Huge AMD Zen 5 Increase Soon? Should You Still Buy AM4? April Q&A [Part 2]

Buy relevant products from Amazon, Newegg and others below:

Video Index
00:00 - Welcome to Hardware Unboxed
00:15 - Ad Spot
00:56 - Is AM4 worth buying at any price point in 2024?
03:28 - Will Zen 5 offer better price to performance?
11:49 - How often do we consciously test hardware at default?
14:38 - Why are people still obsessed with ‘Ultra’ settings?
16:40 - Why do new B650 boards still support VGA and PS/2 ports?
19:22 - Was Direct Storage (DX12 Ultimate) overhyped?
21:56 - Will AM5 go EOL in 2025?
31:05 - Conclusion

Will Zen 5 Be A Better Buy? Are AM4 CPUs Still Worth It? April Q&A [Part 2]

Disclaimer: Any pricing information shown or mentioned in this video was accurate at the time of video production, and may have since changed

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. We may also earn a commission on some sales made through other store links

FOLLOW US IN THESE PLACES FOR UPDATES

Outro music by David Vonk/DaJaVo

[Hardwareunboxed]

Sorry there was a mix up with the editor, the original thumbnail and title that were up for a few minutes are for part 3. It's fixed now, sorry everyone

[tordb]

Everything keeps going up except my paycheck.

[ArtDadDraws]

I went from an R5 2600 to a 5700x3D this month. Absolutely insane upgrade. Like it completely refreshed my system. If you're still on OLD (1000, 2000, 3000) AM4 definitely recommend upgrading within AM4.

[kristof]

Ultra is/was the setting I want to use when I replay the game in 4-5 years after it came out initially.

[Jojo_Tolentino]

Petition to rename Ultra settings to Unoptimized settings

[blackandredtech]

To the point about legacy ports on motherboards. I used to work as an IT technician in a UK secondary school and many of the monitors the school had only had VGA ports. We're talking old monitors that the only reason they hadn't been thrown out was because they still worked. Finding the money to get replacements for equipment like this was also difficult.

[twiggsherman]

I built my son a PC for Christmas. Wasn't quite 2024, but I went AM4 because I had a spare kit of DDR4 kicking around. 5600 + MSI Pro mATX board ran about 400 dollars CAD. Even with AM5 boards coming down in price, I wouldn't be able to put together an AM5 setup for that price.

[cacheman]

23:07 I'm with Tim. "End of Life" ("EOL") in this context is more of a technical term, meaning roughly the stop date for the manufacturing of the product. Intel will usually release a "Product Change Notification" (PCN) with a number of milestones, one of which is the last date that you can put in an (non-cancelable, non-returnable) order. Once that date arrives, they can 'cook' the last batch and the product is tagged as EOL.

[thewildcard]

Default
Overclocking
Intel MB partners: It's the same picture

[kamild_]

I wanted to upgrade my brother's PC to AM5 this Christmas, but it turned out the cheapest AM5 combo was twice as expensive as AM4 w/ an R5 3600. As much as AM5 would help with future upgrades and current performance, and taking into account the kind of games he's playing rn and that he's still running on a Polaris card, I deemed it not worth it.

[MadX]

I genuinely think that for the people who live in the real world, Zen 3 is still a perfectly viable option. I know it might not be the most representative sample, but most players on Steam are still on Zen 2 and a GTX 1060 or an RTX 2060/2070.

I wish I had the money to get the best of the best but it's moving so fast... It's impossible to keep up unless you're ok with spending thousands of dollars/Euros/Pounds every 2/3 years.

So yeah, while it may not be the most "future proof" thing to do (we all know it's BS anyway), AM4 with something like a ZEN 3 CPU should be more than enough for most people for a "real world" usage.

PS: Still learning English so be kind to me :D

[peterwstacey]

About the PS/2 and VGA ports, the same is true for Serial and Parallel which are supported on some motherboards - as Steve says, it is about industrial companies. They test and certify that connector X configured in a certain way in an installation (or Docker image) is known to work for that one particular use-case, and then stick with that setup. The more things they change, the more money they have to spend going through the re-certification process. Banking and Railways are two industries where this is a big issue.

[blkspade]

Two things I think should be understood about the AM4 situation. The first is that there will likely always be a market for older Zen1/+ CPUs. There are people talking about just upgrading from 2000 series to a 5000. I'd imagine they wouldn't mind posting their old CPU up on Ebay that someone in some other region would be interested in because the latest are still way too expensive. The next is acknowledging that the fix for forward compatibility on boards with small ROMs was to remove features and older CPU support. That creates 2 very legitimate potential problems. Users upgrading their BIOS to support a new chip that disables the support for the old chip, which could leave them without a working computer if they update before having the new CPU in hand, or got a DOA or failure. The next issue is for people getting those CPUs 2nd hand, but not having boards available that haven't been updated.

I work at a computer repair shop and have had a lot of AM4 systems come in. One user needed us to update his BIOS because he literally tossed his old CPU in the trash before doing it himself. I have the wherewithal to know a BIOS update can leave a system inoperable if it removes support for the current CPU, but I know not everyone working in such a place is going to. It's not uncommon to consider a BIOS update as a resolution to any number of issues, and not everyone is going to read the notes. They are still releasing AM4 CPUs, and there needed to be room to address them in the ROM. It doesn't seem appropriate to suggest that the only motivation was that AMD was trying to pull a fast one.

With AM5, they've mandated larger ROMs and flashback support as standard. Those things clearly point to an intention of mitigating those drawbacks that existed with AM4.

[venix]

i am it in a company half the monitors (about 800 computers ) if not more are still VGA when it comes to buisness and datacenters vga is still very widely used especially for tasks that do not need a fast pc and just need any pc !

[thomasmould]

Ive just bought a 5800x3d as ive been on am4 for years already. I'm getting close to 200 frames on all favourite games at 1440p so i cant see why i would need to go to AM5 anytime soon

[kevinerbs]

That's incorrect about VGA & PS/2. The reason for VGA ports is because it still makes the screen react much quicker than DVI/DisplayPort or even HDMI, it has much lower input latency than all of them. That's why extreme overclocking boards still have them. Same reason why the PS/2 port is still on some extreme overclocking boards over USB because USB does not work the same way as PS/2 port & during an extreme overclocks the USB keyboards cannot react fast enough to enter bios. the PS/2 port works by using ultra-low level interrupts to the board. While the USB works on signal clock, for which with certain overclocking tunes can be completely ignored by the board.

[mayorplayz]

I just built a system with AM5(R5 7600x) about 2 weeks ago, I really hope AMD give AM5 Zen 6 support, platform longevity was the reason I went with AM5 over Socket 1700 as Intel has ended support for it with 14th gen. I would really like to upgrade to 11000 series.

[blahorgaslisk]

14:39 "Shy are people still obsessed with Ultra settings?"

This is something that has irritated me for a long time. My guess it's somewhat connected with the consoles and the PC superiority claims.

Let me go a bit back in time. When MechWarrior 2 and MW2 Mercenaries were released there were originally no hardware 3D support, and when looking at VGA cards there weren't really much in the way of hardware support for 2D graphics. It all was done in software. Yet the games supported resolutions and options that made it run as a slide show if you maxed everything. This was as close to "Ultra settings" as you can get, but even the best hardware available at this time resulted in something like 1 - 3 FPS no matter how much money you were able to throw at it. A few years later there was a patch to Mercenaries that allowed it to run with 3DFx Voodo cards, and it was a real upgrade. Still max settings were a slideshow.

The idea of including these settings was not because they were usable, but because in a few years they might be usable, and I can't remember that people complained over the games being badly optimized or anything. Thing is we knew that the extreme setting were not usable now, but maybe in the future. Interstate 76 was the same. You tweaked the settings to suit your hardware, and no one could really tun the game at max settings of everything in any reasonable framerate. Yet there were not that much complaints about that. Now there was complaints over general stability and that was totally valid. With patches and faster hardware the game just got better with time as more and more of the high quality graphics options could be raised.

Then came the big console leap. I'm mostly talking about Playstation and XBox. The thing is you really didn't have much to say about the graphics and game settings. But it worked. This schooled generations of players that games were to just work, which was not really how PC games had behaved. Now that the users were console schooled expectations of new PC gamers changed. As everything is supposed to work max settings are expected to be usable. if they are called Max, Ultra or whatever doesn't matter. People enables it all and are disappointed when the game becomes a slide show. Now in some games this will work with a Halo GPU like the 4090, but not really with anything less. Then people still feel cheated when their 4070 or RC 7700 presents less than 60 FPS, or even worse less than 30 FPS.

This is irritating for me. Ultra settings are just that Ultra. They are not something you should expect to work at good performance with the hardware available as the game is released. Max settings is a bit harder to value. It could be just like Ultra, but it could also be something for the currently fastest hardware. It will still be there in a few years, and by then the hardware might just be able to use those settings and present a decent FPS.

[animedrawer]

5600x is such a beast of a cpu that I struggle to see any reason for most people to do a whole new build

[felipeavlopes]

In terms of old I/O options I believe still having VGA makes a lot more sense than having PS2 ports because the likelyhood of an older monitor still functioning is bigger than an old keyboard and/or mouse doing so, specially considering some old devices were built with the mindset of actually lasting and if needed getting repaired rather than being tossed aside and replaced after a short time. I've had an old MAG XJ CRT monitor that was purchased around the time we had an old Athlon and a P3 and said monitor only called its quits about the time the first gen of Intel's Core series came around. In comparison I've had a much much newer Smart Tv that had to be replaced after far less usage.