and 6 cores become entry level hardware
Well, its already entry level hardware :P
I agree and said before that i also find the 5800X to be the sweet spot at least in my eyes, but everyone's needs and circumstances are different and right now its not realistic to say 5600X is not justified for many people. we are enthusiasts, we can easily justify even the 5950X for gaming due to it hitting that 5.0ghz magical clock-speed for games, we justify 500$ over RTX 3080 for ~10% extra performance and an additional 2GB of VRAM. we should not expect everyone to be like that.
In addition, i have many reasons to believe 5600X will age well enough for what you are paying for, of course there will be a time when its no longer even entry level hardware and when 8 cores is the entry level and absolute minimum, but there are many things to consider playing in its favor being a great option even for a few years down the road:
- For now, there hasn't been a huge difference in gaming performance between Ryzen chips of the same generation. core counts isn't everything, looking at single core performance, 5600X and 5800X are close to each other. their boost clock is similar, 4.7ghz for 5600X on 1 or 2 cores for sustained time, and 4.8ghz for 5800X. we expected games to scale better with more cores but that didn't happen to the degree we expected, at least not yet. even looking at games that are known to scale well with more cores/threads like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, its performance on 5600X vastly outperform 12-core and 16-core Zen 2 CPUs. also, the gap between 16-core Zen 2 and 8-core Zen 2 didn't really grow over time, they remain in 10% of each other to this day.
- In best case scenario, if fully utilized, 5800X is ~30% more capable than 5600X which is big, but we know that games don't scale linearly like that at all. at 1080p, using RTX 3090, the most powerful GPU in the world, the difference between them never reach anywhere near this percentage no matter the game, so i would say its safe to conclude that even in the next few years combined with next generation RTX 4080/4080 Ti, the difference would still be small at 1440p using ultra settings and almost non existent at 4k.
- Even at 1080p, the 5600X performance is less than 3% different in general than Intel's top 8-core processors like the current flagship 11900k, are we saying all those CPUs would not be good for gaming in two years?
- Games releasing in this year, in the next year, and probably the following year as well are built on last generation hardware as a base, with their awful CPUs, i doubt CPU usage is gonna explode in this time frame.
- Intel is releasing hybrid CPUs this year for Desktop targeting Windows 11, their 16-core and 12-core flagships only use 8 performance cores and the rest are efficient cores, which means that the affordable option or mid range option for most people would be the 10 core chip and below, all of them are gonna be 6 performance cores and 4 efficient cores or maybe 2 efficient cores with an entry model later. game developers won't release games no one can play and enjoy with the hardware they have.
So, yeah, this is why it really depends on what you need from your computer, and your budget, if you can get 5800X its wonderful chip and the best 8-core processor right now, but if you can't or simply you don't see the value of spending 100-150$ (more in other countries as well), in addition to another 150$ for AIO, then i can't say 5600X isn't justified. its offers great value and great performance.
