AMD Ryzen 5 5500 6-Core, 12-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor with Wraith Stealth Cooler

Had to upgrade my processor from a first gen Ryzen 1600 to meet the new Windows 11 requirements and found this processor was on sale. Thankfully AMD motherboards had a lot of built in futureproofing for multiple generations of processors. Popped it in and tested it and found much faster and smoother frame rates. Roughly a 30% increase in the three benchmarks I ran. Not just processor speeds increased but this allows the graphics card to bump up about 10% better performance as well. I have not checked the electrical load changes but I expect the same or less power usage with the upgrade as this Ryzen generation is using a higher quality lithography. For less than $80. this was a no brainer.

Upgraded Bios and then dropped into Biostar A320 MH Pro.Allowed board to run 8gb x2 dual channel ram at 3200mhz (not possible with 1300x.)Between Ram & CPU you can spend ~ $100.00 to upgrade an A320 board for many more years of use.Bought this for one office PC, Ryzen 5 5600 for another. Performance is 10% less with 5500.This is perfectly fast for Win11 Office PC's and a much better value than 5600 if you're not gaming.Hoping to add another 5-7 years to my 7 year old Biostar A320 MH Pro (which is considered one of the worst, but works perfectly for office PC)

This paired with a RX6650x gpu or nvidia equivalent is a great combo. Granted I only play World of Warships and for a while was hooked on fortnite, it's a budget build and the cpu is the best bang for the buck out there. Mine did come with a decent enough cpu cooler, with that in mind this cpu is roughly $50 If you watch comparison videos this cpu is usually within 30 fps of the 5800x3d. Anything over 90fps is a difference us non-pro gamers will ever see. If you do other things like working/converting videos as I do on my 5900x, this is not what you want. More cores is better when multi-tasking. Update: Just did a PBO undervolt from youtube instructions, great for 5000 series cpus, uses less power and a hair better performance.

I do a weekly show on YouTube, Twitch and Kick that I multi stream locally using Prism Live Studio. For a very long time I had been using an old i7-7700k with a GTX 1080 and 32 GB of ram. However, as the show evolved and started to use more and more effects and full motion backgrounds it struggled to do 1080p 30 FPS streaming. I started having encoding fails during the show and stuttering due to drop frames and encoding overload. I started wondering if it was my graphics card, but everyone on forums for streaming all said a GTX 1080 was more than enough for dedicated streaming.When I had a recent failure I looked at the CPU usage and it was pegged at 100%. I then accepted that fact that I had to upgrade the CPU which meant I also needed to upgrade the motherboard and memory. The last thing I wanted to do was spend a ton a money for this machine and started researching my options. In the last couple of years I made the switch from team blue to team red for my gaming and audio recording / video machines and had been extremely happy. (I have two gaming towers and a 3u rack mounted recording studio machine that I have all built custom.) I knew that the AM4 platform was cheaper these days due to the AM5 out now so I looked at Passmark CPU benchmarks to see what was out there. To my surprise, the best value/performance CPU listed in the #2 spot was the Ryzen 5 5500 for $83 on Amazon. After looking at all the specs and benchmarks, I thought this was a significant upgrade from the 7700k but at a really low price. So I figured what the heck and gave it a shot. I should also mention that I bought a MSI B550-A Pro and 64 GB of Corsair 3200 DDR4 memory. (Memory was overkill but it was cheap.)I am so extremely happy with my decision. Not only am I streaming now at 1080p 60FPS at 6000 kbps, but my CPU usage averages around 12% - 15% with occasional spikes to 20%. This thing is a work horse. I was also able to under volt and overclock the CPU to 5.65 GHZ with temps no higher than 64C at full load using a Cooler Master - Hyper 212 Halo. I'm just so blown away by what a value you get with the power this setup has. If you need a cost effective machine for tasks like this, then look no further. You won't be disappointed. I look forward to many years of streaming with this setup. That is until 4k become standard for live streaming. ; ). But we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

A great processor, especially for the price. The CPU cooler is a little big and almost didn't fit in the case due to the ram being right underneath it, but luckily the ram I had was low profile so it worked out.