Yeah, the framerate drops were practically the main drawback of the FX generation.
I can live with 40-60FPS instead of 60-80FPS, with the extra cheap FX prices, but stuttering is really irritating in some games, when it becomes visible.
Stuttering is caused when the CPU can't keep up with the amount of framse coming from the GPU.
One way to go around this is to limit the GPU framerate to 60-75FPS in the Radeon/Nvidia Graphics settings.
Another is to game at 1440P, instead of 1080P, in order to push both the CPU and GPU evenly.
Well yes, I've been wanting to upgrade for a while and will be doing so maybe later this year during the holidays to a Ryzen 5 2600 or i5 8400 not sure yet.
Get the R5 2600. They have the same single-thread performance, but at multithread R5 is better. And you can also clock it.
The thing is that most old games are heavily single-thread bottlenecked, because of how their engines were coded, and a lot of them are simply now well optimised. Using only 1-2 cores, and FX was not very good with single core performance. That's why everyone strived to clock it to the max and pair it with a powerful GPU like HD 7970 4GB - R9 390X 8GB to compensate.
Another thing is a lot of people still used Win XP (really single-thread dependant) until around 2015 and there was a night and day difference between it and Win 7 in terms of multithread performance at OS level.
But generally, WOW was really one of the worst optimised games, even at the time of its release. I tore through Half Life 2 (also released in 2004) at medium settings with my puny 2 core Athlon II X2 245 at 2.9GHz and Radeon HD 5450 700MHz 512MB, at 1024x768 resolution.
In a case with good airflow - Phanteks Enthoo Pro M/Fractal Design Meshify C/Cooler Master N400, good thermal paste - Gelid Solutions GC-Extreme/Phanteks PH-NDC/Thermalright Chill Factor 3/Arctic MX4, good case fans - Noctua/Phanteks/Arctic, good motherboard - Asus Sabertooth R2.0/Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 R5 and a good PSU - SeaSonic Prime Ultra Gold/EVGA SuperNOVA G1+/Corsair RMx 2018 you will never have to worry about anything.
The problem is that most people paired FX CPUs with weak coolers like Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo/Noctua NH-U12S and used cases with bad airflow - no enough fans, no front mesh for easy air intake, so the temps were worse than optimal.
You need to put an extra 1-2 intake fans and manually set the fan speed of the GPU.
ASRock Phantom Gaming X has slightly smaller fans - 85mm, than the standard 90-100mm, so it gets slightly hotter at lower RPMs and noisier at higher RPMs.
FX CPUs have great thermal conductivity, so they are easy to cool, as long as you have a decent cooler - Thermalright Le Grand Macho RT/ Cryorig R1 Ultimate/Noctua NH-D15/Phanteks PH-TC14PE/Noctua NH-D15S/Noctua NH-U14S/Thermalright Macho Rev.B/Noctua NH-C14S (bottom fan, blowing upwards).
Also, OP should switch the CPU fan position to exhaust, not intake, to optimise airflow.
The Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB Silver variant is awesome! If the previous owner used it with a good PSU and within normal temps (below 70-75°C) - it should serve you for a long time.
The only problem is that the Seasonic 520-620W M12II Evo versions were really lower end and use older and worse tech then the great 750-850W M12II Evo versions. For this config you need a modern 650-750W Gold PSU.
Why is the CPU only clocked to 3.842GHz? Couldn't you reach 3.95-4GHz?
At what speed are the GPUs clocked? At HWBOT the GPUs are listed as 1900MHz Core/1150MHZ Memory. At 3dmark the GPUs are listed as 1630MHz Core/1070MHz Memory.
Great tech you got there! If the R9 290 was 8GB then all the newest games would be good to go at QHD with mid-high settings @ 60FPS. But even now it's still good due to driver optimisations.
Here is a good example of voltage tweaking. The article is about R7 2700X, but generally 4.0GHz should be doable on R5 2600 at around 1.2-1.25V with mid-level LLC:
Asus ROG Strix RX Vega 64 - Sorry for above post, it actually turns out it has good performance and cooling, but you might have to change termal paste in case of bad temps. Asus's stock GPU termal paste is really bad, Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut is much better
