What would you upgrade?

[Beid132444]

Planning a bit of an upgrade for my computer. Fell into some prize money and just want to bring my PC to a bit more of a modern life.

 

Annoyingly I've been out of the hardware research part of my career for a while. Generally if my Dell rep says it'll work I'll throw the businesses money at it when it comes to end user devices

 

If you had $700 AUD ($450USD, $610CAD) what would you upgrade? 

 

Main thing is I want to be able to play the new cyberpunk expansion on at least medium settings (at 2k res, which I think it may already do?), and I do a lot of WFH (IT Systems Engineer).

 

This site is a good gauge of what prices are like in Australia

PC Case Gear

https://www.pccasegear.com/

 

I'm no brand fan boy, as long as what is going in is going to work that's all I need to know, so no Intel or amd preference, amd or nvidia etc etc. 

 

Current specs are:

- i5-7600k

- Z370 AORUS Ultra Gaming (rev. 1.0)

- Trident Z RGB DDR4-3200 2x8GB

- SSD 970 EVO NVMe M.2 1TB

- GeForce RTX™ 2060 WINDFORCE OC 6G (rev. 1.0)

- Fractal Design R5

- Some Coolermaster 240mm watercooler

- Corsair AX850 PSU

- 2x 4k monitors (though I usually set games to 2k)

 

[TatamiMatt]

With $700 id say probably a new CPU, if you wanted to splash a little you could also get a new mobo and upgrade further, but that might breach the $700 mark. your RAM clock speed will be severly affected as your current processors max ram clock speed compatibility is 2133MHz so about 1.1K Mhz or your ram is unused. If you'd want to keep both intel and your motherboard, the latest GEN you can get is 9th gen so either an i5-9600, either K/KF for the ability to over clock or if you wanted to go a bit further an i7-9700K/KF. if you wanted to upgrade a little on the mobo maybe a z490 board as that will allow 10th/11th gen. I dont think id push any further due to both prices and the GPU starting to be the limiting factor at that range also.

 

Id also see other users recommendations and contrast and compare.

 

Edit; You could also boot up a resource heavy game like crysis 3 or cyberpunk, crank graphics to max and see what is throttling your system. Theres a good few bits of software that can help you do this but if you want a base line just the performance tab of your task manager will give you a good idea of whats the main cause of throttling. but id bet its the cpu from what i can see.

Edited September 14, 2023 by TatamiMatt

[ImWilly]

If it were up to me, I would upgrade the CPU, motherboard and adding more mass storage

 

Since your upgrade seems to focus on gaming, here's my suggestion:
1. CPU: Ryzen 5600X is the best budget in AM4 platform, and you may upgrade to 5800X3D later sometime in the future when the price drops

2. Motherboard: I may be biased, cause I generally prefers Gigabyte because it has a lot of USB slots, but ASRock, MSI, and ASUS is also a respectable brand

3. 1TB for OS and game directory is a bit small, and I would suggest to add some mass storage so that your file other than OS and game directory will have more space, especially since modern AAA title games will consume 100GB easily. And since most modern motherboard can support at least 2 slots of NVME, I would say it wouldn't hurt to fill the slots. A cheap Kingston NV2 is really worth the price for mass storage where you can get 2TB for AUD120

 

So in total budget, it's AUD621 (shipping and taxes included)

The details part prices can be seen down below

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 3.7 GHz 6-Core Processor  ($235.63 @ Amazon Australia) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte B550 AORUS ELITE AX V2 ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($267.00 @ MSY Technology) 
Storage: Kingston NV2 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive  ($119.00 @ Amazon Australia) 
Total: $621.63
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-09-14 17:19 AEST+1000

[Somerandomtechyboi]

35 minutes ago, Beid132444 said:

If you had $700 AUD ($450USD, $610CAD) what would you upgrade? 

Used 5800x3d + used b550 board or a used 12600k + used z690 board, should be able to find some of fb marketplace, gumtree, whatever other classifieds sites youve got in austrailia

 

27 minutes ago, TatamiMatt said:

your RAM clock speed will be severly affected as your current processors max ram clock speed compatibility is 2133MHz so about 1.1K Mhz or your ram is unused

Cpu spec is garbage and really just an indicator of what its guaranteed to run, it can run higher but it is officially not guaranteed to work, even the now ancient skylake cpus have imcs that can do 4000 ish ddr4 for daily assuming you arent running freaking quad rank bdie or something, heres an instance of ddr4 3200 on a 6700k but obviously not very impressive and i cant find any other results probs cause skylake was quite a few years ago, skylake x on the other hand is known for hitting 4000 with ease

 

Spoiler

Heres my own instance of running above cpu "max" officially supported ram speed, nearly 3x the official max speed in fact, chip is an i7 930 and official max is at 1066 ddr3, managed to get 3000 to boot in windows and 3200 to boot in bios mostly ram stick limited as nehalem imc is cracked and puts both sandy and ivy to shame

[TatamiMatt]

1 minute ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

Cpu spec is garbage and really just an indicator of what its guaranteed to run, it can run higher but it is officially not guaranteed to work, even the now ancient skylake cpus have imcs that can do 4000 ish ddr4 for daily assuming you arent running freaking quad rank bdie or something, heres an instance of ddr4 3200 on a 6700k but obviously not very impressive and i cant find any other results probs cause skylake was quite a few years ago, skylake x on the other hand is known for hitting 4000 with ease

 

Heres my own instance of running above cpu "max" officially supported ram speed, nearly 3x the official max speed in fact, chip is an i7 930 and official max is at 1066 ddr3, managed to get 3000 to boot in windows and 3200 to boot in bios mostly ram stick limited as nehalem imc is cracked and puts both sandy and ivy to shame

Oh wow, i knew you could up the speed above the CPU spec as i have myself but I had no idea it was possible to that extreme, cool!

[Somerandomtechyboi]

26 minutes ago, TatamiMatt said:

Oh wow, i knew you could up the speed above the CPU spec as i have myself but I had no idea it was possible to that extreme, cool!

Depends per platform

 

Some have ridicolously conservative max ram speed like that i7 930 and some have more accurate max ram speed like zen2/zen3 cpus (not apus those things have insane imcs)

 

honestly didnt think id be able to get far since i didnt know that 1:2 uncore memclk garbage was just something forced on by asus which my x58a ud3r doesnt, i knew non x/e xeon westmere imcs were pretty capable of 3000+ but i didnt think a nehalem could do that let alone this imc still not being topped out cause that 3200 is a rare instance of it booting into bios and im pretty sure it could go higher but my transcend 1333 psc sticks are already topped out so need some better rams, puts both sandy and ivy bridge to shame, might even compete with haswell abit

 

Havent gotten any working ddr4 hardware but i am aiming for a ryzen 5500/5600g, imc on those is also ridicolous, like 5000+ 1:1 and 4533+ dual rank, ryzen apus however are stuck with a pretty pathetic imc only capable of around 3800-4000, oh well atleast they didnt get downgraded like intels where 10th gen could run 4400 ish 11th and onwards have trouble getting 4000+ gear 1 and need gear 2 to hit that same speed

[TatamiMatt]

Yeah, im currently running on a 10600K, supposed max DDR4 speed of 2666 MHz but its pretty safely running 3200MHz. Though i am looking to get a 13th gen soon enough so torn on getting a Z790 DDr4 board or just foregoing the current RAM i have (4x8GB corsair vengeance 3200) and getting a DDR5 mobo. Mainly due to cost as i want a new cooler and case too, so much moneyyyy! But the within spec clock speeds of the 13th gen cpus is pretty crazy