I upgraded my main desktop computer from an AMD Ryzen 2700X to a 5800X3D “Gaming CPU”. I’m not much of a gamer these days but I found the massive L3 cache interesting. The CPU has an extra layer of stacked L3 cache for 96 MB in total. Workloads with large in memory data sets should benefit.
The CPU base clock is actually 8% lower than that of the 5800X so there are a few workloads that fare better with the baseline model. Most workloads sees a 10-20% performance increase and there are some interesting extreme outliers. Phoronix reports a 177% performance increase for a particular zstd compression benchmark.
I did not really need to upgrade the CPU. The old one felt perfectly snappy but this should future proof the computer to last a while longer. The new CPU is probably around 50% faster than the old one. I’ve previously upgraded the PSU to a really high end one. With this upgrade I also changed the RAM as the old one had some bad regions and the Linux root SSD to 1 TB. I regret not going for ECC memory as I’m now quite confident that the motherboard supports it. Data corruption due to bad memory ain’t fun!
This computer may last me 10 years in total, making it my most upgraded one. The previous one lasted 6 years (Sandy Bridge with 16 GB ECC memory) but I never had the opportunity to upgrade its CPU. I will probably upgrade the graphics card at some point if prices become more reasonable. Still rocking a GeForce GTX 1070. When doing so I may opt for ECC memory as well and call it quits.
The value proposition of the 5800X3D is not great except for currently best AMD single core performance. The 5900X with 12 CPU cores can be had for 10% less and would give better batch workload performance such as compilation, rendering etc. The base model 5800X can be had for 27% less.