The last time that I assembled a PC on my own was probably more than 20 years ago. Those were the days where the AMD K6-2 reign supreme. In any case, keeping up with PC hardware was a pain therefore I didn’t get a new gaming rig until last year. At the start of the pandemic, I gotten a PC built after managing to score a GTX 1070 at a very low price. This was back in July 2020 and being a budget build, the rig was powered by a AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and an Aorus B550M motherboard.

The 3300X represents a value-for-money CPU for any budget gaming rig and it served me well. Those of you who have been watching my livestreams on Facebook would know that the 3300X and GTX 1070 combo have taken everything I’ve thrown at it, from Fallout 4 to Halo to The Ascent. But I always knew that the 3300X was a stop gap and was just bidding my time for an opportunity to upgrade. And that upgrade came in the form of the new 5000 series AMD Ryzen 7 5800X. Wait. What?

Now when the 5000-series came out in November 2020 at USD 449, the 8 core, 16 thread 5800X sat in an unenviable spot between the top-of-the-line 5900X (USD 549, 12 cores, 24 threads) and the over-achieving 5600X (USD 299, 6 cores, 12 threads). Most reviewers noted the jump in price between the 5800X and the 5600X and would rather much recommend the 5600X to address mainstream gaming needs.

So what happened? Why did I get the 5800X while the 5600X would have been an adequate, wallet friendly upgrade? Well, Amazon did a number on the 5800X last week for Black Friday, and I ended up getting the 5800X at USD 340. Yup. Nice. And guess what, the price is still up there on Amazon so if you want to get a really powerful AMD processor at a bargain, you cannot go wrong with the 5800X (click here).

Having not built anything PC related in the past 20 years, I have to admit that I approached last night’s “brain transplant” session with trepidation. There was the matter of the 5800X not coming with a stock cooler and it has a reputation of running hot. Hence I went to get one of those humongous air coolers, the be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4. My rig’s case is the Cooler Master Masterbox Q300L, so not only did I have to remove my old processor and cooler, but to have more operating space, I had to remove the GTX 1070, my network card and move aside my Thermaltake power supply unit.

Installing the CPU was a walk in the park compared to installing the new cooler. I spent a fair bit of time to get the middle fan installed within the cooler block. Fortunately the process went well and now I’m a proud owner of an upgraded rig.

Current specs:

  • AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (8 cores, 16 threads, 3.8 GHz base clock, up to 4.7 GHz turbo) – click here to get.
  • ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 8 GB
  • 32 GB Corsair Vengeance LPX (2 X 8 GB) DDR4 3200 – click here to get.
  • 1 TB NVME + 1 TB SSD