AMD Ryzen 7 9700X CPU Review: 8-Core Zen 5 at $359

[Zarathustra]

I agree and also disagree.

The long term support is nice and on one side I'm all for it, but this makes it hard for them to keep supporting it, leads to some annoying sideeeffects making it also a pita, they had to lend CPU's to people to flash their bios so the CPU they bought would actually work with their mobo.

Also their first series of Eyzen motherboards were basic as hell as none of the big brands seemed to have faith in them succeeding leading to too small bios chips for all the CPU's is would need to support etc.

And if you require up to date features you had to upgrade the mobo anyways

I've posted this elsewhere on this forum, but the MSI B350 Tomahawk I bought for the kiddo back in 2016 (as part of a Microcenter bundle with a Ryzen 5 1600x) has been a goddamn trooper.

It started its life with said 1600x and my old 6GB Titan (roughly equivalent to a mid range RX480 at the time, which was popular)

Spent a good amount of time in the middle there with a 3800XT and a 2060 Super before now - in its final form - sporting a 5800x3d and a 4070 Super.

It was dirt cheap by modern standards (I think it retailed for $129 when I bought it, but that was obfuscated by the bundle price) and it has provided every bit of expected performance with every CPU and GPU combination that has been thrown at it, even now eight (!?) years later.

It's still on PCIe gen 3, but that doesn't make itself known in any games or 3d benchmarks. Gen3 appears fine even for the 4070 Super.

He could probably get slightly more NVMe performance if he had gen4, but while that would show up in a benchmark, it is not practically significant, as the random read performance on these things is more predictive of real world performance than top end sequential benchmarks, and that doesn't require Gen4 or Gen5 PCIe. It is more dependent on the drive itself.

I've been very impressed.

Yes, the BIOS chip was a little small, requiring selecting the right BIOS for your CPU, but at least in my case that wasn't a problem. The 1600x was supported out of the box. I had to flash it before popping in the 3800xt, and then again before popping in the 5800x3d, but that was easy enough.

Would have been nice if these boards had the capability to flash from a specially prepared USB stick without a CPU like some boards do, but they were cheap low end motherboards, so you can't get everything.

In the grand scheme of things, very impressed with that solid low end MSI board and its longevity. It beat every last expectation I had in it.

He is probably ready for a faster CPU at this point (as he does some crazy high player count Fortnite game mode that hits the CPU hard) but still this has been a very impressive run. I could not have asked more out of this motherboard. They should make more of them like it.

 

[Zarathustra]

Anyway, I came here to say, I know lots of people were disappointed with Zen5's performance upgrade over previous gen, but having just sat down and looked at CPU's and prices, I think the cost to performance ratio is pretty good.

The 9700x gets you within shouting distance of the 7800x3D, within single digit framerates (in the upper 100's) at 1080p in most titles, and by the time you increase resolution to 1440p, the difference is gone in most cases.

But the 7800x3d going for about $450, and the 9700x can be had for about $290.

I'd argue there is very little to complain about there.

Will be interesting to see where then 9800x3D lands.

 

[Denpepe]

Will be interesting to see where then 9800x3D lands.

This is again where my issue starts, no mobo will support those out of the box, so better get a motherboard with bios flash function without CPU if you want to buy into the AM5 platform from scratch.

Saw a techtuber vid the other day where he was going to fix a broken PC, but it was not broken, husqt had an incompatible bios but the user was not savy enough to now/find out and assumed it was broken and as such could not fix it himself.

If you go in at the start and keep upgrading from there like you did it's all nice and dandy, if you want to jump in midway be prepared to do some good research or you might have some issues.