There are quite a few things you need to go over to justify a CPU upgrade. The architecture, the base clock frequency, the IPC, and perhaps most significantly, the economics. The consumer hardware industry has found itself in the middle of one of the worst inflation cycles in history, thanks to the ever-increasing demand from the AI sector, and that's why every upgrade is being rethought.

Despite this, I've found a sound justification for the next chip upgrade I have in mind for my second workstation, which's on the AM4 platform, and quite likely will remain on it until prices become reasonable again. I'm not thinking of a platform upgrade, and I'm not thinking of switching over to Intel either. If there's a logical upgrade to my old Ryzen 5 3600 that can elevate my productivity and gaming experience, it's the Ryzen 5 5700X3D. Here's why I think so.

The 3D V-Cache is the X-factor

I can't find an equivalent feature anywhere else

Credit: Brian Wong via Flickr

On the CPU side, a dedicated 3D V-cache is undeniably one of the best gaming upgrades you can get. Intel's competing chips on the LGA1200 platform like the i5-10400F and i5-11400F simply don't offer anything comparable to Team Red's proprietary technology. The 5700X3D packs 96MB of L3 cache thanks to its stacked-cache design, and the best you can get with Intel ranges from 16-32MB.

Perhaps that is why the 5700X3D is the second-best gaming chip on the entire AM4 platform, and astonishingly enough, it delivers performance within 10% of the flagship 5800X3D at a lower price point. This seems like an exceptional value proposition when I can get nearly flagship-tier performance without the exclusionary flagship price-tag, and the chip's availability on the secondary markets has the potential to fetch an even better deal.

A dedicated 3D V-cache is undeniably one of the best gaming upgrades you can get with your CPU.

I play simulation-heavy games a lot

Even first-gen X3D chips crush Microsoft Flight Simulator

You might find yourself wondering that, since gaming has become predominantly GPU bound, why not go for a non-X3D chip to save money to invest in a GPU upgrade? The answer to that question is fairly simple. The fact is, simulation-based games break that rule entirely. While most AAA titles will show minimal difference between a 5700X and a 5700X3D on the FPS counter, simulation games flip the equation.

Most of the games I have recorded 40+ hours of playtime on are simulation-based titles, like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and DCS World. A unique characteristic of these games is that you could be sitting with an RTX 5090 and still be limited by CPU performance. AI pathfinding, weather systems and traffic patterns are all dependent on the CPU, and no amount of GPU horsepower can salvage a cache-starved processor's bottlenecks.

When I'm sat with my Thrustmaster HOTAS flight stick and multi-monitor setup, you can tell that immersion means a great deal to me. As these titles are notoriously CPU-bound, they absolutely feast on the L3 cache. In this case, a jump from a Ryzen 5 3600 to an X3D chip is going to be transformational.

Simulation titles are limited by memory latency and CPU speed rather than GPU power, but other GPU-heavy games may not benefit as meaningfully from the 3D V-Cache.

Productivity gets better, too

The extra cores boost multitasking

As an added bonus, the two extra cores on the 5700X3D going from a 3600 can boost multitasking performance. While the 5700X3D shares the same 8-core, 16-thread configuration as the 5800X3D, that's still a 33% increase in core count over my current 6-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 3600. Combined with IPC and architectural improvements of Zen 3 over Zen 2, this will result in noticeably better performance in productivity.

My workload involves having dozens of browser tabs open (and I like to stream in the background), so it's obvious that I stand to benefit from having more cores and threads working to distribute the workload. While the processor won't compete with a modern Ryzen 9 or Intel i9 processor in multi-threaded rendering tasks, for most other applications, the difference will be sweet enough to justify the price.

The X3D chips on AM4 are brilliant, and it's hard to argue otherwise

The longevity of the AM4 platform continues to impress, and the fact that it provides and upgrade path to those on it almost a decade after release is respectable. Perhaps that's why it wasn't so surprising to hear AMD Ryzen chief David McAfee mention that Team Red might potentially bring back AM4 chips, which, nonetheless, is a remarkable vote of confidence that bolsters my intent to upgrade on the platform.

Beyond potential new stocks hitting the market, AM4's existing chips provide an extraordinary value proposition to me as a buyer through secondary markets. Motherboards, memory kits and other components on the platform are plentiful and friendly to the wallet, which makes upgrades sensible and economically viable. Since the chips on the platform are still so capable, it makes sense to even pair them with current-generation GPUs like Blackwell and RDNA 4 without expecting significant bottlenecks to performance. If you're invested in AM4 like I am, chips like the 5700X3D and 5800X3D prove that there's plenty of value left in the ecosystem that's worthy of your dollars.