15/04/2026 11:55 pm
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Ive been building rigs since the GTX 970 days but the 5090 launch has me second guessing my usual logic. Usually at 4K you just dump all the money into the GPU and the CPU doesnt matter as much but honestly Im worried the 5090 is gonna be such a monster that even at 4K Ill hit a wall.
Im planning to head to Microcenter next month for a full refresh and Ive got about $4500 set aside for the whole thing. I was thinking 7800X3D because the cache is king for the modded Cyberpunk stuff I play but now the 9000 series is out and Intel has their new Ultra chips. Does it even matter at 4K anymore? My logic says X3D but these new chips are tempting...
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16/04/2026 12:20 am
Just catching up here... in my experience, you should look at the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X 3.8 GHz 8-Core Processor. It's plenty for 4K and won't bottleneck that 5090. Since youre doing modded Cyberpunk, definitely put some of that $4500 budget into G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB 64GB DDR5 6000MHz memory. Stable RAM makes a huge difference once you start piling on those heavy texture packs.
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16/04/2026 12:20 am
I've been very satisfied with the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 4.2 GHz 16-Core lately. Everyone defaults to the 8-core chips, but for a big $4500 budget, having the extra cores for background stuff works well. My journey with it has been great:
- Zero stuttering in modded Night City
- No complaints with multitasking Ngl, having that extra headroom just feels right for a 5090 build.
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15/04/2026 11:55 pm
Man, the RTX 5090 is gonna be absolutely insane! I totally get the 4K bottleneck concern because that card is basically a supercomputer. Honestly, if you are doing modded Cyberpunk, you gotta stick with the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 4.2 GHz 8-Core Processor. That 3D V-Cache is literally magic for those heavy open-world mods, nothing else touches it right now for smoothing out those frame dips. I know the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X 4.3 GHz 16-Core Processor looks shiny and new, but for pure gaming frame times, the X3D still wins out in my experience. Intel just launched the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K 3.7 GHz 24-Core Processor which is cool and runs way more efficient than before, but for a 4K beast, X3D is just the king. Definitely grab that bundle at Microcenter and put the savings into a faster drive! Its gonna be an amazing build!
