a 5800X3D.

I was hoping that the new gen would show enough improvement to make it worth switching to AM5.  But I'm seeing reports of only small gains in gaming benchmarks over the 7XXX CPUs, and general instability with the 9600X and memory incompatibility with the 9700X.

My 5600X had been doing fine until very recently; I was playing Horizon Forbidden West and encountered brief stuttering, which I think might have been caused by the CPU, although I can't be sure of that.  I play at 1440p, and have a 3080 12 GB overclocked to 2070 MHz.  My 5600X is "overclocked" to 4.6 GHz on all cores.  I have 16 GB of 3600 15-15-15 RAM.

Of course, it's possible that the 5600X isn't the problem and I can get by with it for a while longer, but I'm kind of itching to do an upgrade and I can afford a 5800X3D - although I'm also considering a 5700X3D, which generally scores pretty close to the 5800X3D in gaming benchmarks, and is significantly cheaper.  The only real reason I'm hesitating to get it is that the boost clock is 500 MHz slower than my CPU, and I just have a problem with going down that much on clock speed, mostly for non-technical reasons.

The new higher-core parts will be out in about a week.  Maybe they'll look better, but I don't think those of us whose most demanding application is gaming will reap much benefit from more than 8 cores, at least not for a while.

Anybody here thinking about going to Zen 5?  

If you have a 12GB card, spend the money on a better monitor, or two more 1440’s. You won’t notice much difference going to a 5800 from a 5600.

That’s what I run with my 3080Ti & 5800X.. it’s a blast.

I have thought about upgrading my monitor.  While I'm generally happy with the image quality, it was advertised as HDR but really isn't.  Also, it often has sync issues when switching video modes. But I already have a couple of monitors I'm not using, and they're kind of hard to sell due to the shipping cost, so I'm having a hard time justifying the cost.

Regarding a second monitor, I really don't have the desk space... my desk is cluttered enough as it is.  

I've seen a lot of gaming benchmarks showing the 5800X3D achieving significantly higher frame rates than the 5600X.  However, at 1440p, it's often from like 80 fps to 100+ fps, so you may be right that I wouldn't notice much difference.

What I'd really like to know is whether the recent stuttering was in fact caused by the CPU.  If so, I'd want to upgrade.  But if not... I may still want to upgrade.  

5600X and RTX 3080 XC3 here. No stuttering at all and I game in 4K. I did have to upgrade from 16 gig to 32 gig of ram to do so. Nothing is overclocked. Maybe the OC is causing an instability? That or something is on it's way out, as you stated.

I don't think the OC is causing problems; I've been running it since I got the CPU.  I suppose that degradation could be an issue, but the voltage isn't excessive.  Also, it isn't actually unstable; I almost never experience a crash, and those very few times I have it could have been caused by a lot of things.

For better or worse, the stuttering happens so seldom that it would be difficult to impossible to troubleshoot.  

And at this point, if I'm being honest, it's probably more about just wanting to tinker with my computer than needing to fix something.  

Oh, and I've looked at the system RAM usage while playing HFW, and it runs around 11 - 12 GB.  Still, I might upgrade to (slightly faster) 32 GB because reasons.

One way to find out, Go back to standard clocks on the CPU & GPU & play.

The way AMD integrates frequency clocks between the CPU & RAM introduces its own “quarks”, that under certain circumstances can create hiccups.

Secondly, GPU over clocking is a finicky beast. There is so much now in terms of graphics processing & coding that makes stability very game specific.

If you want to upgrade for the sake of upgrading then you do you. Want to spend $175 on a 5800X, go for it. What to spend double for a 5800X3D, go for it. It’s your money.

At the same time consider this: You purchased a GPU with 12GB of vRAM. VRAM is especially utilized In resolution, or pixel rendering. In order to begin to utilize that 12GB you need to be north of 8million pixels.

From what I can tell from my testing my system jumps vRAM usage in correlation to pixel processing. I have been able to find little in the way of corroborating testing, aside from Nvidia’s own recommendation of running 3x1440 monitors with 12GB cards, basically stating they built them for that application, that I see a 1GB usage for every 1Million pixel processing. 7680x1440 is 11million pixels. My usage hovers around 11.2-11.4GB vRAM usage.

On many game titles once you hit 4K the GPU really becomes the limiting factor. Yes a subsequent step in CPU will bring a jump in frame rate, but it’s not astronomical as it’s still based on the GPU. Going even farther a pushing the envelope to vRAM usage puts more importance on vRAM  capacity & frequency clock.

At that point you also start to realize that the difference between gaming at 120fps & 300+ fps is absolutely zero in relative terms. It becomes more about the immersiveness of the experience over seeing a peak number for the sake of seeing a peak number.

You mention desk space, you wall mount triple monitors.

Several months ago I went from a 5600X, 3080 FTW3, and 32GB RAM to a 5800X3D with 64GB RAM to try to improve VR performance in DCS. I noticed some improvement, but honestly haven't played enough since then to really form an opinion. I need to figure out RAM overclocking as the XMP settings in my BIOS cause my RAM to be unstable. Without XMP, the speed is pretty neutered.

Update:  I decided that if I was going to upgrade to a 5800X3d, I'd want to also upgrade to 32 GB for a bit more future-proofing.  Of course, the RAM needs to be at least as fast as what I have now.

Well, apparently I'm too late.  There are no 32 GB kits available that are even close to as fast.  So, as far as I'm concerned, the AM4 platform has reached EOL.

In the meantime, I looked at some more reviews of the 9600X and 9700X, and most don't match the negative tone of the first ones I looked at (Gamers Nexus, Hardware Unboxed, Jay's Two Cents).  So I'm not as sure that I don't want one... or, of course, I could get a 7800X3D.  Intel is out for me; their recent issues, combined with much higher power draw for comparable CPUs, have caused me to lose faith in the brand.

I found that out the hard way as well. I needed 32 gig for Diablo 4 in 4k. I had moved from 1440p. I had to go to the motherboard's webpage and copy paste the ram part numbers into amazon, until I got a hit. I had to buy 2 new 16 gig kits, as the ram I had in my pc wasn't made anymore.

Edit: The pc is only 3 years old and bought all new ram in October.

If you can make it to a Microcenter, they have mobo, 32gb, and 7800X3D bundles for $500.

Update 2:  As I mentioned above, I missed out on getting the DDR4 RAM that I wanted.  I decided to go to AM5, and I just bought a 7800X3D.

I had suspected that after the lukewarm-at-best reviews of the new AMD CPUs came out, a lot of people like me who had been holding off on an upgrade until they saw the reviews would pull the trigger on a 7XXX CPU, driving up demand.  It could have been a coincidence, but the prices went up everywhere in the last few days - $390 was the lowest price I could find.  However, Amazon is currently offering a $40 coupon, so I got it for $350 (with 2 free games; they don't say which ones).

RAM will be 32 GB of Corsair Vengeance 6000 30-36-36-76.  This is Hynix M-die as far as I can tell. Price is $123; I couldn't find it on sale anywhere.  

Motherboard will probably be an Asrock 670E Taichi or Asrock 670E Steel Legend.  I've always gone with the best chipset available, and both of the Asrock boards are well reviewed.  This is where I could save some money though, either by going with a lesser chipset or a lower-tier board.  I usually buy better boards mostly to get better voltage regulation for overclocking, but in this case it's not a high power chip to start with, and AMD has pretty much squeezed all the potential out of the chip at stock settings (not that that will stop me from trying, of course ).  

I'm making similar plans, but I think I'm going to wait to see what happens with the 7600X3D and black friday sales.  I'm looking at a-die ddr5 as those kits seem to support higher ram frequencies that might prove useful with future CPU upgrades even if current AMD chips can't handle it.  For mobos I'm looking at the lower end b650m boards as like you said, CPU overclocking is pretty much dead, and the only real performance gains to be had are in running tight ram timings; something that isn't affected by the motherboard.  PCIE5 isn't something I really care about as even going down to PCIE3 only barely affects the performance of an RTX4090, so I figure I will have moved on from AM5 long before I end up with GPU that needs more than PCIE4 to get full performance.

Another option I'm looking at for a short term upgrade is a 5700X3D off of aliexpress for about $150. That plus the upcoming windows ryzen fix would be a decent uplift, and I'm mostly playing on a 4k TV anyway, so it's not like I need a top tier CPU.

I'm still running a 3700X and 32GB of RAM. I plan to get a 9700X3D and a new X870 or X870E motherboard when they come out along with 64GB of RAM. I'll also probably need to get an AIO water cooler though maybe I'll get a new case (and do a custom loop again). I'm using a Corsair C70 Vengeance case from around 2012 still that was inspired by an ammo can and military aesthetics. Need new mechanical hard drive too. Damn I really need everything but a new GPU and monitor.