I am currently on Ryzen 5900X. I decided to skip first gen AM5 and wait for second AM5 gen ryzen… which should be Ryzen 9000 based on Zen5 coming hopefully soon… I read some rumors that it will be announced in April.
I hope situation with DDR5 will be a little bit more stable, would like to have 128 GB…
What’s your situation?
I have a 7900X now. Might want to upgrade depending on the details and assuming it will be possible to swap the new chips into existing X670 boards.
Reminder when maxing out memory that 2 DIMMs per channel will often significantly limit your max speed. Might want to look at 2 x 48 GB DIMMs instead.
Zen5 server chips will surely come out first due to maximum profits in this market, desktop chips arrives later. 3nm node is extremely expensive in production, looks like zen5 will be 4nm and only zen5c will get 3nm. I suppose 10% IPC in this scenario, you barely see difference in real world applications.
If you are currently on am4 than it i could indeed be a smart idea,
to sit it out for a bit.
My 1950X TR / TITAN XP PC is still a contender. I have no regrets in uplifting to a 5975WX PRO, but if I was stuck with no budget, I’d still be using that machine as my daily driver. Handles everything from VM’s to VR.
I’m still at Intel 6th gen (i7-6700K) in my WS/main PC and X299 in my server platform.
I wanted to update to recent-ish AMD because I like the CPUs, but I’m still putting it off, because I hate the motherboard offerings. And I can’t really justify the cost of TR/EPYC.
Zen 5 is drop in compatible, that was guaranteed. The only question was if Zen 6 would be or not… which may come down to whether or not it adopts PCIE 6.0
Friend of mine upgraded from a mid-range Ivy Bridge processor to an 7800X3D. But he surprised me and bought a Corsair 64GB kit… I warned him to test stability before doing a clean OS install. His 7800X3D can’t even run 64GB stable @ 5600. Corsair sent him a replacement kit, well it can’t run that one stable at the rated 5600MT/s either.
What I’m getting at is while Zen 5 should have a much more capable memory controller, slapping 96GB on it will probably be just as hit & miss as 64GB on Zen 4 has turned out to be.
I definitely need 128 GB of stable RAM. Doesn’t need to be ultra high speed, but I need the capacity. That is what I have with my current 5900X and I can easily fill it up…
The memory situation with Ryzens 9000 is a bit disappointing…
5600x right now. 9800x or 9800x3d looks like what I’d be looking to upgrade to. Hoping that the new breed of AM5 mainboards improves the ECC support situation (looking at you, Asrock).
Is that 4x16gb or 2x32?
I have 2x48 running at 6200, completely stable for 3 months now. The kit is rated for 6400 though.
He was running 2x32GB 5600 on a 7800X3D. Both kits were Samsung die, neither were stable on EXPO. It took a few voltage tweaks but I helped him get it running stable for him. MSI’s latest UEFI update actually increased his VSOC voltage from 1.20 to 1.30v, I also had him bring that back down to 1.25v. I thought we were done with motherboard brands overvolting the VSOC rail but I guess not. 
It was published that Zen 5’s sweet spot will be DDR5-6400. It’s confirmed there’s been changes to the IMCs in the IO die, so this should likely improve support for 64GB+ configurations too.
If your buddy is still interested in getting the current 7800X3D to work, 2 x 32 GB Kingston DDR5-5600 ECC UDIMMs work fine with a 7800X3D at DDR5-5600 with 1.1 V (JEDEC standard).
These modules use SK Hynix 16 Gbit A-Die and are dual-ranked.
I specifically chose these modules since as “boring” ECC memory they have to work at their rated frequency with 1.1 V and my subjective gut feeling told me that Kingston likely uses a good bin of chips for these modules since DDR5-5600 for ECC UDIMM is rather new, couldn’t find similar modules from Micron or Samsung.
Haven’t tried overclocking them with up to 1.35 V etc. but they should perform well.
Overclocking with ECC memory isn’t as moronic as it sounds since before the system completely crashes under load many memory errors are corrected and you get notified in tools like HWiNFO that there is something up with the memory.
The rumor says zen 5 will use the same io-die as zen 4. If that’s true, I won’t expect there will be major differences on memory support.
However, 32Gb chips are on the horizon. You will be able to buy 2x64GB kit soon. There should be no issue to run it at 6400 to 6800 range.
It’s been reported in a few places, https://www.techspot.com/news/101772-amd-set-bring-heat-zen-5-ryzen-9000.html
Same 6nm I/O die just with some reworkings to the IMCs, and 6400 sounds about right for a typical gen-on-gen improvement.
I’m also running a 5900x and am doing the same thing as you by waiting it out. May end up repurposing it to a home server if I don’t find an epyc or something to play around with.
I still have all the old hardware for when I built an 1800x and will probably do a server with that for the meantime. I did learn my lesson on waiting out the first generation of a new platform. It’s memory controller sucks and can’t get stable 3200MT/s.
I’m wondering if I should get a Zen4 threadripper (low-spec pro) and then upgrade to a monster Zen5… I’m thinking whether it makes sense, and what memory speeds I should look into.
I too am waiting. 3700x am4 with rx 5700xt. I guess I could upgrade my am4 chip for more life. Not sure which way to go. I don’t game so most work is just compiling and occasionally playing with an llm or trying out some image recognition. When I get really boree, I keep going back to a script that someday could beat my wife at Dr. Mario. But really I have a 4u case with i9 10850k that that I could move my work too. It bounces between being a truenas box or an unraid box. Seems I’m not a fan of either solution.
My biggest complaint with the system is that I have two different sized monitors, and scaling in Linux seems dreadful. So maybe I should fix that part. I never realized 4k at 28" was a bad idea with Linux. Oops.
At the moment its interesting looking at ITX & mATX builds using those 96GB memory kits. By the time Ryzen 9000 launches the environment of tech may change and its likely AMD could pull an AM5+ board shift to support different PCIe lane usage to adapt to consumer needs… think of the possibility of having 3-4 NVMe SSD M.2 slots on more mainstream boards as SATA ports are removed & wifi/BT is optional.
This trend is nauseous. I’d rather have 4 pcie slots than 4 m.2 slots.