pcbuild It's time to upgrade! Yes, but... what?

[FreqEvans]

Hello LTT people! I'm Ivan

It's time to upgrade!

Help me decide whats to upgrade first since I can't upgrade em all

 

This is my build

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 @ 4.2GHz

RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) @ 3200MHz

GPU: Gigabyte GTX 1660 Super 6GB

 

These are the three main field that I want to upgrade. I have the budget for just one of them.

 

Rest of the specs:

MoBo: MSI X570-A Pro

NVMe: Kingston Gen4 512GB

PSU: Cooler Master MasterLite 700W 80+ White

CPU Cooler: Arctic eSports 34 DUO

3x 480GB SATA SSDs

1x 1TB 7200RPM HDD

Monitor 1: LG UltraGear 1080p 144Hz

Monitor 2: Dell 60Hz

 

I mainly play games such as Dirt, NBA 2K, FIFA and some Hitman, WWE, Sniper Elite.

 

Other than that I use Photoshop, Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve for some light photo editing and video editing.

 

Thanks to the people who will help me!

[Jon-Slow]

Tell us your budget.

 

If you want to be using Adobe Premier, then you'll need the 13700K or 13900K. But you'll have to upgrade your motherboard too. And 16gb of RAM for editing is way too low.

[FreqEvans]

My goal is to upgrade gaming. With the 1660 Super I can only do 1080/60Hz. If I go higher Hz the GPU became a toaster... 70°C-75°C and I even clean and repaste CPU and GPU once every 2-3 months.

 

My budget nowadays is low, around 300-350 euros

 

16GB for editing seems fine to me.. I don't do special effects or green screen things. I do little commercials or recap videos.

 

I don't want to go Intel because with my X570 I can go up to the 5800 if I want to.. I'm not interested in the Ryzen 7 series

[FreqEvans]

39 minutes ago, oofki said:

That CPU isn’t bad. I’d just go for a GPU upgrade then. GPU upgrades are nice because when you build a new machine you can keep using it

Ok thanks! Now the big question:

even though I'm a I.T. technician I overthink really bad over this thing!

The GPU: 3060 12GB or 3060 Ti 8GB?

Here were I live, in Italy, they costs similar.

[Jon-Slow]

5 minutes ago, FreqEvans said:

Ok thanks! Now the big question:

even though I'm a I.T. technician I overthink really bad over this thing!

The GPU: 3060 12GB or 3060 Ti 8GB?

Here were I live, in Italy, they costs similar.

 

What needs to be figured out is if your Adobe Premier work is more important or your games. the 3060 12gb is a good choice for an editing PC, of course more expensive cards would be better but then again, for a good video editing PC you'll need plenty more RAM first and the GPU comes second. For 1080p gaming both those GPUs will do fine, the 3060ti would be faster but with the 3060 12gb you might be able to get high texture in games that might give you trouble with 8gb.

 

Intel quick sync on K CPUs and the encoding benefits are very important for an editing PC as well. But how professional is your work and what priorities you have is important.

[FreqEvans]

Thanks to both. I do prioritise gaming because my main job isn't editing. I work (as an hobby or in order to do a favor to a friend) on very small project with small timelines. So as far as I am concerned, gaming over editing.

Now, to be honest, games like FIFA or NBA doesn't require that much VRAM but I think I need power to elaborate 120+ frames per second... So I'm going with Ti I think.

And yes an AMD alternative would be good as well.

Latest AMD card that I owned was an RX590 and it ran insanely hot all the time

[WatashiLTT]

Sorry to be the benchmarking nerd, but I have some questions about your current setup. 

 

Regardless of workload, 73c is hot for a stock 1660 super with new paste. Also even on the highest settings you should be well over 100fps in most games. 

 

When you repaste the card have you ever replaced the thermal pads?

[FreqEvans]

11 hours ago, WatashiLTT said:

Sorry to be the benchmarking nerd, but I have some questions about your current setup. 

 

Regardless of workload, 73c is hot for a stock 1660 super with new paste. Also even on the highest settings you should be well over 100fps in most games. 

 

When you repaste the card have you ever replaced the thermal pads?

Hi! Don't worry! We are all nerds here!

Never changed the thermal pads even though I have some good replacement in my home nerd's drawer. Last time I've cleaned my GPU they were quite good.. but yes now I think they need to be replaced.

From today til next Saturday I won't be at home, but as soon as I can I'll replaced them and I'll let you know if it'll run less hotter than now.

Thanks for your help!

[WatashiLTT]

15 hours ago, FreqEvans said:

Hi! Don't worry! We are all nerds here!

Never changed the thermal pads even though I have some good replacement in my home nerd's drawer. Last time I've cleaned my GPU they were quite good.. but yes now I think they need to be replaced.

From today til next Saturday I won't be at home, but as soon as I can I'll replaced them and I'll let you know if it'll run less hotter than now.

Thanks for your help!

I was going to suggest that if the thermal pads were ever replaced they may have been replaced with either too thick or too stiff of pads. If the pads were replaced incorrectly then the cooler would not make good contact with the gpu core and this would cause 1. overheating 2. bending of the pcb 3. thermal paste to dry out too quickly. If you pull the card out of the case and can see a visible bend to the PCB near the core of the card when viewed horizontally then you might want to replace the thermal pads with thinner ones. You can also confirm good GPU contact by inspecting the pattern left by the thermal paste after the cooler is removed. If it is a thin almost vacant even coverage then that is a good sign.

I also checked your build in your profile. You have 5 case fans plus an AIO (therefore no additional heat from the CPU since it should be radiating its hot air outside the case). Even if you idle your GPU fans, a 125W GPU should stay below 60c (given 20-24c room temp). I actually just built a very similar system for my brother, and even without a CPU aio on the 100W CPU, I cant get his 1660 TI to reach 55C (20c room temp). 

All this said, you could find an issue and it still not change anything. 73c isn't technically thermal throttling on most cards, you probably lose 50-150mhz due to Nvidia's heat management utilities, but that is maybe 3-10% performance. (on second thought, it could actually be hotspot throttling if you actually aren't making good contact between core and cooler which could 15-20% performance. You can use GPU-z to check the hotspot temp, it should be 15-25c more than the average temp).

Since you are on 3rd gen Ryzen you could also check for sync'd infinity fabric. In your bios confirm that your ram speed is 2x your FCLK clock speed. This will ensure that your GPU and CPU are talking correctly and not causing major stuttering. This could account for 15-20% loss in performance, but most Bios's will auto these values to their necessary settings. This can only get thrown a loop when XMP or manual ram tuning is enabled (which you should at least attempt to enable XMP as ram speed is quite nice on ryzen especially older ones).

I'm probably rambling about efficiency too much though. I benchmark PC's for fun so I know a lot of in's and out's about performance losses and tuning issues. Nothing that I say should be immediate cause for concern or replace a parts upgrade. They are just some things to confirm if you would prefer to save up a bit more or hold your parts for a bit longer.

 

P.s. If you want to learn about overclocking I can also help but it is always good to find performance drains before looking for performance boosts.

[FreqEvans]

My GPU is a little bit bent but It has been like that for ever.

But now I'm having big problems with my PC, so I'll close this thread.

Thanks to everyone!