money to something else right now. Just make sure to get it on two sticks and if your motherboard has four slots (pretty sure it does), you can always grab two more matching sticks on sale down the road. Problem solved.
Oh, get a better hard drive than that too, there’s a reason it’s so cheap (PCI3). Just grab a 1TB for about the same price, but a PCI4 one. This is also something thats super easy to update down the road, and you don’t need to worry about for a bit, as 1TB will probably get you through the next year at least.
Gamers Nexus said they will do a Cities Skylines 2 benchmark next week I think. Not that it will necessarily change your build at all, I’m guessing this will handle it fine and the Gamers Nexus benchmarks of BG3 would have you walking away with the same set of conclusions that you’ve already arrived at.
Mainly AI Dungeon because I’ve been hella tired and it requires minimal input compared to other games, but I loaded up my three year old Cyberpunk 2077 save and started playing again with 2.0, and Counter-Strike 2 just dropped so I’ve been giving that some of my time.
Playing Path of Exile for the first time! I’m trying a Witch Elemental… Mischief build? I don’t really understand it at ALL and that feeling of being a newb is the most fun thing about it.
I really like this kind of discussion, I wanna see more discussion where community members are the voice as opposed to news where a journalist is the voice.
Generally, I like using achievements to figure out where people called it quits on a game. Like Saints Row the Third. 90% of people cleared the first mission, but the percentages drop with each successive story achievement until you've got the achievement for the last mission which only 27.9% of players bothered to finish. Or you have Hades where around 50% of players just never finished a run of the game and only 25.6% completed enough runs to see the main ending.
My roommate was one of those “completed a run but didn’t finish enough to see the ending” people.
He said that completing the run alone felt like the end of the game to him and he couldn’t bare the thought of struggling for what he barely managed to achieve once.
Personally I just don’t like going through the same basic thing fifty times.
Yeah, it was fun the first dozen times, Hades, but running around looking for a couple lines of dialogue to unlock the “real” ending isn’t actually what I consider fun gameplay.
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