re: What would you upgrade on this PC?

thats the one

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thats the one

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Alright, now we’re cooking with gas. Last major question from me:

How long are you looking for this upgrade to last you? On the one hand, I don’t like seeing people waste money if it limits, or pushes back, future upgrades. On the other, I don’t want them to be disappointed because their expectations are out of whack on a “budget” upgrade.

So, how long until you’re willing to do a full system upgrade, including motherboard, likely psu, cpu, ram, whole thing? One year? Two? Five?

If you are doing a full-scale upgrade in 2 years, its not even worth touching your PC right now.

If you're trying to upgrade, see if you can find a nice used 30-series, or 40-series card for under $500, if you really have an itch for upgrading.

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2 years is a safe bet.

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Ok, then this would be my suggestion based on a two year desired life, with an explanation underneath:

PCPartPicker Part List: LINK

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 3.7 GHz 6-Core Processor ($148.00 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Gigabyte B450M DS3H WIFI Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard ($84.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory ($52.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory ($85.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: SK Hynix Platinum P41 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ($156.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $528.96
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-05-16 11:30 EDT-0400

First, ignore total price. It includes your motherboard for the purpose of ensuring compatibility, and includes two options for RAM. Second, ignore the price on the 5600x, as I would suggest you look into Benny’s offer on his 5600x. Just make sure either you have or he includes the cooler.

Now, with all of that said…

I like the 5600x for your usage case, and it’s about the best your board can handle. I would be tempted to suggest a 5800x3D in a vacuum, but that’s a lot of voltage for that board, and it would require you to purchase a serious cooler, as they run quite hot.

If you had a one year time table, I wouldn’t worry about RAM. But at two years, I think it’s worth the $60 or so to get a really solid upgrade there. And considering your other components, I don’t believe upgrading to 32GB is really worth it. Very, very few games are asking for more than 16GB in 2023. Hogwarts Legacy is the only one I can think of. But I included a 32GB kit if you want to spend another $35 to be safe. Remember that you can’t bring your RAM forward to your next build.

Now, the storage, as that’s going to raise the most eyebrows. No, your board can’t handle PCIe Gen 4, which this drive is. However, it will run just fine in Gen 3 mode and would be a massive upgrade over your SSD, primarily in your day to day usage. And at Gen 4 with 2TB, it’s a drive that you’ll be able to carry forward to your future build and use for damned near the next decade. Gen 5 drives are currently not worth the squeeze in price, heat, and performance, unless you routinely transfer massive files from one drive to the other. Random read/write simply isn’t markedly better than a great Gen 4 drive, which this is, and that’s all gaming cares about. And further, you can keep your SSD as a slower storage drive in this build and any future.

These three components would give you a huge immediate boost both in general computing and gaming, would cost a total of about $300 assuming Benny gives you a decent price, and the most expensive component, the storage, can and should be brought forward to your next build.

He certainly can, but for about $150 or so that CPU and RAM upgrade would not only lift his FPS, but more importantly, significantly lift his 1% lows. Anything that fixes stuttering is a high priority for me. Plus, he seems to be itching for an upgrade. As someone who has been there, I’m pretty sure “don’t upgrade anything” isn’t going to find fertile ground

And like I said, I kinda look at the NVME in a different basket, because it can seamlessly be carried forward to the next build. With price improvements, he would probably only be out about $50 compared to purchasing a substantially similar drive in a year or two, and he would have gotten a year or two of significantly upgraded use out of it in the interim.

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Josh gives great advice and he doesn't have a dog fetish like LSUCoyote.

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I lol’d.

Where is LSUCoyote at these days? Haven’t seen him on here in a while

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If you go with the 5600x from the poster in this thread, make sure you check your bios version in your B450 board to see that the 5600x is supported in that version

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If he confirms this is the route he’s going, I was actually going to go into a bit more depth. Some of those low end boards only have enough space on the EEPROM to fit a few different chipsets, so if you flash it to become compatible with the 5000 series, some will lose compatibility with the 1000 series because it doesn’t have enough memory to fit both.

My suggestion is as follows:
1. Go on your motherboard’s support page and download the latest bios version however they say to do it BUT DO NOT FLASH THE BIOS YET.
2. Acquire new CPU.
3. Flash BIOS immediately before installing the new CPU
4. Install new CPU

Or go and confirm that the BIOS can fit both, but if you’re wrong, your computer is a brick until the new CPU comes in

Today I found myself trying to remember why we “overreacted” so much about his motherboard being so shitty when it’s a perfectly fine lower-middle tier board. Then I went back to the OP and realized we went from spec’ing an A320M system to a B450M system. The devil is in the details

You want this 5600x? Say $80 shipped?

Gonna try and sell it elsewhere if not