AMD in its Computex 2026 presentation, celebrated 10 years of the Socket AM4 platform that kickstarted the company's long march to competitiveness with Intel in the desktop PC processor market, and its eventual domination. Socket AM4 supports the original "Zen" and "Zen+," across the Ryzen 1000 and ...
Oh.
…I dunno what to tell you, then.
If you’re on a 5800X3D, AM5 is terrible upgrade value now. If you wait for DDR5 prices to come down, it will indeed be a “dead end platform” when you buy, as I don’t think AMD will release AM6 unless it’s DDR6.
If you do workstation stuff, get DDR4 threadripper (or even a fire sale EPYC server), and re-use half your RAM, but other than that I have no good advice.
I’m on a 2700x and a 2060 Super.
That’s basically my old PC!! I felt it was great for the last 6 years but I didn’t regret upgrading recently. Felt we really hit a wall finally with gaming tech.
Rocking 5700x3d and 4070S now can play literally anything (that doesn’t have kernal level anti cheat)
Oh.
If you need to upgrade, grab a 5800XD then (or any 5000 series X3D CPU), plus a mobo if you need it. Re-use your RAM. It’s significantly faster; you’ll be set for awhile without busting the bank on DDR5.
Well then I’m even further invested in a platform that’s been outdated for years.
It’s not though. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a 5800X3D now, and there won’t be 2 years from now. It’s still fast, and a supremely practical choice.
Heck, if I lost my whole board+RAM now, that’s exactly what I’d get. I’d go back to AM4, and wait it out till AM6 or something good from Intel, because there’s nothing deficient about a 5800.
Sure, other than it being several years old and outdated?
2 years is all I’m supposed to get!?
…that’s what I’m saying.
There’s nothing outdated about it. It outruns most AM5 CPUs where you actually need the speed, it supports plenty of IO, it supports AVX2 and all sorts of platform features.
And it’s not that expensive if you can re-use RAM. Especially not expensive if you can re-use the mobo.
Full disclosure: I have a 7800X3D now. But I wouldn’t notice the difference if I had an 5800X3D 97% of the time; there’s literally one my sibling has that does all the same things, running a 7900 XTX GPU no problem.
I would certainly prefer a 5800X3D to a 7600 or even a 7700.
I don’t really see a point on upgrading it till AM6 either.
There are certain things RAM bandwidth disproportionally helps with, but these are pretty niche.
Nothing other than the date? And the platform?
Nope.
What exactly are you running (or hope to run) that you think a 5800X3D is too outdated for?
5800X3D is a beast though.
I wouldn’t worry about what is “outdated” anymore, everything is going to stall at these prices and older PCs will retain value and usefulness much longer. Look at the actual performance for the actual dollars spent. Locally I can get a 5800X for 1/3 of the price of a 9700X + 32GB ddr5 + mobo. 1/3 of the price for 70% of the performance seems like a no brainer, but it depends on your workload and requirements.
I’ve been on am4 for 6 years and will prob stay on it for another 5 years at this rate.
What do you mean “everything is going to stall”? Like they’re going to stop developing hardware?
To give you a slightly different answer, CPU advancement has kind of plateaued since 2020. There are a lot of fundamental physical limits that integrated circuit tech is running up against that can only be sidestepped or optimized against, not broken. This was all happening before the AI craze pulled resources away from trying to make non-AI architectural breakthroughs, which means jumps we actually care about like the Zen release are probably not on the near horizon either.
The end result is hardware generations being viable for “classic” workloads a lot longer even on the higher end. I’m expecting my current AM4 system (5800X3D and 7900 XTX) to last another decade if not longer. It may cease to be my main rig when a good AM6 option drops (probably 2028 to 2030), but that’s more because I’m a bit of an upgrade addict than me being sensible.
For consumers, yes, everything is slowing down to a crawl because we are a rounding error as far as nvidia amd and intel are concerned. Most people are just giving up on building a new PC and sticking with what they have, which means software and games will have to keep targeting the older hardware for longer.
Even console releases are slowing down, ps3 2006, ps4 2013 (7 years), ps5 2020 (7 years), but the ps6 isn’t expected until 2028 or 2029.
I mean some companies will. AMD and Intel will not. Sony will not.
They are far more interested in the server space, i.e. the money maker sector for them. Only when the AI bubble pops is where we’ll see companies trying to appease to the end consumer.