3 ms·

Is it actually worth it to wait for Zen 3? I've been doing research and have conflicting information

dragontamer 6y ago
Given that Zen3 doesn't exist yet, there's no legitimate research you can do about Zen3 (unless you are an AMD insider and have their NDA'd numbers / specifications). Generally speaking, waiting to buy a computer is always better, because next year's tech is always better than this year's tech. So you only buy a computer when you need one. Is your current computer slow in ways that you find annoying? Slow enough that you want an upgrade? If so, buy a new computer (or if its only slow in one or two benchmarks... like I/O or Video games, buy a faster SSD or GPU instead). If not, then wait another year or two and ask yourself the question again. Big SV companies seem to be on a 5-year upgrade cadence. If you can't make the decision yourself, then just follow what they do and upgrade your equipment every 5 years.
cooljacob204 6y ago
There is a motherboard shortage at the moment for Zen 2 CPUs so I would personally wait until at least that clears up.
- goliatone 6y ago
  There’s a general shortage. I just built a workstation using a Ryzen 9 3900x and it was very hard to find a compatible, sanely priced, current design and with a good enough spec. I was doing research first and then trying to buy the motherboard but they would be out of stock. Had to change model 3 times before wising up and just going through available inventory and then research. Then the board wouldn’t POST :/ having a concrete issue to google for then surfaced tons of threads discussing the same or similar issues that hadn’t come up when I was doing research before buying. It took me a few days to finally be able to make it boot- it was probably an acculturation of small silly things like the board being picky about which cable/slot you plug in the monitor, removing and installing again RAM even tho it was seemingly well placed before, etc. BUT! I have now a nice beast running Pop_OS and I couldn’t be happier. I hadn’t had this feeling of noticing a performance gain in years of upgrading from MacBook to MacBook. I’m giggling of excitement just from thinking about working on that thing :)
  - redisman 6y ago
    What WiFi do you use with pop? I have a few USB ones I couldn’t get to work
    - goliatone 6y ago
      The motherboard has WiFi/Bluetooth built in. Didn’t have to install any drivers, all hardware was working once I was able to boot
jdietrich 6y ago
If you buy a B550 or X570 motherboard (or some B450 boards with limitations) you'll have an upgrade path to Zen 3.

Given that Zen3 doesn't exist yet, there's no legitimate research you can do about Zen3 (unless you are an AMD insider and have their NDA'd numbers / specifications). Generally speaking, waiting to buy a computer is always better, because next year's tech is always better than this year's tech. So you only buy a computer when you need one. Is your current computer slow in ways that you find annoying? Slow enough that you want an upgrade? If so, buy a new computer (or if its only slow in one or two benchmarks... like I/O or Video games, buy a faster SSD or GPU instead). If not, then wait another year or two and ask yourself the question again. Big SV companies seem to be on a 5-year upgrade cadence. If you can't make the decision yourself, then just follow what they do and upgrade your equipment every 5 years.

cooljacob204 6y ago

There is a motherboard shortage at the moment for Zen 2 CPUs so I would personally wait until at least that clears up.

goliatone 6y ago
There’s a general shortage. I just built a workstation using a Ryzen 9 3900x and it was very hard to find a compatible, sanely priced, current design and with a good enough spec. I was doing research first and then trying to buy the motherboard but they would be out of stock. Had to change model 3 times before wising up and just going through available inventory and then research. Then the board wouldn’t POST :/ having a concrete issue to google for then surfaced tons of threads discussing the same or similar issues that hadn’t come up when I was doing research before buying. It took me a few days to finally be able to make it boot- it was probably an acculturation of small silly things like the board being picky about which cable/slot you plug in the monitor, removing and installing again RAM even tho it was seemingly well placed before, etc. BUT! I have now a nice beast running Pop_OS and I couldn’t be happier. I hadn’t had this feeling of noticing a performance gain in years of upgrading from MacBook to MacBook. I’m giggling of excitement just from thinking about working on that thing :)
- redisman 6y ago
  What WiFi do you use with pop? I have a few USB ones I couldn’t get to work
  - goliatone 6y ago
    The motherboard has WiFi/Bluetooth built in. Didn’t have to install any drivers, all hardware was working once I was able to boot

jdietrich 6y ago

If you buy a B550 or X570 motherboard (or some B450 boards with limitations) you'll have an upgrade path to Zen 3.