What should I do to upgrade my pc

[dandaman1687]

Budget (including currency): 200$

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: FORZA HORIZON 5, COD vanguard, Battlefeild2042 

Other details 

Existing parts:

core I5 9400f

corsair iCUE H115 dual 280mm

Radeon red devil RX570

MSI mpg Z-390 gaming plus

GEIL super LUICE 2x8GB

WD blue 4TB

EVGA 500W1

 

I don't know what I should do to upgrade my pc, it ran fine and loaded all the games I wanted just fine but when I started playing the new releases of late 2021 and soon to be 2022 everything took a dive, loading times stayed the same but graphics quality just dropped, I could run high graphics quality on FH4 but on FH5 for me to not drop frames like crazy I have to put it on medium with really low render distance. I know I should use and M.2 SSD for storage but I like the large storage. I would really like some help deciding/figuring out if I should get two of the same RX570 and run crossfire or try and sell this card and buy a newer card, or if I should upgrade my CPU considering it an I5 but I can overclock it a little and get good performance out of it. I watched some guided before writing this post but none of them really answered my questions you I wanted to ask real people

[Dedayog]

You're between the minimum and recommended specs for Forza Horizons 5.  Don't expect good performance.

 

With your budget, a GPU is out.  I would either sell the 9400f and get a 9900K or just get a 2TB SSD for your games.

 

The 9900K should help fps a little, but your 570 isn't aging well.  The SSD will make things snappier, help with low frames due to loading textures much faster.

 

Or save up for a bigger upgrade.

[Dutch_Master]

The best/cheapest upgrade is to install an SSD for the OS. Keep the HDD for storage, that's fine. You can get a decent SATA SSD for 50 bucks or even less, and as you'd only install Win-OS on it, size doesn't really matter, 64GB or more will do nicely.

[Dedayog]

6 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

The best/cheapest upgrade is to install an SSD for the OS. Keep the HDD for storage, that's fine. You can get a decent SATA SSD for 50 bucks or even less, and as you'd only install Win-OS on it, size doesn't really matter, 64GB or more will do nicely.

That helps Windows and apps, but he's asking about games.  This won't help that at all unless you recommend he installs Forza on it, which you specifically say not to.

[Dutch_Master]

3 minutes ago, Dedayog said:

That helps Windows and apps, but he's asking about games.  This won't help that at all unless you recommend he installs Forza on it, which you specifically say not to.

True, but with a larger SSD (1TB and up) he could reserve space as cache for the HDD. In which case the game files will reside (and be accessed from) the fast SSD cache instead of the HDD.

[dandaman1687]

47 minutes ago, Dutch_Master said:

True, but with a larger SSD (1TB and up) he could reserve space as cache for the HDD. In which case the game files will reside (and be accessed from) the fast SSD cache instead of the HDD.

couple questions

1. for this purpose should it be an M.2 SSD that fits directly into the motherboard or should it be a regular SSD

2. how hard would it be to format said SSD to setup a cache to store games/regularly accessed files

3. what brand SSD should I get Samsung, Crucial, WD blue, HP

[Dutch_Master]

1. SATA SSD's will give you a noticeable improvement, but if your mainboard already has an NVMe slot it'd be silly not to use it. You can get 1TB NVMe drives for about 100-110 USD.

 

2. On Linux, use the bcache tool. On Win-OS, no idea as I don't use it.

 

3. Any A-brand drive will do. PCIE 3 speeds are cheapest and PCIE 4 makes only sense if your mainboard supports PCIE 4. Which I doubt very strongly, as Intel 9th gen doesn't support PCIE 4.

 

For PCIE 3 drives, expect a 6-8 times increase in read speeds over your HDD, maybe even more. In absolute numbers, a decent HDD will have read speeds of 170-220 MB/s, whereas a PCIE 3 drive will range from 1500-3500MB/s, depending on brand, series and memory config. PCIE 4 roughly doubles that, but cost more. Again, your mainboard most likely won't support PCIE 4. For comparison, a SATA SSD is limited to 550MB/s due to the limits of the SATA protocol, which was never meant for Flash-based storage anyway.