Small Upgrade Reccomendations?

bing bong · August 30, 2021

Budget (including currency): see below

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Tarkov! DbD, League, etc

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):

Sup Y'all,

Would like some opinions on a little upgrade I'm doing. Looking into the Ryzen 5 5600x, but I'm not sure about some of the other components. As far as budget, I would just like components that will run well with the cpu, but aren't overboard. Specifically looking for a mtb, psu, m.2 drive that yall like. Really just struggling to understand what's overkill. Main goal is just to run tarkov smoothly. Also curious as to how much of an upgrade this cpu would be/if its worth it to begin with. Thanks for the help.

Current Rig: (Screenshot) https://gyazo.com/5fde86ec5aadf3dbb3e18575dfa0f16b

cpu - intel i5-6500

mtb - msi b150 pc mate

ram - 16 gb ddr4

gpu - Radeon Rx 480 4gb

psu - seasonic 550w psu

WD Blue 1tb HDD

Seasonic 240 gb SSD

Obese_Rice · August 30, 2021

Upgrade Your motherboard to a b550 chipset and get the 5600x. Your graphic card would be a good option to upgrade but they aren’t available right now so if you get a motherboard with a m.2 get a m.2 ssd.

KaTaLy5t-87 · August 30, 2021

The 5600X seems to be widely recommended in terms of price to performance. Yes, there are faster, more powerful CPUs but, the 5600X offers great performance at a decent price. If budget is not a worry sure, go bigger and better but I think you'd be pretty happy with the 5600X.

A B550 motherboard with features that you like will do the job, you won't need an X570 board, that's overkill. When looking for a board, either make sure you get one with the latest BIOS (needs to explicitly state this somewhere on the listing) or one that has a BIOS Flashback facility so you can update the BIOS without a CPU installed because not all B550s come out of the box ready for Zen3. Other than that, just look at what kind of I/O you need/want, how many fan headers, RGB headers you have on the board. To be honest, most boards around the same price point come with VERY similar features, there's only a couple of things that differentiate them.

I'm guessing by the age of your other existing components that your RAM is relatively slow (if not, keep it and reuse it). Ryzen really likes fast dual-channel RAM like 3200 or 3600. If you're tight on cash, keep your existing RAM even if it's on the slow side, you will lose performance but you can always upgrade later.

I would normally recommend a Western Digital SN550 M.2 but apparently WD have started cheaping out on some of the components on those drives. I think the SN750 is still good or a Samsung 970 (little bit on the expensive side). You don't really need a Gen4 SSD as nothing apart from heavy 4k video editing can use that kind of bandwidth.

A GPU upgrade would be worthwhile but, given the current climate you may be better off sticking with your exisiting one and picking a new one up if/when the current madness dies down. Just bear in mind that it may not end anytime soon so, if you really want a new GPU, you're gona have to deal with the inflated prices.

Also bear in mind that if you do upgrade your GPU to a 30-series or something similar, you may need to upgrade your PSU as well. I think your build with a 3060ti would be pushing close to 450W or so. That's not too close to your 550W rating but, if you get a couple of transient peaks, you might start hitting maximum load. Anything more power hungry than a 3060ti and you're definitely looking at a PSU upgrade.