CPU/Motherboard bundle worth to buy?

[Bjorn Smith]

Hi,

I can buy a bundle from a local site that I buy/sell "stuff" on:

CPU: Threadripper 2920x
MOBO: Asrock x399 Phantom Gaming 6
Køler: Noctua NH-U14S TR4

The price is around 430 USD total - I think the price is decent - not crazy good.

I am thinking about buying it to replace my Ryzen 7 1700 that is unable to continue on the windows upgrade train, where this combo should allow me to upgrade - and also its a better CPU than the one I have.

What do you guys think - is it a good offer?

Thanks for any replies.

 

[unwind-protect]

Looks good to me.

 

[RolloZ170]

What do you guys think - is it a good offer?

both parts under warranty ?
what about a new processor only ? what a mobo do you have now ?

 

[Bjorn Smith]

both parts under warranty ?
what about a new processor only ? what a mobo do you have now ?

I doubt they are under warranty - and today I have a gen1 ryzen motherboard - so my board is definetely not compatible.
I think it will be a nice upgrade - but since AMD probably will make a new generation this year I could wait out for that - I mean its not like I "need" a new system - the one I have is responsive enough - I have just had a "twitch" since I found out I could not upgrade to windows 11.

 

[RolloZ170]

and today I have a gen1 ryzen motherboard - so my board is definetely not compatible.

i meant a new/other processor, not threadripper.
sounds to me your motherboard is a secret, but maybe it can run a 3900X.

 

[Wasmachineman_NL]

Buying a dead-end platform is stupid. Just go with AM4 if you don't need that many PCIe lanes.

 

[alex_stief]

I'll have to agree with this. With a 430$ Budget, you can most likely buy a newer Ryzen Processor for your existing motherboard. Which will do almost everything better than the old Threadripper CPU, aside from PCIe lanes and memory bandwidth.
Whether it is wise to panic now about missing Windows 11 compatibility is also debatable.

 

[ReturnedSword]

Almost all AM4 Ryzen era motherboards (300-500 series chipset), even the lowly A320, supports Ryzen 5000, so you should be fine after a BIOS update. The Ryzen SoC itself has fTPM 2.0, which is what you’ll need for Windows 11. There’s no need to upgrade your motherboard, unless you really want a newer motherboard’s features. Ryzen CPU/APU of all generations are found used pretty reasonably priced on eBay.

Tangent:
Weirdly enough, Ryzen 1000 also has fTPM 2.0, but can’t officially run Windows 11, though you won’t have any issue installing the OS presently. In the future Microsoft has said they will disable Windows updates for unsupported processors. I suspect there are other CPU features aside from the TPM 2.0 requirement that is needed for Windows 11, but Microsoft and AMD never fully clarified what was the main issue. From what I understand, even using a physical TPM 2.0 module in the motherboard socket will not enable a Ryzen 1000 and earlier, or Intel 7th gen and earlier CPU to work with Windows 11.

 

[Bjorn Smith]

sounds to me your motherboard is a secret, but maybe it can run a 3900X.

Its not a secret - my current motherboard is a "MSI X370 GAMING PRO CARBON" - with Socket AM4 - but I never considered it could be a viable option to just upgrade the CPU - I don't want to upgrade my CPU if it does not at least give me the possibility to upgrade to windows 11 - otherwise I might as well stay on my current platform until 2025 or whenever MS drops support for windows 10.

Reading the documentation it seems like I can upgrade to even the latest Ryzen CPU - but that seems crazy.

 

[Wasmachineman_NL]

Its not a secret - my current motherboard is a "MSI X370 GAMING PRO CARBON" - with Socket AM4 - but I never considered it could be a viable option to just upgrade the CPU - I don't want to upgrade my CPU if it does not at least give me the possibility to upgrade to windows 11 - otherwise I might as well stay on my current platform until 2025 or whenever MS drops support for windows 10.

Reading the documentation it seems like I can upgrade to even the latest Ryzen CPU - but that seems crazy.

I have a 3950X running on my CH7, aside from it's IMC being ****ed thanks to me putting 1.4V on CLDO_VDDP last year in my new system it works just fine.

 

[ReturnedSword]

Its not a secret - my current motherboard is a "MSI X370 GAMING PRO CARBON" - with Socket AM4 - but I never considered it could be a viable option to just upgrade the CPU - I don't want to upgrade my CPU if it does not at least give me the possibility to upgrade to windows 11 - otherwise I might as well stay on my current platform until 2025 or whenever MS drops support for windows 10.

Reading the documentation it seems like I can upgrade to even the latest Ryzen CPU - but that seems crazy.

AMD promised AM4 socket upgrades until 2020, so Ryzen 4000. Original release 300/400 series chipset motherboards had 16 MB BIOS ROM which couldn’t fit the firmware for all Zen processors so that’s why for example MSI released updated 400 series motherboards under the “Max” revision with 32 MB ROM. This is a common ROM limitation even with Intel. After some complaints AMD provided an AGESA workaround to enable Ryzen 5000 support on 400 series motherboards with 16 MB ROM. Starting late 2021 AMD went above and beyond and supported Ryzen 5000 on even 300 series motherboards (which was not promised).

So definitely you can upgrade to even the latest and greatest Ryzen 5950X if you wanted to on your motherboard. Brand new, the 5950X is about $550 now, though you can probably get it cheaper used on eBay.

 

[T_Minus]

fwiw I upgraded from a 3600 to a 5900x and it was noticeably more snappy, and in games I gained avg 10fps if not a bit more, I was surprised I noticed as much as I did.

 

[Bjorn Smith]

fwiw I upgraded from a 3600 to a 5900x and it was noticeably more snappy, and in games I gained avg 10fps if not a bit more, I was surprised I noticed as much as I did.

It seems like "just upgrade" the CPU is the way to go. As a general rule of thumb - I don't upgrade my CPU/GPU unless I can get around 50% improvement - anything else seems to not make it worth it - unless you care about 10 fps

That being said it seems like kind of a waste to spend money on a CPU now - when a new platform AM5 arrives this year - and can get the next generation socket.

I am well aware that at that time I would need to buy a CPU, motherboard, RAM and possibly everything else as well to get the full benefit of the new platform - but then I should have a system good to go until next major platform change I hope

Thank you everyone for chipping in.

 

[ReturnedSword]

Here’s a small subset comparison on PassMark of various AMD AM4 CPUs. The 2600 can be substituted for a 1600 AF variant as they essentially are the same:

AMD Ryzen 7 1700 vs AMD Ryzen 5 2600 vs AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs AMD Ryzen 9 5950X [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

Looking at single thread ratings, there was a small bump between Zen 1/Zen+. Then big generational jumps in single thread rating to Zen 2 and Zen 3 due to IPC and L2/L3 caching improvements.

But generally, the main benefit of a CPU with more cores is massive multitasking improvement, as you no doubt saw when you got your 1700 compared to whatever CPU you had previously. It would be difficult to get 50% generational improvements in single thread performance nowadays, compared to let’s say the 1980s and 1990s.

Personally I plan to wait out Zen 4 this year at least until the DDR5 pricing goes down. New memory tech prices are an age old problem every time there’s a switch. There was the same problem in the switch from DDR3 to DDR4, and previously from DDR2 to DDR3, and so on going back to the original 30-pin to 72-pin SIMM. I think DDR5 prices will stabilize and decline by mid next year, but by then Zen 4+ or Zen 5 will be nearly out the door as well.

It’s really a personal choice if you’ll upgrade your CPU to a used Zen 2/3 or wait to buy a totally new platform later.

 

[Tom S]

CPU: Threadripper 2920x
MOBO: Asrock x399 Phantom Gaming 6
Køler: Noctua NH-U14S TR4

The price is around 430 USD total - I think the price is decent - not crazy good.

You can get a Ryzen 9 5900X for less than that. It will outperform the Threadripper 2920x and likely consume less idle power too.

The only reason to invest in the old Threadripper 2920X would be if you had some obscure need for a lot of I/O or memory bandwidth. For general purpose use, a Ryzen 5800X or 5900X will perform significantly better, especially in single-core workloads.