Is it worth upgrading my CPU?

[Tony Rushin 0]

Good morning all,

I am a huge Flight Sim fan and have been an aviation enthusiast for over 50 years. I learned to fly for real in the early 2000's but had to stop just before I did my final navigation and practical tests as the money ran out.

In retrospect, it was probably for the best as it is an extremely expensive hobby...anyway, let me get to the point! 

A couple of years or ago I bought a PC purely so that I could run MSFS2020 and also discovered VR shortly after. The PC I purchased has been adequate but I couldn't really get the framerates or the visual definition I was craving in VR with an Oculus Quest 2 (smooth as silk on a monitor). Having read through a post on this forum, I was able to tweak my settings to a much more acceptable level.

This week, I have upgraded my GPU from a Radeon 6700 to a Radeon 6800XT and I'm seeing a big improvement with both FPS and also the scenery quality, so now I'm really happy.

My motherboard will support a Ryzen 7 5800X34D (current CPU is a Ryzen 5 5600). The 5800X3D is the top spec AM4 CPU my motherboard will accept and I really don't want to go down the route of changing the motherboard as well. I've already spent more than I should have on the new GPU and power supply. The question I have is, if I were to go that little bit further and upgrade to the 5800X3D, will I see a further improvement using Flight Sim in VR, or would it not be worth the £300.00 + additional outlay?

I have no way of changing the VR headset either because I have an extremely limited budget, so I am hoping someone will have some experience or knowledge they could share. I'm willing to upgrade the CPU if it's worth doing.

Current system is

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core Processor                3.70 GHz

AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

Windows 11

32 GB RAM

Oculus Quest 2

 

Would really appreciate any help or advice. Thanks in advance.

[Biggles2010 333]

6 minutes ago, Tony Rushin said:

The question I have is, if I were to go that little bit further and upgrade to the 5800X3D, will I see a further improvement using Flight Sim in VR, or would it not be worth the £300.00 + additional outlay?

Based on earlier postings about the Ryzen 5800X3D I think you should see a significant and cost effective improvement. The extra cache seems to be particularly helpful in MSFS.  Again from other postings, it's apparent VR is very demanding and even those with the latest and greatest systems are still sometimes looking for more. But that has always been the case with flight simulation.

[Tony Rushin 0]

Thank you so much for replying and clearing this up for me. That is exactly what I needed to know.

[Reset XPDR 74]

I've recently been discussing such an upgrade for VR which I did for myself over at the MSFS forum here and here.

In short, if it is an across the board FPS improvement in VR you are looking for then you will be somewhat disappointed as VR tends to be GPU bound. Nonetheless, I experienced a significant smoothness improvement and for that alone I think it was worth it.

[deeknow 6]

Hey Tony. I would say go for it. I'm about to do the same thing on my AM4 motherboard but Im going from a 3600 so will see more of an improvement. Am not using VR tho so can't comment on that but all the benchmarking and reviews I've seen show it's a decent boost and the price for the 5800X3D is reasonable. This is pretty much our last shot at an update without swapping m/b also so might as well huh?

[Tony Rushin 0]

That's exactly my thinking as well. May as well get it as good as possible with my current motherboard. I'm not really much of a gamer, but I got the PC purely to run FS202 and it was the best I could afford at the time. I have seen a really nice improvement going from the 6700 XT GPU up to the RX6800 XT. There was apparently no point going for a higher spec GPU (was toying with the new RX7900XTX) as the CPU would just cause bottlenecking, so ultimately a waste of money. If the 5800X3D works as well as it's reported to with the RX6800 XT, I'm thinking I may as well go for it and be happy with it being as good as I can get it.

[Eracer1111 3]

I have a 5800X with base clock set to 4400Mhz.

I'm contemplating replacing it with a 5800X3D (base clock 3700MHz, not designed for base multiplier OC.)  I understand that it's the L3 cache that makes the X3D better for MSFS.  And also that both CPU's have a boost curve.  The X boosts to 4700MHz, while X3D is 4500Mhz.  I'm betting that the cache will outweigh the loss of clock speed.  I doubt I'll see much improvement in fps, but I have heard that users (especially those with VR) report a smoother experience, most likely due to the cache improving main thread latency.

I plan to buy the 5800X3D and look at my temps, possibly undervolting if they get too high in order to keep the max boost where it should be.  My 5800X almost never gets above 60°C (closed loop on a 240mm rad) so I doubt I'll have a temp issue with the X3D.

 

[Eracer1111 3]

I upgraded to the 5800X3D from the 5800X.  I recommend that anyone on the fence about upgrading from a lesser AM4 CPU (even the quite capable 5800X) do so before the X3D version becomes unobtanium.

I saw a 30% increase in overall frame rate, and a very tangible improvement in frame time.  Yellow spikes in Dev Mode FPS Display are pretty much non-existent now.  CPU temps are about the same, maxing out while flying around 62°C.

I haven't played with undervolting yet.