Help deciding what to upgrade first

Waltistic · June 2, 2020

Budget (including currency): A little over 500 USD

Country: Mexico

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Mostly League of Legends, CSGO, Valorant, Overwatch. Other AAA titles will be played (The Witcher, Cyberpunk, Borderlands 3, etc) but not the main focus of the rig

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):

I currently have an FX 6300, 16 gigs of RAM and an R7 360. I bought a 144hz monitor and can't get the most out of it since I can't consistently have 144+ fps. I don't earn a lot of money and since the gpu takes up almost half of the budget for the full new rig (since I don't have to buy a PSU or a new HDD) I was thinking of keeping the old GPU with the new CPU, but I was wondering if it'll be better to buy the new GPU and keep the FX until I can afford the rest of the rig.

TL;DR Is it better to buy the GPU first (RTX 2060 Super/RTX 2070) or to buy the new CPU and necessary components (Ryzen 5 3600, motherboard, ram)?

GDRRiley · June 2, 2020

new CPU first. most games you are playing should do very well on a 3100 or 3300x

your GPU should have enough power for those E sports games

mariushm · June 2, 2020

You shouldn't stress so much about not getting 144 fps.

Anything above 100-120 fps should be fine, above 120fps it's diminishing returns, less noticeable.

Video card upgrade would be much more noticeable, the CPU you have now will limit a new video card by a small amount but otherwise can still keep up in the games you're interested in.

Also, new AM4 motherboards are about to be released (B550 chipset) so prices are kinda bad these days, this adds up to lack of stocks from covid to raise the prices higher than normal.

Wait until the prices settle, a few weeks after B550 is launched, to revisit buying cpu, mobo, ram

In the meantime, research prices for selling your old components on eBay or local places, separately or as a kit (cpu,mobo,ram) - you may be able to sell them and put the difference to buy new stuff same day.

So I'd say get the video card now, but look at what's the best in your budget. There's also the 5xxx cards from AMD which offer ver good performance for the money.