Socket Longevity Could Be Holding Us Back
For consumers, socket longevity is a doubled edged sword. On one hand, you can save a few bucks and keep using that same old motherboard for years on end if desired. On the other hand, doing so may not be the experience you were promised or what you thought it would be when you shelled out your hard earned money because of a promise. Losing features or not getting access to the full capabilities of the new processor isn’t a good thing either.
It can lead to massive disappointment to buy something in the hopes that you can use it for years only to find out, that to do just that, you have to start sacrificing features. That includes the UEFI GUI, as it does change your user experience. Some might call that a good thing but that’s a matter of opinion. RAID functionality with SATA drives is a given, but it isn’t with regards to NVMe. You typically had to spend a little more to get that feature on a mainstream motherboard. Thus, losing that capability might be something that’s totally unacceptable.
Were the promises worth it?
It then starts to beg the question: Were all these promises of socket longevity really worth it in the first place?
I think whether or not the problems that come with socket longevity are worth it comes down to personal preference. Some people don’t mind buying motherboards with new CPU’s to fully leverage whatever platform advances have been made or to take advantage of VRM improvements in the hopes of better overclocking. Others simply want to save money and add a bit more performance to their system over time and maintain the same basic configuration over a longer period.
It will be interesting to see how people react to this specific issue and how it may impact AMD’s socket strategy in the future. These issues may also not hit X570 going forward as AMD has positioned it as a more premium platform than X470 was. That still leaves X370 and X470 users in a potential bind if they happened to get a motherboard with a smaller EEPROM. A feature that almost no one cared to look at before now.
If you haven’t checked this out yet, check out our full AMD Ryzen 3900X CPU Review.