I'd have to disagree there. Both those articles are a useful read, but it does show the overall benefit for PCIe4.0 is only 1% over 3.0, and it only gets up to 5% on those two games when comparing it to Gen 2 rather than Gen 3. IMO a 1% overall improvement up to 3% on certain games is certainly not worth the premium cost of a 570 board. For the same cost the benefit would be far bigger improving RAM, CPU or GPU, or SSD size.

(I'd put it in the same category as comparing an EVO 970 SSD to a cheaper option like an MX500. If they were the same price you'd go for the EVO970 but the MX500 is a lot cheaper, and for practical purposes does the same job as the 970 at only slightly lower performance despite theoretically being a fair bit slower)

Struggling to decide between the 3600X and 3700X. I think the 3700X is overkill for gaming right now, especially on my relatively mid-tier hardware, but who knows what kind of processing power the new consoles will have. It might make sense to overkill on the processor today so I don't have to replace it in 18 months to play new stuff.

Intel - Anti-Competitive, Anti-Consumer, Anti-Technology.

Me in the exact same boat. I have whittled down my choices to exactly these two models. I think/hope the SMT (equivalent of Intel's HT) may save the 3600X from totally tanking if 8 cores start being needed for games.

The spectre of future games possibly demanding eight cores is the reason I removed the Core i5-9600K (6 cores, no HT) from my short list.

Yeah. I might get a weaker GPU so I can get the 3700X honestly. The GPU I'll probably be replacing after the new consoles either way, but the 3700X has a real shot at being a long-term part. I doubt I'll be using ray tracing until the GPU after this anyway, so that saves some power.

This is a bad time to upgrade honestly, but my new 1440p monitor requires more power and I want to play coming games like Wolfenstein, Doom and Cyberpunk at native res on at least high.

I will stick to my current GPU for sure, as weak as it is. Changing GPUs is not so difficult.

What have you got?

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-r9-280x.c2398 Draws way too much power compared to an Nvidia 1650, which is a bit faster and much more modern.

I would suggest picking either Ryzen 5 3600 (non X model) for $199 if you want to save some money or Ryzen 3700X for $329 depending of your needs. Difference in majority of games nowdays is minimal.

Very minimal today, yeah. I'm more thinking of what will hold up in the "next gen" console era though, so I hopefully only have to replace my GPU again in 2 or so years. Honestly though if games start veering more toward multi-threading it won't really make the single core Ghz performance more important, so maybe the 3600 is a safe bet.

its gonna be years before games take advantage of these new cpu's atm your just wasting your money if u just game, 8 cores is enough for gaming atm anymore is just overkill, my cpu is a ryze n5 1600 and it does what is needed for me

Games like Hitman 2 and AC: Odyssey are already severely held back by the 1600. Not really because of cores but because of speed. The super high end chips are totally useless with games, yeah, but that doesn't mean the 1600 isn't starting to show its age.

In the process of stashing cash specifically to build a whole new system, and I've gotta say, I was originally planning on an i5, but after seeing the benches on the 3600X/3700X, I'm actually starting to lean towards AMD. I'm probably going to stick with Nvidia with my GPU, as those 2070 Supers look pretty good and will save me some cash from the 2080 I'd originally picked out.

Yes, because people solely use their computer for gaming and absolutely nothing else, the operating system and drivers never needs any resources and of course no-one ever has multiple programs open at the same time. Not to mention recording, which again, no-one does, especially not people who plays games. And it is impossible for someone to later want to use a gaming computer for non-gaming purposes.

And of course we all know that every single game in existence has cannot use any more than 8 cores, otherwise it explodes. Oh right, Terraria is a game which can take advantage of any number of cores (for computing lighting). Oh, and implementations of various graphics APIs may use several threads to compile shaders etc. Also, emulators for consoles requires quite a few cores.

I agree that if you focus primarily on semi-modern games natively compatible with your OS and processor architecture, then >8 cores might not be worth the premium, but your blanket statement above is false.

After looking at benches and thinking over things I went with the 3600X. In benchmarks over multiple sites it shows clear gains over the 1600X, with even 20fps boosts to very CPU focused games like Hitman 2. In contrast the 3700X shows only very small gains over the 3600 in games, and I think even with new consoles coming out they likely won't beat the clock speed or core count. I might need to upgrade my 2400Mhz RAM though, we'll see.

I also got an MSI 2070 Gaming Z. Yes the super cards are slowly coming to retail, but the heavy discount on this card right now matches a decent 2060 Super card, but with slightly better performance. A decent 2070 Super would have been $100 more, and with a 1440p monitor I don't really need it.