PC Upgrade Help Needed

[tibcrookedh]

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?

Edited March 26 by tibcrookedh
Updated Cache Description and Core Count note

[ModEnjoyer52]

I can't give you a technical explanation but I upgraded from a 3700X to a 5800X3D, no other changes, and it was a massive performance boost. I think the X3D line is a great choice for Skyrim from what I've read.

You can make big improvements to performance using the INI files in Skyrim, particularly shadow distance and quality, and try to lower the draw call count if you are limited by CPU.

Try using this tool first to be sure where your bottleneck is Skyrim Performance Monitor

[Karna5]

I'm visually impaired so can't read any of those technical letters and numbers, but I'm on a 2016 PC which runs modern games fine having done only the following upgrades since 2016:

1. For my monitor I'm using a 55" 4k television (240 Hz) and play at 4k resolution. (It cost around $500)

2. For my graphics card, I upgraded from Nvidia 1080Ti to Nvidia RTX 3080

3. For modern games (like Assassin's Creed Shadows, Star Wars Outlaws, Black Desert Online, etc.) i got a big solid state drive and put the game son those.

There really isn't anything I can't play on this, though Windows will probably force me to get a new PC before the end of the year because supposedly my hardware is too old for Windows 11.

[radiusrsatti]

grain of salt, but from personal experience... I upgraded from a system similar to yours, ryzen 7 1700x , 64gb DDR3, asrock x670 mobo, GTX 1070... this setup played everything perfectly, well, as perfectly as vanilla games get...

modding skyrim was a different story, for me... vanilla, 60 fps almost always... at the time, I had a mod collection of maybe 1k mods before I upgraded, and I upgraded specifically due to VRAM insufficiencies of the GPU, 8GB was not enough to handle the 4k overhaul of skyrim textures (keeping 1080p display, just using 4k textures)... VRAM bottleneck kept my fps between 5 and 30 with heavy stuttering in overworld map... this was verified through various task managers and monitors at the time, CPU usage rarely topped 30% across a single core, but VRAM filled before savefile even loaded... I often managed a steady 45fps indoors, but also had lag spikes fairly often

CPU processing didn't change substantially after upgrade, but with the 3090ti (24gb VRAM) I upgraded to, I once again get a solid 60fps overworld with 3k mods, using Pfuscher's 16k texture packs...

to your questions about the L1 cache, it is also split per core like the 5700, 64kb per core... the 3d v-nand only refers to the physical structure of the memory, used for density increase, 96mb vs 64mb... more cache does increase CPU performance, but not end-user noticeable

All that said, keeping it simple, the 5900xt is beefier than the 5700x3d, double cores, threads, only potential downside would be the smaller L3 cache, but in comparison to your 1800x, it's 4x what you've got now

Edited Sunday at 05:36 PM by radiusrsatti