Wait for <$100 5600 or jump on 3600 and B450 mobo for $130?

[WhiningKhan]

Related to the thread topic, this week I bought my son a 5600 for his birthday, replacing existing 3600x. The performance difference is noticeable while not dramatic of course, but there is a huge difference in cooler noise (using the boxed coolers). Didn't realize 5600 is 65W TDP vs 3600x's 95W, so that was a pleasant surprise.

 

[homerdog]

Related to the thread topic, this week I bought my son a 5600 for his birthday, replacing existing 3600x. The performance difference is noticeable while not dramatic of course, but there is a huge difference in cooler noise (using the boxed coolers). Didn't realize 5600 is 65W TDP vs 3600x's 95W, so that was a pleasant surprise.

My new computer is completely silent unless it's being stressed. I mean completely 100% inaudible. I have the side panel off because my case still hasn't come in and the InWin C589 I stuck it in has no intake fans. When I stress it I can hear the CPU fan but it isn't very loud and temps never reach 80C on any core. Looks like my concerns about needing a watercooler were unfounded.

 

[homerdog]

Performance is fantastic in all the games I've tried except Witcher 3 with raytracing. Gaming at 100+FPS with a high refresh display instantly altered my perspective on what is "good" performance. 60fps is looking like the minimum for me going forward

Unfortunately I noticed some super annoying artifacting in Battlefield 1 on the screen space reflections. From what I can tell this is a known issue for all AMD 6000 series cards, and it affects multiple games. The artifacting goes away in DX12 mode but BF1 stutters horribly in DX12 . The "fix" that is suggested online is to turn Post Processing to Medium

 

[homerdog]

Some notes about my new system.

• It is completely inaudible at idle and louder than my old computer under CPU load. I can't hear it with my headset on and it isn't an annoying pitch so I don't care about this.
• Temps are fine. Under sustained load a couple of the cores get to the low 80s, slightly higher than the rest of them. Maybe this could be improved with one of those aftermarket contact frames.
• The USB 2.0 ports are a little screwy. Most things like flash drives work fine with them but my Xbox 360 wireless controller dongle will not function when plugged into them. It lights up for a second and then goes off. Dunno if this is caused by the ports/wires in the case or the motherboard USB header. I suspect it's a motherboard issue, like it's not providing enough amps. Will try one of the other USB headers at some point. The USB3.0 ports work fine.
• Performance is very good. Gaming at 120+Hz is revolutionary. I wonder if I'd notice the difference between 144Hz and 240Hz.
• Modern games are very large. I will get another SSD.
• I've had a couple of AMD driver crashes while gaming with youtube or twitch playing on the 2nd monitor. This happens on my AMD laptop as well so I don't think it's a hardware problem.

 

[homerdog]

One more thing I've noticed; the computer does not wake from sleep when I press spacebar like most other computers. I have to press the power button. The placement of the power button makes this such a non issue that I don't care to troubleshoot it.

 

[homerdog]

My experience hasn't been nearly this bad, but I do have trepidation over doing important things that use the GPU on this computer. It has randomly shit the bed twice in the middle of Overwatch matches, dumping me to an AMD driver crash report window. Glad I don't play ranked. If I have a Youtube video playing on the second monitor, the video starts dropping frames like crazy and the audio skips. Turning off hardware acceleration in Chrome fixes this. Maybe this hasn't happened since I installed the new driver, I can't quite remember. These things never, and I mean never happened on my old computer. I've been playing Overwatch since it released (hundreds of hours on the game) and it has literally never crashed on my GTX970. Now with only a few hours gaming on the new system and it's crashed twice.

Googling and reading comments suggests that I am not alone with these problems, but it's really hard to tell if that's confirmation bias. I could probably find plenty of reports of NVIDIA instability if I looked for it. Surely if these kinds of issues were normal for AMD GPUs I would've heard more about it. Although I do see how reviewers could completely miss this if they don't actually game on AMD cards. From what I can tell they practically all use NVIDIA in their own rigs if they even play many games at all on their own time. It's not like they would have youtube playing on a second screen during a benchmark.

If this crap keeps happening I will swap in my GTX970 and see if that fixes it. Which sucks because the 6700XT is monumentally faster but TBH in Overwatch the 970 is fine. Even if I play youtube on the side