[00:02] recent years, AMD has become a household name. But it wasn't always this way. Due to crippling financial constraints in the early 2010s, AMD could afford the R&D for new CPUs, but couldn't afford to develop new motherboard chipsets to go
[00:17] with them, which resulted in them rebranding and reusing their old chipsets. This resulted in compromises on features and some compatibility on features and some compatibility issues. But compared to Intel, AMD's
[00:29] approach also felt refreshingly proconsumer and earned them a small but very dedicated team red fan base that helped [music] to carry them through those darker days. eager to leverage that reputation to promote their do or
[00:43] that reputation to promote their do or die Zen family of chips. In 2017, AMD made a bold promise that if you bought into their new AM4 platform, they would support it for an unprecedented four generations of CPUs, making upgrades far
[00:59] more affordable for their customers. As for whether they delivered on four generations, it depends on how you measure. We technically got only three Zen architectures, but there were a couple of half steps along the way that
[01:13] performance games, [music] like Zen 3 with 3D Vcash, which remains competitive for high-end gaming still 4 years after its release. I would call AM4 a huge win for AMD. But there is something that I couldn't help noticing.
[01:29] While I can use my old motherboard from 2017 with this brand new AM4 chip today, AMD does have the money to R&D new chipsets these [music] days and has done
[01:42] so several times over the lifespan of this socket. So, am I going to be if I put this in an outdated motherboard? This is a particularly important question at this [music] moment because DDR5 prices are skyhigh.
[01:56] [music] platforms to save money. DDR4 platforms like AM4 where older boards are plentiful [music] and in many cases more affordable than brand new ones. So what we decided to do today is dust this old
[02:11] socket off, throw a shiny new CPU in it, and see how she fares. And we're also going to dust off this segue to our sponsor, Threat Locker. AI tools are with every new agent and productivity tool comes new vulnerabilities for your
[02:27] organization. Learn more about how Threat Locker can put you in control at Threat Locker can put you in control at the link down below.
[02:42] system. We chose the Ryzen 5800 X3D because to answer the question of how much does a CPU motherboard age gap matter, it was the greatest difference that we could find in release dates. Meanwhile, for our GPU, we could have
[02:56] gone top of the line, but we wanted to keep things a little bit more relatable. So, we figured a 4070 Ti felt like just the kind of card that somebody building a bang for the buck AM4 system might choose. 12 gigs of VRAM, full support
[03:10] choose. 12 gigs of VRAM, full support for DLSS 4.5 upscaling, and solid 1440p high refresh rate gaming performance. Wait, did I say test system? What I meant to say was test systems. Our second bench is using all the same
[03:25] hardware, exactly the same, except instead of an old crusty X370 [music] instead of an old crusty X370 [music] motherboard, it gets a shiny new X570 motherboard. We can start testing, right? M well not quite. See, our newer
[03:41] right? M well not quite. See, our newer chip did not actually work on our old motherboard out of the box, and neither will yours. Motherboard firmware cannot be written to support future CPUs that don't exist yet. So, it's very likely
[03:55] that your older board will need a firmware update. But unfortunately, this process might not be as simple as just grabbing the one with the most recent date stamp. There was a quirky period during the 300 [music] series where
[04:10] boards were built with just 16 megabytes of firmware storage space instead of 32 as was the [music] style at the time. Some board makers handled this limitation by stripping away the BIOS guey while others dropped support for
[04:26] older CPUs altogether when you upgraded to support a newer one. So, you actually had to choose [music] which CPU you wanted to be able to support at the time of flashing your firmware. The good news is that the effort was often worth it
[04:39] with new firmwares bringing new features that 10-year-old boards were never expected to have, like rebar, which improves gaming performance on modern improves gaming performance on modern GPUs, especially Intel Arc. There is one
[04:52] modernize though, and that is the physical copper on the board. We were not able to run at quite the same memory speeds on our older chipset no matter [snorts] how hard we tried. And when you consider how important RAM speed is to
[05:08] Zen CPU performance, that could end up costing us some FPS. With that out of the way, now we can fire them both up. Before we talk about games though, there are other features that rely on clean signaling and high
[05:23] that rely on clean signaling and high quality traces like PCIe storage. While our shiny new CPU can speak PCIe Gen 3s, this old board over here is only rated this old board over here is only rated for Gen 3. So, a modern drive will still
[05:36] work in that slower slot thanks to the forwards and backwards compatibility of PCI Express, but we're going to be limited to the speed of our weakest link, which is the motherboard. And okay,
[05:50] okay, that is a big difference, but not as big of a difference as you might care about. Let me explain. If we were to just look at the raw throughput, so these headline numbers at the very top, you would say,
[06:04] "Wow, the new system runs that drive twice as fast." But [music] in daily twice as fast." But [music] in daily use, unless you just copy large files back and forth for fun, you're never really going to use the drive like that.
[06:18] And these random results down here are far more important. And what these show is that in most cases, we're actually more limited by the quality of the nan flash, the condition of the nan flash, and the speed of the controller than we
[06:33] are limited by the speed of the link to the drive. Also, it's worth noting that there was this one result here where the old system actually outperformed. If I collection or something in the
[06:46] background. Either way, this is not a difference that you would notice in daily use. However, there is one other component of your system that is highly reliant on your PCIe link speed, which means [music] that this 470 Ti is
[07:00] getting literally double the bandwidth of this one over here. [snorts] Let's fire up Cyberpunk. To be clear, this is not a direct storage game, which is games that will [music] actually stream game assets off of the SSD. Uh so
[07:16] those [music] in particular do you know require a faster SSD but still you would think you know faster drive more faster load times right in practice though what you're going to see is that they're pretty much the same as expected. Oh
[07:31] look at that we managed to load in exactly the same spot. This is great. Oh this is a bigger performance difference than I expected. Way to go PCIe Gen 3.
[07:44] too, though. And yeah, we're only looking at about a 3 FPS difference. Oh, man. Not even that much [music] sometimes. Like like two sometimes. But no one likes to see their hardware not reaching its full potential. Let's uh
[07:59] movement. In terms of the perception though, be easy to to feel. Okay. Really running around. I can get it to dip a little bit
[08:15] lower and I can feel a little bit of stutter on the left system. That I would say is less down to PCIe bandwidth and more that my memory is going to be running a bit [music] faster. However, nope, I'm able to do the exact same
[08:28] just down to that this is a very demanding game and this is a demanding environment with array tracing up the butt and it's a [snorts] very mortal hardware 4070 Ti and a you know realistically few CPU. [music]
[08:42] So bottom line, that's a win for the newer motherboard, but teeny tiny small win. With this GPUbound scenario out of the way, then next I want to see how much of our 5800 X3D we're leaving on the table by moving to something more
[08:55] CPUbound. Wait, you told me we were doing CS2? This isn't the CS2 that I was hoping for. Then again, it also really wasn't the CS2 that I think anyone was hoping for.
[09:09] Skylines 2 a pretty rough [music] game make it a pretty good benchmark because it is extremely demanding on your CPU and can [music] basically use as many cores as you throw at it. And as we can see here, there doesn't really seem to
[09:24] see here, there doesn't really seem to be any kind of drawback This is ending up being a pretty feelgood video in a world where everyone's trying to sell you a new thing instead of supporting their stuff
[09:36] for longer. It's refreshing to see how close these are. You know what else feels good? Our Forever socks with their marina wool blend, cushioned soles, and copper treatment that helps cut down on awful
[09:48] odors. ltstore.com. Can I Can I play the other CS2 now? I feel like I feel like doesn't let you decide what map you want to be on anymore. So, I guess I could be just kind of approximate it. So, I'm getting about [music]
[10:03] 220 250 FPS average on this system. And then moving over here, you know what? Screw it. No, we're going to leave live maps and we're going to do practice cuz this is too different. So, FPS around Yeah,
[10:18] we're [music] we're we're bang on, boys. But that's actually the best possible outcome that we could have hoped for because what that tells us is that while a 200 mega transfer per difference in RAM or a PCIe Gen 4 versus PCIe Gen 3 is
[10:35] going to show up in benchmarks, it's not the kind of thing that you or I are going to feel in our daily use. And while there may be a reason to upgrade this motherboard at some point in the future with a, you know, RTX 60 series
[10:49] GPU or something like that, by the time those are available, if you wanted to go all PC of thesis, you could keep this CPU, pick up one of these boards secondhand, and then throw your brand new GPU on it to make sure that you're
[11:03] probably be getting a pretty good deal in the process. So, if at the end of the day there isn't much of a performance difference here, why did AMD even bother with new chipsets or for that matter updating to AM5 at all? Well, for good
[11:21] reason. See, it's a lot of work to port new CPUs to older platforms, and there's a ton of room for weird bugs and edge cases that need to be squashed. That's a big part of the reason that Intel doesn't do it. Most infamously with
[11:36] Coffee Lake, which was actually blocked from working on 200 series chipsets even though they used exactly the same socket and some enthusiasts [music] even showed that technically they could be used interoperably. So, by AMD
[11:51] [music] switching to a new platform, every once in a while they get a fresh slate to unlock new features, higher bandwidth IO, and in the case of AM5, a deliver real world performance gains, even if they're not really worth the
[12:06] extra cost at the moment. On the subject of AM5, by the way, so far AMD has done of AM5, by the way, so far AMD has done a similarly like stellar job of providing long-term support to that platform. So, I hope that we could do a
[12:19] similar exploration once it reaches end of life sometime after uh 2029. Now, it's time for a similar exploration of our sponsor, Threat Locker. With every efficiency gained from AI comes potentially risks to your organization.
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[13:28] today at the link in the video description. Also, check out their blog into place to help keep your team safe while adopting AI. That'll be linked this video, why not take another walk down memory lane and revisit the legend,
[13:45] down memory lane and revisit the legend, the goat, the 1080 Ti.