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So I've been falling down some rabbit holes trying to decide what kind of CPU I would like to upgrade my old Skylake i5-6500.

Would be nice to replace it with something that has the same 65W TDP, so I started looking at Ryzen CPUs.

CPU Benchmark has the Ryzen 5 5700X as the best value, but it's AM4 and it would be best to get something on a newer socket.

This brought me to the Ryzen 7 9700X which has a TDP of 65W, is an AM5 socket, and has 8 cores and 16 Threads.

The CPUMark score of the 9700X is 37126 vs the 6500's 5623 😅 It is an almost 10 year old CPU.

Now doing this will require replacing the motherboard, but the bundles MicroCenter has for a pretty good price are ATX Mobos and my current case only supports Micro ATX or smaller. Unbundling and replacing with a Micro ATX mobo raises the price 150 USD...

If I go with an ATX card, I need a new case, and then the Jonsbo N5 isn't looking so bad because even though it's 250 USD shipped, it has plenty of drive bays and room for a lot of shit.

MicroCenter has a massive case with 8 drive bays for 100 USD, but it's white and I don't think it would pass the husband test to replace the black Fractal case which he tolerates.