Despite chasing the newest, shiniest PC components as a starry-eyed teenager, I’ve mellowed out a lot over the years. Compared to their predecessors from the pre-2015 era, modern PC components don't get completely obsolete as soon as a new generation hits the shelves, especially since the performance enhancements in recent hardware have been rather minimal.

Couple that with the RAM shortage afflicting PC hardware prices, and you can see why I no longer chase performance numbers anymore. In fact, I’ve been using a Ryzen 5 5600X since late 2021, and while it is far from powerful in 2026, I doubt I’ll be upgrading the AM5 systems anytime soon.

My Ryzen 5 5600X can still handle most games at respectable frame rates

It may not be perfect for e-sports titles, but it can handle my favorite games like a champ

Before you call me out for using a processor that’s over 6 years old, let me add that I’m fully aware that my Ryzen 5 5600X is already outdated. Heck, it was already a mid-range processor back when it first debuted, and the fact that I can’t hook it up to an AM5 socket means faster DDR5 RAM speeds are out of my reach. That said, I don’t have too many complaints about this CPU’s performance.

I spend the majority of my time in single-player and co-op titles, where sky-high frame rates (pretty much anything in the 100+ FPS range) aren't all that important. If anything, my RTX 3080 Ti becomes more of a performance bottleneck than my Ryzen 5 5600X at high resolutions. Yes, the 1% lows aren't the best on CPU-intensive titles (like Cyberpunk 2077 and late-game areas of Baldur's Gate 3), but as long as I’m willing to turn down the crowd density and physics settings a bit, I can run these games at high frame rates consistently. 1440p is currently the sweet spot for my gaming PC, but the RTX 3080 Ti + 5600X combo can still handle many titles at 4K once I start delving into the DLSS territory. I also emulate a bunch of console titles on this PC, and it’s still reliable enough to run something as recent as PS4 games without massive frame drops.

The only situations where my CPU falls short are when I try to enable too many vehicles in BeamNG.drive or go wild with my modding experiments. And by that, I mean hundreds of wacky (and often unsupported) mods on Minecraft, Lethal Company, Assetto Corsa, Arma 3, and good ol’ Skyrim, not just a few QoL tweaks or community-created packages, either. For coding and 3D modellng, this aged processor can easily pull its own weight, and it’s not bad for video editing by any means. And the best part? I still have a decent upgrade path for my aged computing companion.

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is a viable upgrade for my AM4 setup

That way, I won’t have to spend a fortune on DDR5 memory modules

If you’re even remotely active in the PC hardware ecosystem, you’ve probably heard the news that AMD is bringing back the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. For folks like myself who are still stuck on the AM4 socket, that’s probably one of the best pieces of news we’ve heard in a while.

With the DDR5 memory prices going haywire, I can’t justify buying a new processor and an AM5 motherboard when a new RAM stick alone would cost hundreds of bucks – and that’s just for an 8GB/16GB module. If I wanted the same 32 GB RAM experience I get on my current build, I’d have to shell out the same amount of money as a budget GPU.

Fortunately, I still have the option to nab a new Ryzen 7 5800X3D instead of going broke by buying a next-gen CPU. Between its 8-core/16-thread design, faster 4.5GHz boost clock, and (most importantly) 3D V-Cache stacking vertical L3 cache memory onto the processor, it’s a pretty impressive CPU for something that relies on the aged AM4 socket. Although I’m satisfied with my Ryzen 5 5600X daily driver, I might just grab the Ryzen 7 5800X3D if it gets massively discounted later down the line.

But I wouldn’t retire my Ryzen 5 5600X when I upgrade to the 5800X3D eventually

One Proxmox installation is all I need to resurrect this old machine as a powerful workstation

Even if I did end up buying the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, I don’t plan to sell my Ryzen 5 5600X or let it gather dust on a shelf, as it’d make for a killer home server. Contrary to what most spec-crunching PC enthusiasts think, home lab nodes don’t require a lot of firepower, and I say that as someone who still uses a decade-old Ryzen 5 1600 system to self-host LXCs and VMs for tinkering experiments.

Heck, I even armed my Ryzen 5 5600X PC with Proxmox (on a spare SSD, not my primary boot drive) and passed the RTX 3080 Ti to a Windows 11 virtual machine as part of an experiment nearly two years ago. Despite the extra overhead of the virtualization platform, this project worked exceedingly well as a remote gaming VM – to the point where I would’ve ditched my current setup if not for the fact that certain co-op titles with kernel-level anti-cheats don’t run well in virtualized environments.

Likewise, I’ve temporarily used this system as the guinea pig for some Proxmox and XCP-ng projects, and it didn’t let me down. In fact, I’ve already got plans to turn my old gaming buddy into a PVE server that can host dev VMs alongside bulky LLMs inside containers if I end up upgrading to a new PC.