The force is strong in AMD

If I remember correctly, I impose a moratorium on myself with regards to gaming PC upgrades. Last year, I upgraded my PC by getting a new case to fit a new motherboard and CPU. That CPU is the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X. It is a beastly 8-core, 16-thread CPU. I love it to death. I used the stock Ryzen Prism Wraith RGB cooler that, while it works well mostly, I wasn’t able to get my PC stable on long periods of intense workloads. For some reason I have thermal runaway, in which the CPU fan was unable to keep the CPU cool enough, resulting in a high chance of system crash. But when it comes to gaming, its perfectly stable. Gaming do not cause the CPU to have sustained 100% workloads all the time, so temperature remain cool.

AMD is going to release their new Zen 3 CPU, and their top-of-the-line cpu goes to 16-core, 32-threads for the mainstream market. That is insane! Through I do not need that much processing power, but AMD as well for some reason, is tempting me to upgrade once again. And the temptation is compounded by the fact that I have been toying with the idea of upgrade to a AIO cooler for the new CPU (if I chose the said upgrade path)

That would mean potentially forking out more than $500 for the CPU and AIO cooler. And I haven’t even factor in a new motherboard. While it is not required, I am sceptical as to whether the current generation of CPU, the X470s, is truly capable of handling a 16-core 32-thread cpu. It just might considering that it will be based on the 7nm architecture, which promises efficiency gains, requiring less power to run a more powerful chip.

I don’t know. I need to curb this temptation somehow. I have told myself time and time again, not to upgrade till at least 2020 and beyond, perhaps when the AM4 socket becomes obsolete, and AMD no longer supports using it for their future chips, coupled with PCI-e gen 5 becoming mainstream. Only then I will seriously re-examine my upgrade path.

Also, don’t forget, future GPUs. The current GPU are just too expensive right now. So expensive, I have no desire to upgrade to the current generation of Nvidia’s GPU, the ’20’ series.

I think I’m going to do a wipe down on my gaming PC. Remove all the fine dust that has been accumulating inside. That would at least make it look and feel like a new PC again, and hopefully help in curbing the temptation. The announcement is this coming Monday. I wonder what surprises awaits the gaming community when the new chips are officially announced.