What's a good CPU to pair with a 7800 XT?

[Quadsword]

I foolishly bought an AMD Ryzen 7 8700F without checking the reviews first and figured out it's bottlenecking my system. There's pretty much no way I'm running Doom: The Dark Ages at a decent frame rate unless I get a better CPU.

[C1REX]

Up to you and your budget. 7700, 7700x, 7800x3D (used), 9700x, 9800x3D are worth considering.
CPUs age surprisingly badly and quickly. It feels like yesterday when the 5800x3D was considered an overkill.

[Illusion of Progress]

I mean, there is always a bottleneck. If your only concern is to try and remove one, but you don't have any other problems, then you're worried about that which can't be avoided.

Doom The Dark Ages hasn't released, so we don't know how it will perform. You're probably thinking your CPU is terrible because it's effectively a 7000 series CPU in performance with half the cache, and yes that hurts it a bit in gaming, but your CPU is quite above minimum and probably even recommended specifications anyway, so I'm not sure I see the problem.

I'd wait and try it, and then upgrade later if you want more performance. Otherwise, if you're already on AM5 with a 8700F, the only reasonable upgrade is either a 9800X3D or a 7800X3D anyway. While the 7700X (and similar) are a bit better, they're too small of an increase over your current position to pay full price.

[Illusion of Progress]

Origineel geplaatst door C1REX:

Up to you and your budget. 7700, 7700x, 7800x3D (used), 9700x, 9800x3D are worth considering.
CPUs age surprisingly badly and quickly. It feels like yesterday when 5800x3D was considered an overkill.

CPUs definitely don't age terribly. Some do more than others, but on the whole, not really. A lot of people just have FOMO and confuse "not the current talk of the enthusiast community" as "has aged and is no good". Those are two very different things.

The 5800X3D is more than most people currently have and there's next to nothing it's bad at. Is it always overkill? Absolutely not, but it also wasn't always overkill on day one when it was the fastest CPU to exist, either. There's always things that will be able to use more hardware power.

[Tiberius]

Get one of those x3d cpus

[C1REX]

Origineel geplaatst door Illusion of Progress:

Origineel geplaatst door C1REX:

Up to you and your budget. 7700, 7700x, 7800x3D (used), 9700x, 9800x3D are worth considering.
CPUs age surprisingly badly and quickly. It feels like yesterday when 5800x3D was considered an overkill.

CPUs definitely don't age terribly. Some do more than others, but on the whole, not really. A lot of people just have FOMO and confuse "not the current talk of the enthusiast community" as "has aged and is no good". Those are two very different things.

The 5800X3D is more than most people currently have and there's next to nothing it's bad at. Is it always overkill? Absolutely not, but it also wasn't always overkill on day one when it was the fastest CPU to exist, either. There's always things that will be able to use more hardware power.

You are right, and I should add some more context to my opinion. A few years ago, I was considering upgrading from my 3950x (3700x gaming performance) to a 5800x3D for 4K gaming. Back then, people were telling me it was overkill, often quoting some useless, misleading bottleneck calculators. Now, I have a 7800x3D for 4K gaming, usually aiming for just 60fps, and I feel it’s just enough for some games. Just enough, despite many considering it an overkill for 60fps. Dragon's Dogma 2, Monster Hunter Wild (beta), Starfield, and a few others were surprisingly CPU demanding, even to hold a stable 60fps. I look more at 1% lows than averages. High fps means nothing if a game stutters.

The main reason why I talk about bad aging is how little game settings affect CPU performance and how stuck we can be with a CPU bottleneck. In most games, there is literally nothing we can do if our CPU can’t hold 60fps, when with GPUs, you can usually lower your settings low enough.

This is of course just my personal opinion and not a statement of fact.

[Illusion of Progress]

Origineel geplaatst door C1REX:

Origineel geplaatst door Illusion of Progress:

CPUs definitely don't age terribly. Some do more than others, but on the whole, not really. A lot of people just have FOMO and confuse "not the current talk of the enthusiast community" as "has aged and is no good". Those are two very different things.

The 5800X3D is more than most people currently have and there's next to nothing it's bad at. Is it always overkill? Absolutely not, but it also wasn't always overkill on day one when it was the fastest CPU to exist, either. There's always things that will be able to use more hardware power.

You are right, and I should add some more context to my opinion. A few years ago, I was considering upgrading from my 3950x (3700x gaming performance) to a 5800x3D for 4K gaming. Back then, people were telling me it was overkill, often quoting some useless, misleading bottleneck calculators. Now, I have a 7800x3D for 4K gaming, usually aiming for just 60fps, and I feel it’s just enough for some games. Just enough, despite many considering it an overkill for 60fps. Dragon's Dogma 2, Monster Hunter Wild (beta), Starfield, and a few others were surprisingly CPU demanding, even to hold a stable 60fps. I look more at 1% lows than averages. High fps means nothing if a game stutters.

I'm usually chasing additional CPU performance more than GPU performance. I was sort of guessing that may be where you were coming from as well, if I was right, I was speaking my perspective on that. Basically, yeah, more CPU performance can always be welcome, and sometimes I can be quote-unquote "needed", but I wouldn't say that makes CPUs age terribly.

After all, CPUs are improving at a much slower rate than graphics cards (although those seem to be greatly slowing down in raw performance uplifts themselves).

I think you could reasonable buy a 5700X3D now, pair it with something like an RTX 4060/Ti or 4070, and then turn around and pair it with an RTX 6070 or 7060 and it will be fine. Obviously it won't be as fast as doing that with CPUs two years from now, but that just means faster CPUs are faster. The RTX 5070 is likely going to be a marginal (sans DLSS) raw performance uplift over the RTX 4070, so unless the following x70 is a massive uplift, it might only be, what... around the RTX 4090 (maybe even weaker!?), and people had no qualms pairing that with the 5800X3D.

Also, most of the earlier Ryzen generations were all making nice jumps over one another, and the 5000 series in particular was a big uplift over the 3000 series (which saw its performance in games limited from CCDs being split into CCXs, and this was especially bad on the Ryzen 9s of that generation). The 7000 series was again a fair uplift, and then both of those generations got X3D CPUs. So yeah, the 7800X3D will be a lot faster than a 3950X, even at 4K. My 5800X3D was a pretty big uplift over my 3700X.

A lot of people don't chase the latest games and/or expect great performance out of them though. The opinions you see on tech communities and forums, Reddit, and so on? All of those perspectives (including mine, even as someone who really never has great hardware often) is going to skew more towards enthusiast compared to regular gamers. So what "we" say is often not the common reality. And ultimately, that's the beauty of the PC platform; it's so long in span that even older hardware has eons (in PC time) of games to choose from. And if you instead want something closer to the latest stuff, that's an option too.