Minecraft upgrade

[Hadus]

Budget (including currency): Budget. Perhaps max 300 usd

Country: denmark (europe)

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Minecraft

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):

 

Existing parts:

Ryzen 3, 3100

16gb ram, 3000mhz

RX 570, 4gb vRam

1tb nvme (dont remember model)

Plays single monitor, full HD

 

For my kids pc. He mainly plays minecraft and the occasional roblox or other minor childrens games. My issue is minecraft though. Bedrock version works just fine, Java edition though is a different ballpark. I realize a lot of it is probably the many mods the kids involved there (uses the curseforge launcher). Alot of the time fps seems okay, above 60. But the game still feels sluggish and choppy. I see the cpu spiking a lot and ram nearly all utilized. 

 

A few of the mods he plays are heavy, memory wise. They need 5-6gb allocated to start it seems. 

If i reduce java memory to "just enough", playing suuuucks and cpu nearly just pins at 100%- If increase it to say 6gb, cpu can breathe a bit but it goes back to being sluggish. 

 

Is this all as easy as tossing more memory and cpu at it? 

Or just one of the things? 

 

My own rig has a ryzen 5, 3600. but same amount of ram. 

Everything is smooth as butter for me. Well mostly, he sometimes create hundreds of zombies, then nothing is smooth

 

Bright side: kid is 6, when i ask him about it he's perfectly content... It's just me, my eyes hurt when I look at it. 

 

[IkeaGnome]

6 minutes ago, Hadus said:

My own rig has a ryzen 5, 3600. but same amount of ram. 

Everything is smooth as butter for me. Well mostly, he sometimes create hundreds of zombies, then nothing is smooth

There's an easy option there. 

What motherboard do you have? How much is the 3100 selling for there? PCPP has the 5600x listed at 2349 DKK. If you could get it at that price, you might be able to sell the 3100 for the price difference, get you the 5600x and give him the 3600. 

It's pretty much either that or get him on a 3600. If his 3100 is selling for decent there, you could always sell the 3100 and buy a 3600 for him. That should make for a cheap upgrade as well. A full platform change wouldn't really make too much sense there. 

[Hadus]

17 hours ago, IkeaGnome said:

There's an easy option there. 

What motherboard do you have? How much is the 3100 selling for there? PCPP has the 5600x listed at 2349 DKK. If you could get it at that price, you might be able to sell the 3100 for the price difference, get you the 5600x and give him the 3600. 

It's pretty much either that or get him on a 3600. If his 3100 is selling for decent there, you could always sell the 3100 and buy a 3600 for him. That should make for a cheap upgrade as well. A full platform change wouldn't really make too much sense there. 

Tha'ts a fair point I guess. I'm on an ASRock A520M-ITX/ac Mini ITX. I move around a lot, so needed something compact to take with me.

5600x is in fact in stock at around 2300 DKK. That could be a very reasonable upgrade path. Especially now, as everything, including a 3100, should be easy enough to sell again.

 

Do I ignore ram in this case? I mean, Minecraft is "fine" for me, but would there be any practical benefit of going beyond 16 gigs? Maybe pushing from fine to awesome?
I've read both for and against. I'm leaning towards "it's probably fine"... though it seems we've been on the 16 gig stage for years now

 

[IkeaGnome]

2 hours ago, Hadus said:

Do I ignore ram in this case? I mean, Minecraft is "fine" for me, but would there be any practical benefit of going beyond 16 gigs? Maybe pushing from fine to awesome?

Ram would be fine. The memory controller in Zen 3 runs at 1800 mhz. That puts 3600 mhz ram at the "sweet spot". 3000 would get by just fine.

As for the amount, if he's using more than 16 than it would help a little. If it's not a pain, you could run MC and his mods on your computer to see if it would help.

In general, for gaming, 16 gigs is perfectly fine, but potentially could lead to another cheap birthday present or Christmas present down the line. 

2 hours ago, Hadus said:

ASRock A520M-ITX/ac Mini ITX

AS far as this specific board for the 5600x, it's not in the VRM tier list and that's what I would usually go off of. Maybe @Jurruniocan give some insight into the VRMs on this board. 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/asrock-a520-motherboards-show-why-a520-may-be-a-better-option-than-b550

Quote

The A520M-ITX/ac appears to feature an eight-phase power delivery subsystem, a configuration that's commonly found on cheaper B550 motherboards. As expected of the mini-ITX form factor, the motherboard only has two DDR4 memory slots, but memory overclocking should be superb given the shorter traces to the processor.

@HadusDo note that you would have to update the BIOS with the 3600. 

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A520M-ITXac/index.asp#BIOS

https://www.asrock.com/support/BIOSIG.asp?cat=BIOS10

 

[Jurrunio]

The A520 ITX Asrock board is more than enough for the 5600X if you have a downdraft (which means the fan points towards the motherboard) cooler on the CPU. Trouble is that VRM heatsink being too small to.really help compared to not having it at all. I'm not certain how.hot.it will.get under heavy CPU load on a standard tower cooler or.AIO.

[Jonathan Lee]

Heavily modded minecraft can use a lot of ram, so it is something to consider. Definitely try to upgrade the CPU though. That looks like the main problem right now. You can also consider lowering the render distance to reduce ram utilization.

[Hadus]

Followup time

 

First part done, I swapped the cpu's so he's pc is now equipped with the 3600. This seems to have alleviated alot of the issues.

I then have his ryzen 3100, so far I dont' have an issue with it. Guess I might just keep it and see what I think... I suspect HL Alyx wont be too impressed, haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Nice to know there is a direct upgrade route though.

 

@Jurrunio thanks for the update on 5600x, definately something to keep in mind with the downdraft. Don't really have anything blowing towards the mobo right now.

@IkeaGnome Good advice throughout, thanks.

 

Had a bit of an experience swapping CPU's though. The cooling paste was kind of "hardened" on top of the cpu (the 3600) and had started acting a like glue. Removing the cooler yanked the cpu right out of it's socket. I thought I'd changed quite a lot of CPU's, but thats a first for me. Bent a few pins in the process, managed to get them straightened and it worked again But ... let's not do that again (stock wraith prism cooler).

 

 

[Jurrunio]

18 minutes ago, Hadus said:

The cooling paste was kind of "hardened" on top of the cpu (the 3600) and had started acting a like glue

It's called "cement" in chinese for this reason lol, you could let the CPU warm up the paste first so it won't stick so well

[Hadus]

1 minute ago, Jurrunio said:

It's called "cement" in chinese for this reason lol, you could let the CPU warm up the paste first so it won't stick so well

lol, yieks. Guess I just wasn't expecting to have cement on my CPU

 

[BahnStormer]

My son's gaming rig is a bit older and different components, but probably pretty comparable other than your faster GPU: i7-3770K, GTX1050Ti (4Gb), 16Gb DDR3.

 

He plays all his at 1080P 60FPS+ on Bedrock and it looks and feels smooth even on 30+ chunk render distances. We had a look at Java, but although there's more technical content and advice out there for it, there wasn't a lot of reason to start on a platform that the developers are trying to encourage people off of BECAUSE it is so much harder to optimise the graphics for: I had accidentally bought both and on Java, we found we had to reduce the render distance right down to the point it impacted the whole game (couldn't pillar up and look for biomes / see End Cities).

 

It's about 2 years since I even looked at Java, but it seemed that people who wanted to play Java Minecraft were the old-school technical players and they were all throwing silly amounts of money at high end GPU's to get even moderate performance - not that I've tried Java on high render distances, but I you'd probably need a RX6800 in Java just to get something comparable to a RX570 in Bedrock in terms of running reasonable 32chunk+ render distances.

 

Fortunately for me, all his friends were playing on consoles/tablets, so he wanted to play Bedrock... maybe just steer him towards Bedrock more? 

[Hadus]

@BahnStormer Hi, completely agree. And mostly same scenario

 

I started him out on bedrock version. He had a blast, but then as kids do he started craving minecraft videos on youtube. And, well, most minecrafters on there use the java version, so we tried it out. Gave him a few mods, set it up with curseforge so he can do it himself. Works like charm mostly, but as you say, java minecraft is not winning any performance prices. I honestly also don't like it much compared to bedrock, especially in creative it has this weird "floating" thing going on when you fly around.

 

Lately I've set him up with the "realm plus" subscription thing for bedrock, where they get a bunch of mods for free each month.

I'm hoping he likes that, it also allows him to share and include friends with the mods.

 

Ultimately what I find is that, at least for young childrens computer, I aim for something that can handle most anything at default settings. It doesn't have to be "default settings @ 120 fps", just, not crappy either. They are not old enough to handle the various performance settings games the provide. They just want to start the games... at least, mine does. I help him out ofcourse, but I'm not always there when he jumps into something new. 

 

[BahnStormer]

one thing working in your favour: that Realms has REALLY low render distance (20 or 30 chunks?)...