5600X3D or 5800XT, which is better for gaming?

Going to be upgrading my CPU and I am not sure which CPU to get. The 5600X3D and the 5800XT (5800XT is $20 higher in price at Microcenter if that matters) are in my budget. I play mostly Forza Horizon 6, Fortnite, and Diablo 4 and a few others. I am currently using a 3400G which is way too slow to play anything at 1440p.

My main PC died so I am going to have to upgrade this older one. I have a RTX5060lp for video card and 16gb of DDR4 PC3200. I updated the Bios on the motherboard to run Windows 11 and for it to be compatible with the newer CPUs (Asus Prime B450M-A II). I will also be getting a better CPU Cooler as the current one is the stock AMD cooler.

the x3d beats a normal 5800x in gaming. so if thats all you want it for...

5600X3D. Single threaded performance still trumps multithreaded performance as long as you have at least 4 cores.

Definitely the 5600X3D. It will be a bit of a shame having less than 8 cores, but really there are still very few games that actually use 8 cores, and 6 cores is still 2 more than your 3400G has.

Also I'm curious, you said that your main PC died. How so? Is it not fixable? Is there anything you can salvage from it? Maybe sell some of the components and use the bit of extra money to get a 5800X3D instead, now that they are back in production.

GotNoRice said:

Definitely the 5600X3D. It will be a bit of a shame having less than 8 cores, but really there are still very few games that actually use 8 cores, and 6 cores is still 2 more than your 3400G has.

Also I'm curious, you said that your main PC died. How so? Is it not fixable? Is there anything you can salvage from it? Maybe sell some of the components and use the bit of extra money to get a 5800X3D instead, now that they are back in production.

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My computer was a Minisforum BD895i SE, basically a laptop CPU soldered onto a Mini-ITX motherboard. When one goes both are dead. About 6 months ago I had a Minisforum 795S7 die on me, I RMA'd it and got a refund and used the money to buy the motherboard/cpu and used the Ram, Video Card and SSD from it to get going again. I have been building computers sense the 1990s and these two are the only ones I have ever had a major failure like this. I have been wanting to go to a traditional MB/CPU ever sense the 795S7 died anyway. The CPU was pretty damn fast in the 2 Minisforum PCs, 16 cores, 32 threads, 5.4ghz, even for a laptop CPU. I definitely was not CPU Bottlenecked. I am going to sell the Sodimm ram from the PC and transfer the SSD and video card over to the old PC along with the new CPU it should at least get me gaming again. I am on disability and money is tight, I have been lucky over the years to manage such an expensive hobby, the Minisforum PCs have been unreliable for me and I'm ready to go back to traditional systems.

5600X3D it is then, thanks for your opinions!

GotNoRice said:

Also I'm curious, you said that your main PC died. How so? Is it not fixable? Is there anything you can salvage from it? Maybe sell some of the components and use the bit of extra money to get a 5800X3D instead, now that they are back in production.

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I have found a workaround and got my main computer up and running. It was an easy but not so obvious fix for me. All I had to do was disable Secure Boot in the Bios. The problem I was having was that out of nowhere my computer would only boot into the Bios with no error messages. It would not boot from the NVME or USB drives. Don't know why this problem would pop up out of nowhere.

I am almost disappointed as I was going to go to Microcenter tomorrow to buy the new CPU for the older computer. Now I have no good excuse to go, it's about a 40-minute drive one way so going for a casual stroll around the store is not really an option.