Back in 2018 I was forced to upgrade my computer since Opteron 3280 based system unexpectedly died and even older Sandy Bridge-EP based platform was quite unstable, especially with modern graphics cards, likely because of ES nature of the CPU (later I received different QA89 s-spec CPU which also exhibited the same issue, thus it may be common to the same stepping engineering samples). At that time, I went with the AMD Ryzen 5 1600 6-core CPU, which I have used for the following 3 years. Though unplanned, upgrade by itself was really successful and I was very satisfied with the performance and stability of the system. Next year I downgraded my GPU to Radeon R7 370 for better NetBSD compatibility, and to this day it defined my main computer setup. However, this week I decided to finally upgrade my CPU. Since I have X370 chipset based motherboard, I can't use the latest Ryzen 5000 series (Zen 3) CPUs but the prices for Zen 2 ones went to acceptable levels. I decided to stay with 65W TDP package, because of that only three suitable options were available: Ryzen 5 3600, Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 9 PRO 3900. The latter one is OEM model, thus not available for purchase in retail stores. I didn't find one in amazon or ebay as well. The second option looked very tempting, since it has 8 cores instead of 6 and slighter higher turbo frequency, but in the end I decided to buy direct counterpart of my current CPU - Ryzen 5 3600. It is still 6-core CPU but it has higher clocks and Zen 2 improvements over original Zen architecture, delivering around 30% performance improvement according to benchmarks. This decision was mainly driven by the price, 3700X CPU costs over 100 euros more in my location which sounded a bit too much for 2 additional cores. However, I would not rule out the possibility to opt one of these CPUs some time later depending on availability and price.
CPU upgrade went pretty smoothly. Probably the main challenge was posed by my CPU cooler which requires complete motherboard removal to replace the CPU. Nevertheless, it was a good exercise, since I cleaned big amount of dust inside the case. The first boot took longer than usual and UEFI BIOS settings were reset, but it was smooth experience soon after the reconfiguration. Both Linux and NetBSD works snappier after upgrade. It is visible to the naked eye in WEB browsing and windows animations. However, I performed one "test" by rebuilding NetBSD userland, the building time reduced by 35% to 26 minutes. Actually building it with X.org sources took few minutes less than without them previously. So, the improvement is consistent with the benchmarks which can be found in the internet and comes in handy for me (I also use pkgsrc). The temperatures usually stayed a bit below 70 °C under full load (I am using silent mode for fans) and around 40 °C or less on idle. Overall, I am satisfied with the update and I believe the CPU is worth it's current price (I paid around 170 euros without fan).
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| AMD Ryzen 5 3600 |
However, if the one wants to save more money, there are also Ryzen 5 3500X and Ryzen 5 3500 models available. The main difference between them and Ryzen 5 3600 is the lack of SMT support (so no 12 threads), also 100 Mhz less turbo frequency. But in general they performance is very similar to 3600 model and can be a good trade off in many scenarios. The difference between 3500 and 3500X is only in L3 cache, the former has 16MB, and the letter has 32MB. The price difference between 3500 (without X) and 3600 can reach around 40 euros and around 20 euros for X variant.
After CPU upgrade I believe I won't have much more improvements before next complete computer replacement. I don't have any timeframe for that, it may likely happen after two or three years. However, I am considering to change my SATA SSD to NVMe one as the last major improvement sometime this year.
