I've been looking at upgrading my PC recently. Cannot afford a full new build atm.
Current Specs (Was built late '17- early '18) :
Ryzen 7 1800X - 3.3/3.9 (Oc'd) Boost
PowerColor Red Devil 590
Corsair Crystal 280X, Corsair 850w PSU, 4x Corsair 140mm QX fans, 280mm AIO, 1 280mm RX in drive/psu compartment (Fan curve based on Coolant Temp)
Asus ROG Strix B450 M-ITX
32G 3200mhz Corsair Memory (2x16) - Recently upgraded from 16g 2833 to 32g 3200
Intel 250gb M2 Boot Drive
Samsung M2 1tb Gaming Drive #1 - (SkyrimSE, DQ11, BL1/2, Doom)
Samsung 970 1tb SSD - Gaming Drive #2
1tb Seagate (lolhybrid) laptop drive - Storage/Mod Staging drive
2tb WD Black - Steam Storage - games that don't need SSD or that i'm not currently playing.
(All drives are currently sitting in the 40-60% used range)
MSI 28" Curved 1080p Freesync for main monitor, UW 28" LG secondary/Rainmeter/Monitoring.
At the time I built this PC it was mainly for Final Fantasy 11 and an occasional run thru of Doom (16) and Borderlands 1/2. Complete overkill for FF11 (PC port from PS2), was giving decent mid-range FPS on the other games.
I've been on the fence about upgrading my GFX card (pricing/availability, etc) even though I know long term, it will likely become the bottleneck. However, even with tons of mods, Skyrim at 1080p -should be- much more CPU dependent than GPU dependent. So for now, I'm going to hold off on GPU upgrades and am focusing on CPU primarily. Though if someone can present a convincing argument for GPU upgrades, I'd consider it. The 590 only has 8g of Vram (low by todays standards), but does have a 256bit bandwith.
The first two items in the build list are the most relevant to this discussion.
Note : Below, all 3 processors are 8/16 cores. 8 physical + 8 Virtual/Hyperthread
So :
-------------------------------
1800X - 3.3g/3.925g Boost
Cache L1: 96 KB (per core)
Cache L2: 512 KB (per core)
Cache L3: 16 MB
-------------------------------
5700X3D - 3.0/4.1 Boost (slightly lower idle clocks + Higher Boost Clock and the 3dV-nand L3)
Cache L1: 64 KB (per core)
Cache L2: 512 KB (per core)
Cache L3: 96 MB (shared)
vs.
5900XT - 3.3/4.8 Boost (Same idle freq. as current, much higher boost, more L3 than current build, not 3d v-nand)
L1 Cache: 1024 KB (IDK exactly how cache is used here, if its physical cores only, this would be 128kb per core, or if its logical cores (Physical+virtual), then 64kb like the 5700)
L2 Cache: 8 MB
L3 Cache: 64 MB
These two processors are in the $250-270ish USD range.
-Could- play on my 4k Samsung TV, but not likely as it would involve lots of playing with windows settings every time I wish to do so. More likely would be for me to finally unbox and install my SteamLink that has been in a closet sitting around for 6 years. So for recommendations, please keep in mind i'm perfectly happy playing at 1080 with higher FPS, and am not really interested in higher resolution solutions atm.
Either of these are obviously going to be upgrades, but which would actually be better FOR SKYRIM SE?
Will the 3d V-Nand from the 5700X3D help more, even with the lower clocks, or will SSE benefit more from the brute force higher boost clocks from the 5900X?
