Why I Won’t Be Upgrading To AM5 Anytime Soon

Resisting The Upgrade Itch

My last major PC upgrade was back in 2018 when I went from AMD socket AM3+ to AM4 as detailed in this article,  AMD Ryzen 2600X – An Essential Gaming Upgrade. During the intervening years, I’ve upgraded to the following:

• CPU – Ryzen 5600X 6 core, 12 threads
• Water cooler – Corsair H100i Platinum
• Memory – 32GB Corsair Vengeance 3200Mhz RGB
• GPU – Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB
• Boot – Western Digital WD Black NVMe 500GB
• Monitor – LG Ultra Gear 32″ QHD 1440p 144Hz

I’ve also taken advantage of storage availability by adding a 500GB NVMe drive into a PCIe card and moved the WD 500GB M.2 SATA drive into the second M.2 slot, being glad that I chose a high-end motherboard in the first place – Asus ROG Strix Crosshair hero VII WiFi. The most significant performance gains came with upgrading the Ryzen CPU, moving from SATA to NVMe to boot Windows, and upgrading the GPU. So, as far as I’m concerned, bearing in mind that this is my main gaming PC, any major upgrade would have to offer a significant performance increase across the board.

Why Upgrade To AM5?

AMD AM5 is a new socket and completely different from AM4. It’s described as LGA 1718, zero insertion force flip-chip Land Grid Array (LGA) CPU socket for AMD Ryzen microprocessors, starting with the Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 series. The pins are on the motherboard instead of on the CPU which means additional pins (vs AM4) and more power delivery.

AM5 also ushers in new CPUs and DDR5, so upgrading from AM4 for most of us is an expensive business because it means a new motherboard, CPU, and memory. In my case, I would want to acquire a similar motherboard in terms of features to what I have now, coupled with a Ryzen 9 7000 series CPU and 32Gb of DDR5 memory. Perhaps something like this:

• ASUS ROG STRIX B650E-E GAMING WIFI, AMD B650, AM5, DDR5, PCIe 5.0, 4x M.2, 2.5G/WiFi 6E, AMD EXPO™, ATX
• AMD Ryzen™ 9 7900X3D, AM5, Zen 4, 12 Core, 24 Thread, 4.4GHz, 5.6GHz Turbo, 140MB Cache, PCIe 5.0, 120W, CPU
• 32GB (2x16GB) Corsair DDR5 Vengeance RGB Black, PC5-48000 (6000), Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 36, XMP 3.0, 1.4V

This combo would set me back about $1100 which is a major investment and more than I paid when upgrading in 2018. But that expenditure has paid off in the long term, mainly due to the quality of the components. However, one has to weigh up what performance advantages would be gained by such an upgrade. Clearly, the most important component from a gaming point of view is the GPU, but it’s often the most expensive. To upgrade my current AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT, I would need it to be a substantial upgrade, rather than a sideways move. A Radeon RX 7800 XT, 16GB would be a sensible option at around $750 – an Nvidia RTX 4070 12GB would be the equivalent for another $100 – but we’re now talking serious money and the argument still comes back to performance gains.

Socket AM4 Isn’t Dead!

For those of us reconsidering a platform upgrade to AM5, many budget-conscious enthusiasts are squeezing the AM4 platform to its limit, thanks mainly to AMD’s 2022 launch of 3D V-Cache CPUs in the form of Ryzen 7 5700/5800X3D which are said to give a 15% performance increase in gaming. The good news is that this upgrade would only cost around $300 to $350 and would be a simple question of updating the motherboard BIOS/UEFI and slotting in the processor.

For most of us gamers and tech enthusiasts, the upgrade itch never really goes away, but there does come a time when good sense overrules that itch. For my part, my current system copes very well with 90% of my games and doesn’t even break a sweat in video rendering. However, this amnesty for the AM4 platform is very welcome and I will almost certainly take this upgrade route, leaving the AM5 platform for another day when I’m more flush with funds.

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