Advice for potential upgrade to gaming PC; new among the community.

[MCazzi]

Hey all, my buddies just helped me build my first PC. I made the mistake of not checking the parts list they made first, so I may have a few issues. It runs great, most games I play (i.e. League of Legends, Counter-Strike) run great at max settings. But if I put this much money into a build I want to be able to run as much as possible. For comparison, I am running Battlefield 1 at less than 50 fps at all settings (even low) when playing multiplayer, but the campaign runs decent with settings on high. Here is my build, I would like ideas for potential upgrading, and if upgrading certain parts will make me have to reinstall windows. Thank you for the help, I apologize for my lack of technical terms

CPU: Intel Pentium G4400 3.3GHz Dual-Core Processor
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H110M-A Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory
Storage: Kingston SSDNow UV400 240GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
Video Card: Gigabyte Radeon R9 380X 4GB WINDFORCE 2X Video Card
Case: DIYPC Solo-T1-BK ATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply: EVGA 400W ATX Power Supply

 

[Ambular]

Suggestions:

1. Bump up the G4400 to an i3-6100 (or an i5-6400, if you can swing it.) This will not require swapping out the motherboard, and hopefully it won't make you reactivate Windows.

2. Replace the R9 380X with a GTX 1060. This would probably not be a MASSIVE, SCREAMING upgrade, but it would boost performance and also lower the system's power requirements, which would be a good idea, since the R9's specifications call for a 500 watt PSU and you've only got a 400 watt. I ran the numbers through a couple of different PSU calculators and you should be okay with that, but it makes me a bit leery.

A GTX 1070 would be a better upgrade performance-wise, but they're also significantly more expensive and power-hungry than the 1060.

Have you got an exact model number for the PSU? The only 400 watt EVGA model I could find on PCPP looks...not horrible? But 400 watts may be cutting it closer than I'd be comfortable with in your shoes.

 

[MCazzi]

Thank you for your reply! I appreciate it a ton the model number for the PSU is 100-N1-0400-L.

 

[Ambular]

Thank you for your reply! I appreciate it a ton the model number for the PSU is 100-N1-0400-L.

Yeah, that's the one I was looking at. It's probably okay (Jonny Guru said in his review that it's pretty much the bottom-of-the-barrel unit that EVGA offers, but his tests still weren't able to kill it) but if you see a good deal on a higher wattage, higher-quality PSU you might want to consider it, especially if you plan to add a more powerful video card in the future. Something like this maybe:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151119

If you'd rather leave that for later, the tiered PSU list is getting kind of out of date, but it and its associated comments are a good starting place to look for a good PSU whenever you get to it.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2547993/psu-tier-list.html