What to upgrade?

[zEmo1]

Budget (including currency): 500€

Country: Portugal

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Call of Duty, Tarkov, some upcoming games.

Other details

current specs are:

 

ASUSTek Prime A320M-K
AMD RYZEN 5 1600
EVGA RTX 2060
Gskill 2x8 Gb DDR4
Seasonic S12II 520W 

1TB Western Digital WDC

Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB (SATA (SSD)

 

Considering my budget and the fact that I play at 1080p, what should I upgrade? I thought about Motherboard+CPU but I don't think the budget will allow. Graphics card is doing ok for the time being I think. I'm lacking storage so I could use another SSD.

With all that in mind, keeping the current board and update to a AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and get the RAM and SSD would make sense?

 

Thank you

 

 

 

[merco]

You could drop a regular 5600 in there for a cheap upgrade, I saw them sell for 120€ here, so it should be comparable at some point in your country. Right now I saw one for 153€ in Portugal, if you wait for a sale you can probably get one cheaper. Here's what you could expect (probably comparable to 6600xt at 1080p): 

Purely for gaming 2x8GB RAM is still enough, a good SSD would (probably) cost you 80-100€ for 1TB. 

[Applefreak]

13 minutes ago, zEmo1 said:

Budget (including currency): 500€

Country: Portugal

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Call of Duty, Tarkov, some upcoming games.

Other details

current specs are:

 

ASUSTek Prime A320M-K
AMD RYZEN 5 1600
EVGA RTX 2060
Gskill 2x8 Gb DDR4
Seasonic S12II 520W 

1TB Western Digital WDC

Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB (SATA (SSD)

 

Considering my budget and the fact that I play at 1080p, what should I upgrade? I thought about Motherboard+CPU but I don't think the budget will allow. Graphics card is doing ok for the time being I think. I'm lacking storage so I could use another SSD.

With all that in mind, keeping the current board and update to a AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and get the RAM and SSD would make sense?

 

Thank you

 

 

 

1. Update to the lastest BIOS and then upgrade your CPU. Ryzen 5000 processors are still available (may not be forever) and prices are really good right now.

2. Adding SSD storage but that depends on the games you are playing and how old that HDD is. 

A modern HDD will be able to read 250 mb/s or more, about half the speed of a SATA SSD. While access time is worse, certain older games won't benefit much from an SSD (my experience). If you just need a little bit more storage, go with an SSD. 500GB models are fairly cheap at the moment, 960 - 1 TB aren't bad either.

Your motherboard is fine unless you need more connections or ports for some reason. There is also no need to upgrade the graphics card any time soon.

[zEmo1]

Thanks guys! I guess there’s no point going for the 5600x instead of the regular 5600.

regarding the ssd, could you help me out? From what I’ve read I think I’ll go for a 1Tb m2 but have no idea which to choose.

[zEmo1]

If I was to find a sale of 5800X3D for about 350€, would that be a good purchase instead of 5600?

[Queen Chrysalis]

2 hours ago, zEmo1 said:

If I was to find a sale of 5800X3D for about 350€, would that be a good purchase instead of 5600?

18 hours ago, zEmo1 said:

Thanks guys! I guess there’s no point going for the 5600x instead of the regular 5600.

regarding the ssd, could you help me out? From what I’ve read I think I’ll go for a 1Tb m2 but have no idea which to choose.

No, and despite what others have said, with a 2060 for your GPU I don't think you'll actually see any meaningful change in performance going from a 1600 to a 5600.  I actually did just that with a 1070ti because I was getting a second PC for the living room and nothing really runs any better.  The 1600 isn;t bottlenecking the 2060, and yeah the 5600 has more cache, but with most of those games on a 2060, it really depends on the specs of you monitor whether you would see any change, but most likely none of them are gonna run noticeably faster.  I also don't think changing your SSD setup will affect much of anything so long as your load times are good where they are at.

[merco]

20 hours ago, Queen Chrysalis said:

No, and despite what others have said, with a 2060 for your GPU I don't think you'll actually see any meaningful change in performance going from a 1600 to a 5600.

I guess it depends on what you would call meaningful, it's certainly possible that you do that upgrade and all the games you happen to play already ran at your monitors refresh rate, making it a bad buy. It's also possible that the game you are running benefits a lot from it, when the average performance gain with a 6600xt at 1080p is around 40%. Maybe the 2060 in comparison to that card is slower than I assumed though, and it's not quite that high. Either way I would say it depends on your use case and you should always look at what games you are playing, and if you are actually unhappy with the performance look at the possible upgrade. Just look at the Fortnite medium quality example: going from 119 to 257fps in 1% lows can make a huge difference with a high refresh 1080p monitor.

[zEmo1]

I just tested the Call of duty in game benchmark and it’s giving me a CPU 95% bottleneck. My current monitor is only 60hz 1080p but I see myself upgrading to a 1440p high refresh rate soon. 
I’m inclined to get the AMD 5600 but I wouldn’t like to “need” to upgrade CPU again in the next 2-3 years. Also, if I was to upgrade the graphics card in two years or so, would the 5600 handle it or would it be a huge bottleneck?

[merco]

18 hours ago, zEmo1 said:

I wouldn’t like to “need” to upgrade CPU again in the next 2-3 years

Well tbh upgrading more frequently can be a lot more cost efficient. The problem is that your platform is at the end of its life, but also it is super nice that it even existed for that long. You are now in a position where you don't have to buy a new motherboard, new RAM and a new CPU all at once. In my opinion you can easily use the 5600 for 3 years from now, by that point there will be ryzen 8000, 9000, 10000 already on the market (in theory). So whatever is out then will be much better than for example a 7600x, the cheapest AM5 processor that already will cost you about 300€, with RAM and motherboard probably another 300€.

So since you have the chance to do a cheap drop in upgrade the fastest option for gaming would be the 5800x3d for about 350€. I think both these options are too expensive compared to a 5600 that would cost you 130€.

Let's say you do upgrade to 1440p down the line, now your GPU matters even more, and the differences between a fast and slow CPU shrink, as described by Queen Chrysalis, at that point it would hardly make a difference in most games, unless you play esports titles and with low settings. But compare something like cyberpunk for example, you can see at 1440p with a medium GPU it would be nearly the same FPS with your current CPU:  

 

 

So what if you buy a 3080 on top, what can the 5800x3d do for you over the 5600 at 1440p then? 

 

 

Not doing that much better in this scenario, certainly not 220€ better in my mind. Obviously this is the other extreme scenario of very demanding for the GPU, but I just don't think you can future proof all that much with the best CPU you can buy right now on your platform. 

 

Let's look at COD for another hypothetical result: 

 

Obviously the 5800x3d looks a lot better here, but keep in mind this is with a 3080.

Here's my (very professional and accurate) approximation of the same benchmark with your 2060 at 1440p: 

 

 

Here's what I based that on: https://youtu.be/5en2HSaep60?t=573

 

Also here's the link to the 3080 video: https://youtu.be/81kAorV30Vc

If you watch a couple of videos like that you can get a clearer picture.

 

18 hours ago, zEmo1 said:

Also, if I was to upgrade the graphics card in two years or so, would the 5600 handle it or would it be a huge bottleneck?

Well you can see it can be a bottleneck, maybe the 5800x3d looks interesting to you because you also plan to upgrade your GPU anyways. But if you're gonna use your 2060 for another 2 years and even plan to go to 1440p with it, the 5600 is a better fit in my eyes, just because it's cheaper. Otherwise you would have spent 220€ more, for performance that you are not going to use for 2-3 years, so why spend the money now? In my mind it's much better to save that money for a new GPU and then when you have a new GPU use it for a while with the 5600 and change platforms with it afterwards. You could even argue that it would be better to stick with the 1600 and buy a new GPU instead, but yeah that's what I'm saying it just depends a lot on your use case/monitor/graphics settings etc. 

 

[zEmo1]

14 hours ago, merco said:

Well tbh upgrading more frequently can be a lot more cost efficient. The problem is that your platform is at the end of its life, but also it is super nice that it even existed for that long. You are now in a position where you don't have to buy a new motherboard, new RAM and a new CPU all at once. In my opinion you can easily use the 5600 for 3 years from now, by that point there will be ryzen 8000, 9000, 10000 already on the market (in theory). So whatever is out then will be much better than for example a 7600x, the cheapest AM5 processor that already will cost you about 300€, with RAM and motherboard probably another 300€.

So since you have the chance to do a cheap drop in upgrade the fastest option for gaming would be the 5800x3d for about 350€. I think both these options are too expensive compared to a 5600 that would cost you 130€.

Let's say you do upgrade to 1440p down the line, now your GPU matters even more, and the differences between a fast and slow CPU shrink, as described by Queen Chrysalis, at that point it would hardly make a difference in most games, unless you play esports titles and with low settings. But compare something like cyberpunk for example, you can see at 1440p with a medium GPU it would be nearly the same FPS with your current CPU:  

 

 

So what if you buy a 3080 on top, what can the 5800x3d do for you over the 5600 at 1440p then? 

 

 

Not doing that much better in this scenario, certainly not 220€ better in my mind. Obviously this is the other extreme scenario of very demanding for the GPU, but I just don't think you can future proof all that much with the best CPU you can buy right now on your platform. 

 

Let's look at COD for another hypothetical result: 

 

Obviously the 5800x3d looks a lot better here, but keep in mind this is with a 3080.

Here's my (very professional and accurate) approximation of the same benchmark with your 2060 at 1440p: 

 

 

Here's what I based that on: https://youtu.be/5en2HSaep60?t=573

 

Also here's the link to the 3080 video: https://youtu.be/81kAorV30Vc

If you watch a couple of videos like that you can get a clearer picture.

 

Well you can see it can be a bottleneck, maybe the 5800x3d looks interesting to you because you also plan to upgrade your GPU anyways. But if you're gonna use your 2060 for another 2 years and even plan to go to 1440p with it, the 5600 is a better fit in my eyes, just because it's cheaper. Otherwise you would have spent 220€ more, for performance that you are not going to use for 2-3 years, so why spend the money now? In my mind it's much better to save that money for a new GPU and then when you have a new GPU use it for a while with the 5600 and change platforms with it afterwards. You could even argue that it would be better to stick with the 1600 and buy a new GPU instead, but yeah that's what I'm saying it just depends a lot on your use case/monitor/graphics settings etc. 

 

Thank you so much for the detailed reply. Precious information! I ended up going with the 5600. Thanks once again, really appreciate it.