Is my PC done? Should I move on?

[WlLL]

Hello everyone.

I am hoping someone can help me. I know my PC is a few years old but lately it has been really bogged down. I thought maybe a reformat, re-download of all drivers and cleaning the inside of my tower would help but it did not.

I cannot play any semi-current game very well at all. When I play CS:GO I barely get 50 FPS while a year ago I would get over 150 without having to put all settings on low. I do not know much about PC components but I am hoping if I list my current rig if anyone can tell me if my 50 FPS should be accurate or if there is anything I can do to help out my older PC.

List:

AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition 3.3 Ghz
Patriot Gaming 8 GB DDR3 (2)
Corsair Hydro H60 Liquid Cooler
Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1200W
Asus M5A97 EVO AMD 970 motherboard
MSI Radeon HD 6950 2GB TwinFrozr III

Any help would be appreciated. Outside of cleaning my PC I have not really performed any maintenance on it.

Thanks

Will

 

[Yamitime]

Do you have a lot of programs running from startup eating all your resources without realizing.? Hardware doesn't really slow down over time .Games get more hungry for power but if you were getting high fps before on the same game there's no reason it should change.

 

[Eximo]

Re-install Windows. Get a new GPU.

Phenom is getting a bit dated, but it is still a potent processor for now. You can consider upgrading the CPU, Motherboard, and RAM, but immediately a new GPU will have more impact.

 

[burdenbound]

Probably wouldn't be a bad idea to do a fresh OS install. If you have the funds it would be an ideal time to throw an SSD in.

 

[Dan_97]

You mentioned you hadn't maintained it other than cleaning, have you replaced the thermal paste on the CPU and Graphics Card ? That's pretty important if you've never done it. Your components could be overheating if that's the case. Make extra sure that your graphics card fan is spinning at a good rate, sometimes the fans break on radeon cards and will get stuck moving very slowly. On that note, replacing the fan usually only costs about 12 bucks. 50fps on counterstrike sounds pretty low for your setup even with how old it is, I would really give the thermal paste a try and check the fans.
If all else fails I would recommend buying a different gpu, for about 100 bucks you can get an rx 460 as a good upgrade.

 

[WlLL]

- My PC is pretty bare. I run Discord , Steam and Spotify at start and that's basically it.

- I have reinstalled Windows just about two weeks ago.

You mentioned you hadn't maintained it other than cleaning, have you replaced the thermal paste on the CPU and Graphics Card ? That's pretty important if you've never done it. Your components could be overheating if that's the case. Make extra sure that your graphics card fan is spinning at a good rate, sometimes the fans break on radeon cards and will get stuck moving very slowly. On that note, replacing the fan usually only costs about 12 bucks. 50fps on counterstrike sounds pretty low for your setup even with how old it is, I would really give the thermal paste a try and check the fans.
If all else fails I would recommend buying a different gpu, for about 100 bucks you can get an rx 460 as a good upgrade.

Thanks for your replay Dan!!

As far as replacing the thermal paste on both, I have not. I wouldn't even know where to start...although googling it would be rather simple I'm sure. You are 100% right about the fan breaking. I already replaced one recently and according to the speed they seem to be working fine. I even added a two new fans to the tower relatively recently.

How easy would upgrading the graphics card be on my setup? And does anyone know the max type of card I can put in my current setup without having to drop 2K on a brand new rig...

 

[Eximo]

With that power supply, any 3 or 4 GPUs of your choice. Anything that fits in a PCIe slot basically, which is all contemporary gaming GPUs. Only limit there is your budget.

RX480 would be a decent mid-range purchase. GTX1070 would probably be the limit of the CPU.

 

[Dan_97]

As far as replacing the thermal paste on both, I have not. I wouldn't even know where to start...although googling it would be rather simple I'm sure. You are 100% right about the fan breaking. I already replaced one recently and according to the speed they seem to be working fine. I even added a two new fans to the tower relatively recently.

How easy would upgrading the graphics card be on my setup? And does anyone know the max type of card I can put in my current setup without having to drop 2K on a brand new rig...

[/quotemsg]

There's no "Max card" per-say, it's just a question of when your cpu becomes a bottleneck for the graphics card. You can put any card in your rig but it wont perform to it's full potential with an older cpu (simplified). I would recommend staying somewhere mid-range or lower unless you decide to upgrade your cpu to an fx 8350 or fx 8370 (highest end am3+ cpu). My recommended card for it without upgrading any other parts would be the rx 460. If you decide to upgrade to an 8350/70 then an rx 480 would work quite well.
As far as putting on the thermal paste all you do is take the heatsink off and wipe the original thermal paste off with rubbing alcohol (91% preferable) and reapply the new stuff. Same goes for the graphics card, just a lot more screws involved (the gpu unit you apply it to looks like a diamond).

 

[WlLL]

Thank you so much for your reply. I will try that and see what happens. Huge help.