After many years of using Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs, and in the wake of the weird hardware landscape caused by the pandemic, I decided it was time for a change. I took a gamble and went in the complete opposite direction of my past instincts, buying in to AMD’s flagship lineup in an era where they had both more available hardware and more apparent capital in the world of video games.
I was mostly wrong to make this choice — particularly on the video card side of the equation. I went with a Ryzen 7 5800 processor…not the “X” version that’s quite common on the open market, but an OEM part with marginally less overclocking functionality sold exclusively through Dell. For the GPU, I bought the just-launched Radeon 6800XT.
The CPU has aged okay. Recent updates to Windows 11 slightly improved its efficiency, and I totally dodged the weird nightmares Intel has had with their last couple of hardware releases, though I wouldn’t have run into this in a meaningful way considering their most problematic models weren’t yet out when I was buying. I’m not usually CPU-limited in most titles, and although shader compilation takes a little longer than I’d like in modern DX12 games, I’m still pretty pleased with its performance.
