Upgrade AM4, or replace with AM5?

[Dirk Broer]

Everyone has his/her own user case to consider (gaming, crunching, economics, bling-bling, etc.), but here is some food for thought regarding the AM4 vs the AM5 platform:
(click unto to make bigger)

If you look in the money/threads column you see that the AM4 platform still has its advantages, but that is the one-time purchase moment.
The everyday economics might be better served with the AM5 Ryzen 9 7900 though, though the AM4 Ryzen 9 5950X is a good contender too.

When you need that big L3 cache and economics play a part too, you'd best buy a AM4 Ryzen 7 5700X3D -and search for articles to clock it down so it consumes a mere 65 Watt. And, when money is the least of your worries: you'd better buy a brand-new 64 core Threadripper.

[Megacruncher]

I'm not too short of dosh but I'd hesitate before splashing out on a current generation Threadripper 64 core system. £6302 on Scan just for a bundle. Yikes!

As it is I just bought a AM5 Ryzen 9 7950X bundle on Scan for a relatively modest £1300. I'm very happy with it.

I hadn't realised that it had on-chip graphics which seem to make a useful job of crunching E@H alongside my NVidia GPU.

[Dirk Broer]

The cheapest 64-core sTR5 socket Threadripper is -here- the Threadripper 7980X (Boxed) at € 5.322,89.
The most expensive 64-core sTR5 socket Threadripper is -over here again- the Threadripper Pro 7985WX (Tray) at € 8.147,56.

Cost-wise they are cheap as compared to the 96-core sTR5 socket Threadripper Pro 7995WX (Boxed) at € 11.149,00 -for just the CPU.

64 cores means 128 threads which, using my 4GB-per-thread rule-of-thumb, means 512 GB of DDR5 RAM.
96 cores means 192 threads which, using my 4GB-per-thread rule-of-thumb, means 768 GB of DDR5 RAM.

...and some of the sTR5 socket motherboards only have four RAM slots! Eight-slot mobo's are more than 1000 Euro's (ASRock WRX90 WS EVO at 1320 Euro's and ASUS PRO WS WRX90E-SAGE SE at 1202,28 Euro's)....

Very big modules are only for sale at very slow speeds (2666 MT/s), too

So, yes: viva the Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 9 7950X3D! The latter has not only an on-chip RDNA2GPU, but for a bit of extra cash you also get extra cache

[Dirk Broer]

In the end I bought two AM4 boards and one AM5 board.

The AM4 boards (an Asrock A320M-HDV for the A12-9800E and an Asrock Fatal1ty X470 Gaming-ITX/ac for the 2400G) are there for the CPUs that were pushed out of their mobo's in favour of better CPUs/APUs. Got them dirt-cheap from a company (Dealstunter) selling left-overs and refurbished equipment -my earlier X370 iTX is also from them. This gave rise for a need of new cases, mainly in the iTX department.
So, I also managed to get hold of a 2nd hand white version of the Fractal Design Node 304 for the Fatal1ty X370 Gaming-iTX/ac based 3400G that got as comment from the wife upon seeing it "have you bought a new microwave?". You can see in the link how easy it is to mix up the two!

I am now saving for a 2nd Node 304 in black, for the Asrock Fatal1ty X470 Gaming-ITX/ac, as they fit so snuggly in my computer rack -being just 210mm high. They also have room for a decent sized (165 mm high) cooler, plus two 92mm intake fans and a 140mm exhaust fan. The ideal iTX crunching-case after the Cooler Master HAF (High Air-Flow) Stacker 315F went out of production, IMHO.

The A320M-HDV, that I had planned to go with the with the Athlon A12-9800E (those guys at Dealstunter sell no sh#t when they say 'updated to the latest BIOS' -they did! BIOS L8.01 in fact. So: No Bristol Ridge support as consequence. And "ASRock do[es] NOT recommend updating [to] this BIOS if you are going to use [a] Pinnacle, Raven or Summit Ridge CPU on your system.....") will for the time being re-use an old Packard-Bell casing that used to be the PC-case of my late father and that once held an AMD Sempron as the casing sticker still proclaims.
As the Athlon A12-9800E now definitely gets retired -I simply have no board left supporting it!- the A320M-HDV board will get the Ryzen 3 3100 and will be the core of a future Windows 11 system for a blind friend of my wife and me, for whom I do the IT-support -she is now running Windows 10 on an Intel Core 2 Duo E8500, which is still enough to run JAWS for her.

The AM5 board then.
Just as with the introduction of the AM4 platform, when I went for an APU with the board that gave all I needed in terms of upgradability and APU support,

in comes my trusted, and now fully upgraded ASRock A320M Pro4 (to BIOS 7.40, so no Bristol Ridge support either).... I have to buy a Ryzen 5 5600G or Ryzen 7 5700G to still get the most out of it

I have now gone for an ASRock A620M Pro RS, and this with the Ryzen 7 8700G, that not only has a decent GPU but a 16 TOPS NPU as well. Now I am hunting for a Fractal Design Node 804 to give it a home. Already love to hear the wife's comments on this one..

My next AM5 board will be a full-size ATX ASRock B650 Pro RS, again with a Ryzen 7 8700G to see performance differences, if any.

In the meantime I am building a new AM5 system for my son too, using a ASRock B650E PG Riptide WiFi with a Ryzen 5 7600 as CPU.
He wants to be prepared for PCIe 5.0 x16 GPUs and really full-speed NVMe PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives and does not want to change his mobo every five years -he comes from an Intel Socket 1155 system that I built for him ages ago.