Possible upgrade viability

RocketLizard · August 6, 2020

Hello everyone, i'm new in this community, i have to ask for help (sorry for bad english in advance).

1st, the situation i'm in. I have a 6 y/o pc a friend built me. Relevant specs: core i5 4440, ssd for the OS + HDD for everything else, RX580 (i had to swap in after the GPU i had before died), and 8gb of ddr3 ram.

The problems i'm facing now i think you can guess: unbearable loading times on recent game and insufficient ram for gaming+chrome running at the same time.

The idea i had before was to completely rebuild and building around ryzen5 (the plan was never very detailed). Thing is, doing so would cost me multiple hundreds of bucks, a sum i can't forgive miself for spending right now only to game.

But today i had this new idea:

getting a second high capacity ssd (now they cost a lot less then when this pc was built) and getting some extra ddr3 ram. The way i see it i would solve both the problems i have right now, all while spending under 150moneys.

Is there a catch? I can manage assembling google searching to solve issues, but i'm lost when it comes for compatibility for the builds.

Please someone enlighten me

Thank you all in advance!

Edit: to add because i think it's relevant: the ram i have is 2x4 and i have 2 free slots

kelvinhall05 · August 6, 2020

Yeah that would work, as long as you are sure that it's your RAM and SSD are insufficient. Otherwise there isn't really a point.

RocketLizard · August 6, 2020

3 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Yeah that would work, as long as you are sure that it's your RAM and SSD are insufficient. Otherwise there isn't really a point.

As i added in the edit, the ram i have is 2x4gb and i have 2 free slots. do i have to fill both slots or not? are all ddr3 ram sticks ok for what i want to do or not?

dfsgsfa · August 6, 2020

10 minutes ago, RocketLizard said:

now i think you can guess: unbearable loading times on recent game and insufficient ram for gaming+chrome

1 dont run chrome and game at same time

2 get a good ssd eg crucial mx500

Avocheeseado · August 6, 2020

Getting another set of (2x4) ddr3 ram at the same speeds at the one you have. That will definitly benefit you. An ssd like the Crucial MX500 is great and would speed up your loading times significantly.

If you do ever feel like you want to build a whole new system, AMD and Nvidia are both releaseing new hardware in the next couple of months.

Chris Pratt · August 6, 2020

If you can swing it, you'd be better off getting two new sticks of higher capacity. That would allow all the RAM to run dual channel, so the added capacity would actually run at full speed. That's normally not that big of a deal, but since you're trying to get every last ounce of performance out of this rig, it's going to make a difference.