Time to upgrade PC

Rod-IT · 2020-04-01T12:42:59.000Z

What budget are we talking, what types of games do you wish to play…

mhunt · 2020-04-01T12:52:26.000Z

There area lot of factors at play here.

Personally this would be my checklist for you, in order

(CPU is ok)

SSD hard drive (If you don’t have one already)

Video Card (Don’t buy a video card that out performs your screen)

Memory (Going to 16 is a good idea)

Chances are a CPU upgrade might trigger a Motherboard upgrade, which means a memory upgrade.

mhunt · 2020-04-01T12:55:09.000Z

Oh, and you should definitely run the Decrapifier on this machine.

That will probably help with CPU and RAM load.

bryandoe · 2020-04-01T13:22:58.000Z

Unless you’re trying to play at maximum settings in 4k, I don’t think I’d worry about much. The CPU should be fine and extra memory for a system like that should be very cheap. Put a better video card in it and go, and an SSD if it doesn’t have one.

For what it’s worth, my i5-3550 with 16GB and a 1050Ti can play anything I have at maximum settings in 1080p.

lamocon · 2020-04-01T14:49:52.000Z

Sounds like you have a pretty good game plan. I took a look at the system requirements and it’s not a tough game to run. AMD RX580’s are pretty cheap right now (depending on your budget). I’d also do a fresh install on an SSD and call it a day. You won’t be shredding 2020 AAA titles on max settings at 4K, but you aren’t dumping 2 large on a new build either.

RedBeardedGriff · 2020-04-02T06:30:43.000Z

I’d keep the Intel i5-4670 since it still holds up today. However, I would suggest upgrading your graphics card (an RX 570, or RX 580, depending on your budget), and getting an SSD hard drive. Upgrading to 16GB of RAM is definitely worth it as well.

jakeskillings7912 · 2020-04-03T06:51:50.000Z

Thanks for the ideas guys, I do have an Samsung SSD which Win 10 is installed on which is a 120gb, are the RX580s better than the R9 280x then? Also the PSU I have is a 750W Gold Corsair…

RedBeardedGriff · 2020-04-03T07:23:06.000Z

jakeskillings94:

Thanks for the ideas guys, I do have an Samsung SSD which Win 10 is installed on which is a 120gb, are the RX580s better than the R9 280x then? Also the PSU I have is a 750W Gold Corsair…

The PSU is fine, and so is the SSD hard drive for the OS. The RX 580 is better than the R9 280x in terms of performance, and they’re not expensive either.

jakeskillings7912 · 2020-04-03T07:29:56.000Z

Yeah just had a look at the 580 and think I might get that just need to check whether I have 2 slots for another two 4GB RAM sticks or whether I just need to buy two 8GB sticks. I haven’t upgraded my PC since 2014…

Rod-IT · 2020-04-03T08:35:24.000Z

The 280 is listed as a legacy card, the 580 is much newer.

Here is a list of GPUs in order of best to worst in terms of speed, the higher up the chart the card, the more powerful it is and the more it costs.

Tom's Hardware – 27 Feb 24

The GPU benchmarks hierarchy 2024: All recent graphics cards ranked

We've run hundreds of GPU benchmarks on Nvidia, AMD, and Intel graphics cards and ranked them in our comprehensive hierarchy, with over 80 GPUs tested.

jakeskillings7912 · 2020-04-03T10:09:48.000Z

Thank you for that Rod. I am going to order the 580x and then get some more RAM. Checked my mother board and I have another 2 slots for RAM so going to get a pair of sticks to take me up to 16GB. All 4 ram sticks don’t have to be the same do they its just the pairs have to be the same?

Rod-IT · 2020-04-03T10:13:30.000Z

If you have PC3-1600 for example and buy PC3-1800 (examples only), the ram will only operate in dual channel at the slower speed, if your board supports triple or quad channel memory, getting the same spec will enable these options

jakeskillings7912 · 2020-04-03T10:47:44.000Z

The current RAM I have is DDR3 am I better off just buying 16GB DDR4? My motherboard is ASUS® Z87-A: ATX, USB3.0, SATA6GB/S, SLi, XFIRE…

Rod-IT · 2020-04-03T10:53:14.000Z

You can’t put DDR4 in a DDR3 motherboard, so no, buying that would be a waste of your money

Rod-IT · 2020-04-03T10:55:31.000Z

You’ve been in IT long enough now, you should know the differences in DDR1, DDR2, DDR3 and DDR4 etc.

Not to mention, there is always the manual.

ASUS Global

Driven by innovation & committed to quality, ASUS has a wide selection of best in class products. Find & buy a laptop, phone, router, monitor, motherboard & more

To get you started I posted this a while back

Different Types of RAM Hardware

I was looking at buying some RAM for a Dell PowerEdge 710 and was wondering what the differences between PC3-10600, PC3-10600R, PC3-10600H, and PC3L-10600R are… Assuming they’re all Registered ECC, would they all be compatible? I’ve tried searching to find the differences but Google doesn’t seem to like minor differences in strings.

jakeskillings7912 · 2020-04-03T10:57:36.000Z

I didn’t even check the motherboard should of done that first😂

jakeskillings7912 · 2020-04-07T10:03:33.000Z

Got my 580x all installed now. works well. just is there a way in the radeon software to change FPS the games run at does anyone know?

Rod-IT · 2020-04-07T10:05:19.000Z

What do you mean change the FPS - this is determined by the game, resolution, detail level you specify during the game.

mhunt · 2020-04-09T12:21:38.000Z

Another little system tweak you can use to speed up loading your games is to create exclusions in your Anti-Virus for the game folders or just your Steam folder for example.

brittany-for-scale · 2020-04-09T23:06:47.000Z

It might help to also throw all of your parts into PC Part Picker and make your own build, so you can see which parts would be compatible if you want to upgrade.