I recently built two machines, one with a 5600x and the other with an 11700k. The rest of the parts otherwise are pretty similar between the two machines and honestly both are indistinguishable in performance without diving into benchmarks. That said I actually don’t really have any use case which fully utilizes either so I’d say unless you do have some specific use case that’s going to benefit from more cores/threads or single core performance or TDP or what have you, then just go with what’s cheapest near you and save yourself some money.
I will say though the integrated graphics on Intel chips is really nice and they win points there for me definitely.
I can’t say how shocked i am even with my lowly 3300x i am writing this from. The machine i built with some left over shitty non-amd QVL’d DDR4 (running at 2133 because i can’t be bothered dealing with popping out the CMOS battery due to no boot recovery, bios reset button or clear pin shortage procedure in the manual :D), my old Vega GPU and the cheapest gigabyte motherboard i could find (B550M S2H) in the cheapest cooler-master micro-ATX case i could find locally) to see how bad the lowest of the low end Zen2 is.
With 32 GB and m.2 for general purpose use it is actually fast. I’m stunned at just how good this box was considering my intent and lack of spend on it.
It’s significantly faster than my old Haswell Xeon E3-1231v3 (basically like an i7-4770) and runs some less threaded things significantly faster than my 2700X.
There’s zero doubt in my mind that even the lowest end Zen3 part you can buy will be a HUGE leap. Bulldozer wasn’t exactly fast compared to 4 core sandy bridge, and the new Zen parts are way, way ahead of that - especially Zen2/Zen3 based stuff.
Been checking store prices hare alot lately and i must say upgrade bundles (CPU-MOBO-RAM) has come down every month just a few euros and now i could get 5600x(cost around €289-329) asus mobo (around €150) and 16 gigs 3600 cl16 ram(around €80-140) for total of 499€. And i still think it’s way too much for 5600x system.
I might be too spoiled with damn nice second hand market back in the days before “the_varus” and those 2700-3700x bundles were around or under 400€ if i remember right.
I also think that a upgrade kit with 5600X for just €499,- is a pretty reasonable deal.
But he could also look at intel options of course.
Something like the i5-11600K which is slightly cheaper then the 5600X.
5600g apu offers most of the performance of a 5600x, but also included is the igpu. Which my guess would be nice for hw passthrough. As well as troubleshooting if a discrete gpu ever fails. Also 5700g is nice too. Both offering good performance all while costing less than a non apu variant.
