After a couple years of running the same CPU and motherboard in my main rig, I finally decided it was time to upgrade. I’d been pairing a Ryzen 5 1600 with my RTX 3060 Ti, and I was definitely noticing bottlenecking—especially in more CPU-heavy games—so I went out and grabbed a Ryzen 5 5600X and an MSI B550 board. In this video I walk through the swap, do some much-needed cable management (because the back of the case was getting a little ratty), and get everything installed with my EK AIO. The big takeaway is that the 5600X gives the 3060 Ti the headroom it needed to actually stretch its legs. Even though the 5600X isn’t “new,” prices settling back down around MSRP makes it a really solid mid-to-upper range option again. After the upgrade, CPU-intensive titles like Minecraft and Valorant saw a huge boost—Minecraft at 2K max settings jumped from around 150 FPS to around 400 FPS, which is wild. I also ran Heaven before and after: my score went from 4122 to 4722, average FPS jumped to 187, and max FPS hit 375—right around the ~15% bottleneck I was dealing with before. Overall, this combo feels super future-proof, and I’ve got a more cinematic build showcase of this rig coming soon.