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Comment by brutus1213 | Hacker News Reader

I bought the R10 late last year (before the new Ryzen chips were in stock) so ended up getting the AMD Ryzen 3700x. I was quite confused why Dell was even offering the single channel RAM option.

The actual hardware Dell uses is a bit annoying. It seems even the GPU I got was a Dell specific version. The motherboard is also their custom chipset. I am fine with what I have but it is perplexing that Dell positions Alienware to be upgradable and makes it pretty difficult to do so (e.g. I made the mistake of not getting the system watercooled .. the steps required seem out of my hardware skill level). I'd also be keen to swap the Ryzen 3700 for the newer series chip .. but have no clue whether that is possible on that motherboard. Also, can I say AMDs numbering makes no sense to me personally.

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> The motherboard is also their custom chipset

It's a custom motherboard but not a custom chipset. The chipset comes from AMD.

> I'd also be keen to swap the Ryzen 3700 for the newer series chip .. but have no clue whether that is possible on that motherboard

If the chipset is A520, B550 or X570, you have Ryzen 5000 / Zen 3 support, though it probably requires a BIOS update. You might also have Zen 3 support on B450, B550A, X470 [0]. Check the BIOS release notes for your machine.

> I made the mistake of not getting the system watercooled

Most water cooled systems only water cool the CPU, which in your case (a 65W TDP CPU) is absurd. Good air coolers match the performance of twice as expensive AIOs [1] and have far less potential for breakage.

> Also, can I say AMDs numbering makes no sense to me personally.

The first digit is the generation. 1000 series -> Zen 1 architecture, 2000 series -> Zen+, 3000 series -> Zen 2, 5000 series -> zen 3. The higher the number after that, the better the CPU is within the generation (more cores/cache, higher frequency).

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15807/amd-to-support-zen-3-an...

[1] https://youtu.be/23vjWtUpItk?t=482

> The first digit is the generation. 1000 series -> Zen 1 architecture, 2000 series -> Zen+, 3000 series -> Zen 2, 5000 series -> zen 3. The higher the number after that, the better the CPU is within the generation (more cores/cache, higher frequency).

Except in APU territory, where nothing makes sense and cpus with the same first digit will be of different zen generations.

Didn't they skip 4000 to fix exactly this?

4000 exists, but there are only mobile chips in that line.

Half of the mobile 5000 APUs are Zen 2 and half are Zen 3. The Zen 2 chips may or may not be the same as the 4000 series chips with a new code name (it seems likely, but isn't totally clear yet). So far it seems like desktop 5000 series APUs will all be Zen 3, but there's still plenty of time for AMD to make model numbers more confusing before those become available.

The 4650G I got from aliexpress last year is pretty nice though; wish I could have bought it domestically.

Some of the 5000 series are Zen 2. Be careful, and look it up.

3700 is being marketed as 3'rd generation Ryzen. https://www.newegg.ca/amd-ryzen-7-3700x/p/N82E16819113567

So that means zen 2 = 3'rd gen, and zen 3 = 4'th gen??

Yes, 2nd gen = Zen+ [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_(microarchitecture)#Second...

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