Upgrading Quiet PC

[PompMag]

Hi.  I need some help!!!

 

I have an old (but upgraded through the years) PC that I am looking to upgrade the CPU of, and therefore all the other related required components too.  I have built PCs before, but that was many years ago and I am a bit out of things now so all help and suggestions are appreciated.

 

The current specs are:

Intel i5-3570K, on an Asus P8Z77 ATX motherboard with a beQuiet cooler (all obviously to be replaced)

32GB RAM (4x 8GB Crucial DDR3 1600, UDIMM240)

MSI GeForce GTX 1060 Gaming X, 6Gb

SoundBlaster Xi-Fi Xtreme Audio Card

beQuiet 680W modular PSU, 80+Gold, model BQT E9-CM-680W

Thermaltake Suppressor F51 no window case with 2 140mm case fans of unknown type (front and rear)

1 SATA 5.25" optical drive

1 SATA 2.5" SSD, OCZ Arc 100 120GB (used as boot drive)

3 SATA 3.5" HDDs used for game installations, and for file storage

Monitor:  Currently an old Samsung SyncMaster 1680x1500 panel, but looking to upgrade soon (separate budget) to something 1080p with a >100Hz refresh rate.  Also outputs to my 1080p TV.

 

The main uses of the PC are:

1) Playing games, both on this PC itself and using this PC as a Host for Steam Remote Play (with another lightweight PC on my home network as client (1080p 60Hz display)), games played are not AAA titles, mainly I play things like Cities Skylines, Anno 1800 or 1404, Europa Universalis 3 and 4, Crusader Kings 2, Two Point hospital, various Total War titles, plus a load of older games.  The real driver to upgrade is Cities Skylines which is painfully slow at present on the PC, and at best 5fps via Steam Remote Play.  

2) Watching movies, both streaming and locally stored, plus acting as a place to store video and music files that other devices connected to my home network can stream and/or download from it to play.

3) Generic internet use, word processing etc.

4) It needs to be very quiet as it is in the living room, and it should not really be noticed...

 

The bottleneck seems to be the CPU on games such as Cities Skylines which has it pinned to 100% full-time, hence looking for a CPU upgrade and thus everything that goes with that.

 

Budget is what it needs to be, anything from £200 to £500 or so (I am in the UK).

 

I am looking at the Ryzen 5 3600 as probably the new CPU, and building around that, but retaining and reusing as much of the current system as possible.

 

Questions:

On the basis of going for the R5 3600, with I'm thinking a Noctua NH-U12S CPU Cooler,

1) What motherboard?  I'm really confused here as the prices and the marketing claims seem so varied.  Ultimately I want a reliable motherboard that will run the PC quietly and have expansion capacity (the main point here being SATA slots, as I will already use 5 and I want to have the ability to add at least another couple of HDDs at some future point if needed), it also needs to support 2 USB 3.1 and 2 USB 2 front IO, and Gigabit wired ethernet (WiFi not necessary).  I don't care about flashy things for this machine like RGB (if anything I'd rather not have it) just the core performance.  I also don't really plan on overclocking (except perhaps a simple auto over-clock in the BIOS it it would do anything on a 3600 or even exist).

2) Sound.  I don't know what current sound on motherboards is like.  The Soundblaster card works just fine, so will likely just put that in, unless someone tells me that modern motherboard on-board sound is now better than that.

3) RAM. I'm guessing I will need to buy DDR 4 RAM, as I don't see many (any?) motherboards available that would accept the DDR3 I have, but this obviously is expensive given I will want 32GB so if there is a good decent board that will accept DDR3, that might be money worth saving?

4)  Boot drive.  My old OCZ SSD works fine, but it is small and even a when new a few years ago it wasn't exactly the fastest on the market.  Is it worth putting a new, larger SSD in (either SATA connector or M.2) to use as the boot drive and for game installs too?  Will this add much performance compared to spending that money elsewhere?

5) Case fans:  Will I be fine with the current 2 case fans, or do I need to put more in?  There is space in the case for extra fans, front, top, base and side.

6) From the spec list above, do I need to replace other things to make this work?

 

Finally, if anyone has any suggestions on a new monitor in the £200-£250 range with 1080p and >100Hz refresh rate that would be interesting but I am not looking at upgrading that until early next year,

 

Thanks in advance for all help and guidance received!