This moment in time seemed to be an appropriate one for an upgrade. With a new platform comes savings to be had on the passing platform, resulting in the acquisition of a near newly released £300 worth of 5700x 8 core, 16 thread CPU for a more palatable £156. The part arrived ahead of schedule, and with that surgery commenced.
The first thing was removing the memory to make room for the screwdriver.. A few strategic turns later and some gentle rotational coaxing removed the cooler from the thermal paste riddled CPU beneath..
Always a bit of a funky mess, the first thing was to apply a little isopropyl alcohol to help remove said gunk. Cleaning the CPU in its socket is a convenient way of holding a delicate part..
With that done the cooler was next. Neither gave me any grief although it's worth mentioning how much thermal paste can get all over your fingers.
So out came the old CPU, my trusty 1st gen 1600.. Thank you for six years of unrelenting service. You've performed admirably and are still a worthy and very operational part, hopefully destined to continue in another's hands..
** (UPDATE: the CPU landed in the hands of a young first time builder - may it serve him well!) **
In goes the new 5th gen 5700x, with two more cores, four more threads and a bit of a boost in clock speeds. You're supposed to find a corner with a triangle to match up.. I couldn't see the bloody thing but one aspect which Ryzen seems to share is a constant orientation of the writing on the IHS.. Don't quote me on that but it seems to be a thing.
One blob of thermal paste later..
.. and it's time to stitch her back up! Another careful few strategic turns of the screwdriver, memory reseated and Lain's back together with new life..
Will she work? Have I managed the delicate art of brain surgery?
This would suggest yep! Yay!!
Of course it wouldn't be the same without something unusual thrown into the mix. Bitlocker security on the hard drive assaulted me with a demand for the secure bazillion-bit security code to be able to actually use the PC.. My mindfulness with this matter saved the day and we were up and running!
From 6 cores, 12 threads..
Both BIOS and user are happy campers! Is she faster? Well, yes she is. I ran a little Cinebench R23 test on the 1600 before disassembly (clocked at 3.5Ghz with a little ASUS endorsed overclock) and received a single core score of 877 and a multi core score of 6377 for my troubles. The new 5700X (clocked at 3.6GHz with its ASUS endorsed overclock) came in with a single core of 1117 and a multi core score of 11950. She felt a little snappier in basic tasks but I've only had about an hour or so of playtime at this point.
Thoughts
It's probably not that drastic an upgrade in the grand scheme of things but the motivation for this was always a bit more tactical than technical. I wasn't going to go over the top - there are higher AM4 processors than the 5700X, but this was about finding a palatable price/performance sweet spot. The 5800X came with a performance which is a hairs width above the 5700x (the 5700X can match it with a manual overclock), but with a higher 105W TDP for that extra hair and a price of around £230 vs £156 it was out of the running with a straight face (Steve from Gamers Nexus said it best, calling the 5700X the chip that the 5800X should've been). Other higher models get towards £500, even for end of platform parts - actually there's some personal mirth behind the cost of this new CPU. When I bought the 1600 back in late 2017 it was typically going for £229 and I bagged it at £136! It's fair to say I've been pretty lucky with my CPU buying. The extra cores are a little insurance too.. I could've gone with the lesser 5600X with it's same 6 core, 12 threads as with the outgoing part but this was an upgrade.. I tend towards productivity as much as gaming so the cores are welcome for any flexibility they can bring for the next few years. My music making may make a comeback and those cores may be useful for that by all accounts! I'm not likely to change anything this fundamental again without a total platform change.
Other reasons.. (and yes I know there's a simple way around it, but it bears consideration anyway) the move to Windows 11 will be somewhat.. I hesitate to use the word enforced, but in the near future the balance will shift. Given that official support doesn't encompass many older platforms including 1st gen Ryzen (and shame on Microsoft for throwing so many "recent" platform iterations under the bus, although there must be some technical caveat allowing them to get away with it.. probably foundational architecture security issues), the shift to a valid CPU provides a simple solution to that.
It's also quite nice to actually use the upgrade path. As I say when I adopted AM4 it was partly on the promised longevity and AMD arguably over-delivered on that promise, even if I didn't ultimately take them up on that promise until now - they're seemingly turning out new AM4 processors at time of writing even after launching AM5. This is a jump across three generations, from the earliest to the latest, with all the updates and tweaks you can expect from a matured platform. Part of the compromise you make in immediately adopting AM5 is welcoming teething issues with open arms.. always worth pause for thought.
A shift upward has also opened the window on GPU's. Those sharper eyed will have seen the GTX1070sc in its PCIe slot. That was pretty current with the 1600.. not so these days, although it's still perfectly capable. Still my logic decided that since GPU's are quite expensive and the market still quite uppity it was perhaps more appropriate to upgrade the CPU and pave myself a path for a GPU without the threat of an inward bottleneck. The 1070sc will be no threat to the 5700X, but a higher GPU such as say a 3070 and up, even if they were affordable, would have been a headache for the 1600. True, if I want to take advantage of a silly powerful GPU at some point it will demand a PSU upgrade from the current 650W but for right now it's about extending my platform life in as efficient a way as I could.
Finally, the 5700X does all this whilst running at the same 65W TDP which the 1600 boasted. Power efficiency has been a big thing in the AMD camp with the Ryzen series and that's a reasonably significant thing these days. For what it's worth in this respect it's also a halving from 14nm lithography to 7nm lithograph, a dry stat which will have contributed to that efficiency. It's also nice to make such a generational leap and still be able to use the same CPU cooler.
So let's see how it goes. It's nice to know there's still going to be some significant life in Lain's socks! Does she have socks? Who knows..
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