 In the late 90s and early 2000s, there was actually a pretty good chance that someone shopping for a PC was buying one for the first time. Maybe to check out that newfangled internet. These days though, not only does pretty much every household in the US already have a computer, but with the slow, iterative improvements that Intel has been making over the last five years, unless it's a pretty darn old one, it probably does everything they really need it to do, and an upgrade to the latest hardware would be unlikely to bring about a worthwhile increase in performance. But AMD's Ryzen promised to give people a reason to upgrade again, bringing more processing cores than ever before to lower price points than ever before. So now that the whole lineup is available, is it actually worth the upgrade? For you, we've got the answer. And you can watch the video for it, or you can just click the- 🎵 ShadeTree sunglasses are handmade from hardwood, feature polarized lenses, and come with soft and hard carrying cases. Use offer code LINUS to get five bucks off below. Performance aside, Ryzen's early bugs prevented us from issuing a full-on recommendation. But the good news today is that many of the issues present at Ryzen 7's launch have now been fixed. As long as you don't try using RAM faster than 3200 MHz, which we've tested to be the point of greatly diminishing returns anyway. And this is great because there are reasons to upgrade to a new system beyond raw CPU speed. Both mechanical and solid-state drives slow down over time. Maybe you've got a bad capacitor somewhere causing weird stability issues. Or maybe you just want more modern features like M.2 drive support and native USB 3.1 10 gigabit. The last of which is actually unique to AMD's platform at this time. Now our initial testing of each Ryzen product has consistently put AMD's offerings in the same general ballpark as the Blue Team's similarly priced modern counterparts. Typically trading off per thread performance for sometimes vastly superior multi-threaded performance. With background tasks like encoding and streaming gameplay simultaneously benefiting dramatically. You can see just how much in our stream quality investigation here. So AMD likes to think that all of this makes for a very compelling deal. But how does Ryzen stack up against your old battle station? We've grabbed four common CPUs off the shelf since the turn of the decade to answer this question once and for all. Now as we dive in with gaming and single threaded workloads, we can already see how the trade-off between per thread and multi-threading impacts Ryzen. It generally trails behind even Intel's older hardware and games, but beats even Intel's newest offerings in multi-threaded workloads. So if you're a gamer running an older Core i5 or Core i7 and you aren't a streamer, and you're not interested in any of the platform improvements, honestly, you might be better off investing in some more cool games to play or like a new wireless mouse or something. With that said, if you're in the never Intel camp and you're an AMD user who's been waiting and waiting for a compelling upgrade, go ahead, pull the trigger and feel good about it. Now let's look at the productivity and creative workloads. Wow! If your use case isn't purely gaming, it's pretty much a sure thing that you're going to realize some kind of noticeable performance benefit from an upgrade to Ryzen. As we observed in our launch reviews, even compared to Intel's latest and greatest in today's multitasking world, especially Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 are an absolute breath of fresh air. Ryzen delivers a strong value for multitaskers and content creators pretty much across the board. Now, we could have just left our comparison there, but it's pretty common practice as a system nears its best before date to try to squeeze a little more life out of it through overclocking. So we decided to take advantage of Ryzen's across the board overclocking support and run all the tests again against the older CPUs also overclocked. Overall, the story here is actually pretty similar to be honest. Intel's CPUs, even going back five years, are great for gaming and turning up the juice on them wasn't going to change that. With that said, for the folks with mixed workloads, you know, 3D animator by day, gamer by night, those guys will be really happy to see Ryzen continue to dominate the workloads that they need to make money and close the gap somewhat in games, pushing more of the system bottleneck onto the GPU. So it comes down then to what matters most to you. Intel is the undisputed gaming king and even folks with second or third gen core i5s and i7s wouldn't see enough performance benefit to justify an upgrade to Ryzen. And sadly, outside of some edge cases like high refresh rate 1080p gaming, that kind of applies to Intel's latest too. But if you're an AMD user or your work relies on multi-threading or heavy multitasking, then you'll find that Ryzen has a lot to offer and without unforgivable sacrifices in gaming, especially if you pair it with a B or X series motherboard and a decent cooler, so you can take advantage of XFR and overclocking to get the most out of it. So then as I mentioned before, you'll find some good better best combo recommendations for your shopping convenience linked below and enjoy your new CPU. In collaboration with JBL, Massdrop is bringing us the LSR30X based on the best 5-inch powered reference monitor in its price range. It's powered by two 41 watt class D amplifiers and the LSR30X delivers strong bass, smooth highs, and evenness throughout the frequency response. You can use the low and high frequency trim switches to fine tune the amount of bass and treble to compensate for the room you're in and it features XLR and TRS inputs so you can connect your speakers to many different sources. They come with rubber isolation feet and you can check it out now on Massdrop for only $279.99 and this purchase comes with quick two to three day shipping. So thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit the like button, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there, you'll find cool shirts like this one at our merch store and our community forum where you can talk shop with other tech enthusiasts.