Need Help On What To Upgrade!!!

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Jacob_Thren

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Aug 5, 2017
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Hey guys so I built a gaming pc about 2 years ago and now I think its time to upgrade. I game on it nearly every day and its definitely isnt running the newer games how it used to with older games. Older games are great but the newer games are just killing my pc barely hanging onto 30 fps on some games. I've been looking into upgrading for a long time now I just really dont know what to upgrade. I have a amd fx-6350 on a msi 970 motherboard with a radeon r9 280x and 16 gbs of ram, I have to run most games at the lowest graphic settings to get a decent game play out of it and the fps drops significantly when I use higher graphic setting on some games. If you guys can please help me out on what I need to upgrade that would be a terrific help!

If you have any suggestions on what specific hardware I should get please let me know because Im not very good when it comes to picking pc components, thank you!
 
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cryoburner
Is that in US dollars? $600 USD would be more than enough to work with for a decent CPU/MOBO/RAM upgrade.

Intel's new Coffee Lake CPUs would be worth considering, and a 6-core i5-8400 (~$200) or an overclockable i5-8600K (~$280) would likely perform well in games for years to come (The 8600K would also require a cooler, since it doesn't come with one). The price of Z370 motherboards to go with them start around $120, and 2x8GB of DDR4 2666 or higher currently starts around $150. You might even be able to sell your existing 16GB of DDR3 for close to $100 too, since RAM prices are rather high at the moment.

Just note that the Coffee Lake launch was rushed, so it's extremely hard to find these CPUs right now, and it could be weeks or...
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cryoburner

cryoburner

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Assuming you're at 1920x1080 resolution or below, the Radeon R9 280X should still be reasonably fine, with performance in a similar range as the 1050 Ti among current GPUs. You may need to lower settings somewhat to maintain good frame rates at 1080p in some games, but I think it should be capable of more than just "low settings".

The FX-6300 is likely holding performance back more than anything, and its gaming performance is well behind the current CPUs from AMD and Intel. Unfortunately, there aren't any CPU upgrades for AM3+ motherboards that would make a substantial difference. An FX-8350 might provide slightly better gaming performance, but not enough where it would be all that noticeable.

So, better performance might call for at least a CPU and motherboard upgrade. And since both AMD's Ryzen and Intel's Kaby Lake/Coffee Lake CPUs require DDR4 RAM, upgrading to either of those would require replacing your memory as well. And unfortunately, RAM prices are quite high right now, nearly double what they were a year ago.

Another option might be to go with a Skylake processor (such as an i5-6600, for example). Skylake officially supports DDR3L and DDR4, but some motherboards also support regular DDR3 as well, which might save you the cost of upgrading RAM while still offering much better gaming performance in CPU-limited games. You might also be able to find some Skylake hardware at lower prices on the used market now.
 
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Jacob_Thren

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Aug 5, 2017
17
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510


Thank you so much for the input, unfortunately on the games that I have troubles with fps I am already running on the lowest settings. I think that I am going to go for a new cpu, mobo, and ram. If it were yours which way would you go, right now I actually don't have much over $600 so im trying to keep it in that price range. If you could get back to me that'd be great!
 
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pellemans101

pellemans101

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Nov 5, 2017
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Good choice. If it was my choice I would go for Ryzen 3 or 5
 
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cryoburner

cryoburner

Judicious
Oct 8, 2011
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34,840
Is that in US dollars? $600 USD would be more than enough to work with for a decent CPU/MOBO/RAM upgrade.

Intel's new Coffee Lake CPUs would be worth considering, and a 6-core i5-8400 (~$200) or an overclockable i5-8600K (~$280) would likely perform well in games for years to come (The 8600K would also require a cooler, since it doesn't come with one). The price of Z370 motherboards to go with them start around $120, and 2x8GB of DDR4 2666 or higher currently starts around $150. You might even be able to sell your existing 16GB of DDR3 for close to $100 too, since RAM prices are rather high at the moment.

Just note that the Coffee Lake launch was rushed, so it's extremely hard to find these CPUs right now, and it could be weeks or possibly even months before they are readily available for purchase.

Another option would be AMD's Ryzen processors, where you could get an overclockable 6-core Ryzen 1600 for around $200, and at least a B350 motherboard to enable overclocking, which start around $65 to $70. Ryzen benefits more from faster RAM, but again, it's possible to find a 2x8GB kit of DDR4 3000-3200 for around $160. Ryzen might not be quite as fast in most games as the 6-core Intel Coffee Lake CPUs, but it should perform rather well, and the addition of SMT (hyperthreading) compared to the i5s can potentially offer better performance in heavily multithreaded software, even if that doesn't apply much to today's games. Also, a Ryzen 1600 build might cost around $50 less than an i5-8400 build due to having less-expensive motherboards available, which could be put toward an eventual graphics card upgrade in the future.

Quad-core processors are also an option if you are looking to save some additional money. Most of today's games still don't benefit much from having more than four cores, since that's what most people have, and what most developers currently design for. That could change over the coming years, but 4-core processors could still be considered a reasonable choice for a gaming build today.
 
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