Can I make use of a small upgrade? And some other spec questions.

CookieKenpachi · October 29, 2023

Budget (including currency): 60 Euro

Country: Netherlands

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Ark Survival Ascended, Black Desert Online, future MMO's/co-op games. 1080P Gaming.

Other details

Hello people,

I'm not a person who has a lot of money. So I came here for some well needed advice.

I currently have Ark Survival Ascended, working at somewhat ok FPS with decent graphics. Between 25-35 FPS.

Motherboard: MSI Z97 Gaming 5

CPU: I7 4790 (not the K)

GPU: MSI 1070 8GB

Memory: 16 GB DDR3 2400MHZ

SSD: NVME

Power Supply: 850 Watt Gold

Now the game runs ok with this on lower/medium settings. Checking in my windows game bar. I see the GPU is working at a 100%. My CPU barely gets above 50%. Vram around 92% and RAM on 80-90%.

But if I want to make a small upgrade to 32GB DDR3, would it increase the performance somewhat? I sadly don't have money for a GPU upgrade, and changing my CPU would also mean I'd have to upgrade the motherboard and RAM. Which I sadly can not do right now.

But in the case I do get my hands on some money for a 3060TI for example. Would my CPU bottleneck this heavily? Or would I be good to go for at least a while with it. Until I can go further on the upgrading path?

I am playing games with my girlfriend, this is one of the few very very high demanding games. But I can imagine there might be other UE5 games coming in the next year or so, who also need higher demands.

So in short.

Extra 16GB of RAM worth it for performance now? I'm ok if its not the ultimate best bang for my buck. I just want to enjoy time with my gf, and she has the better pc.

Can my 4790 support a graphics card like a 3060TI?

PDifolco · October 29, 2023

5 minutes ago, CookieKenpachi said:

Budget (including currency): 60 Euro

Country: Netherlands

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Ark Survival Ascended, Black Desert Online, future MMO's/co-op games.

Other details

Hello people,

I'm not a person who has a lot of money. So I came here for some well needed advice.

I currently have Ark Survival Ascended, working at somewhat ok FPS with decent graphics. Between 25-35 FPS.

Motherboard: MSI Z97 Gaming 5

CPU: I7 4790 (not the K)

GPU: MSI 1070 8GB

Memory: 16 GB DDR3 2400MHZ

SSD: NVME

Power Supply: 850 Watt Gold

Now the game runs ok with this on lower/medium settings. Checking in my windows game bar. I see the GPU is working at a 100%. My CPU barely gets above 50%. Vram around 92% and RAM on 80-90%.

But if I want to make a small upgrade to 32GB DDR3, would it increase the performance somewhat? I sadly don't have money for a GPU upgrade, and changing my CPU would also mean I'd have to upgrade the motherboard and RAM. Which I sadly can not do right now.

But in the case I do get my hands on some money for a 3060TI for example. Would my CPU bottleneck this heavily? Or would I be good to go for at least a while with it. Until I can go further on the upgrading path?

I am playing games with my girlfriend, this is one of the few very very high demanding games. But I can imagine there might be other UE5 games coming in the next year or so, who also need higher demands.

So in short.

Extra 16GB of RAM worth it for performance now? I'm ok if its not the ultimate best bang for my buck. I just want to enjoy time with my gf, and she has the better pc.

Can my 4790 support a graphics card like a 3060TI?

Adding RAM won't give you any more frames

For 60EUR you won't be able to upgrade anything else than getting a SSD and you already have one

A 3060Ti would be pretty bottlenecked by your old CPU, but it'll work, and it's way more expensive than 60EUR (350..)

Nickola · October 29, 2023

LTT did a video on this, if you add ram and only do gaming you get very little extra performance, however i do think you should get a 3060, or if if the rx 6650xt is around the price of the 3060 get that instead. Sure, it will bottleneck, but if you do upgrade, you can reuse the 3060 / 6650 since its much more recent / Powerful Edit: I did not see he said a 3060 ti, so if it is TI then probably get that instead of the amd gpu

Crunchy Dragon · October 29, 2023

If your PSU and CPU cooler can handle it, I'd upgrade to a 4790K and overclock it a little bit. It shouldn't be super expensive, and will get you some more performance.

Extra RAM is nice to have, but you'll have to replace it with DDR4 or 5 when you move to a more modern platform, so I would hold off on that for now, unless you start running out of RAM.

+1 on buying a better GPU than your CPU can support and using it with a future upgrade.

CookieKenpachi · October 29, 2023

16 minutes ago, Nickola said:

LTT did a video on this, if you add ram and only do gaming you get very little extra performance, however i do think you should get a 3060, or if if the rx 6650xt is around the price of the 3060 get that instead. Sure, it will bottleneck, but if you do upgrade, you can reuse the 3060 / 6650 since its much more recent / Powerful Edit: I did not see he said a 3060 ti, so if it is TI then probably get that instead of the amd gpu

Thank you for pointing out that video to me. I missed that one.

As I see in Far Cry 6. Which has a min req of 8 GB and recommended req of 16 GB, the FPS gain was noticeable there.

Ark Survival Ascended (This is the remastered version which just got released) has a minimum requirement of 16GB, and a recommended requirement of 32GB. I probably should have mentioned this in my original post. Sorry for that.

That's why I got to thinking if the 16GB upgrade at least for now would be noticeable.

@Crunchy Dragon Yes I sadly know I will have to upgrade that as well. But that's in my far future, which will come then. As I see from you and others answers, getting the GPU upgrade would be a good thing at least. And overclocking is not in the stars for me. I'm far too scared I'll break the parts. So I really rather not mess with that.

So I would still notice a improvement? I understand it would be bottlenecked right now, but it would also hold up for when I can upgrade CPU/MOBO/RAM in 2ish years time.

Somerandomtechyboi · October 30, 2023

2 hours ago, CookieKenpachi said:

I currently have Ark Survival Ascended, working at somewhat ok FPS with decent graphics. Between 25-35 FPS.

Motherboard: MSI Z97 Gaming 5

CPU: I7 4790 (not the K)

GPU: MSI 1070 8GB

Memory: 16 GB DDR3 2400MHZ

SSD: NVME

Power Supply: 850 Watt Gold

Now the game runs ok with this on lower/medium settings. Checking in my windows game bar. I see the GPU is working at a 100%. My CPU barely gets above 50%. Vram around 92% and RAM on 80-90%.

Overclock the gpu with msi afterburner, just a matter of playing with sliders and maxing them out with furmark in the background to check for artifacting and stability

Think theres a way to mod the bios to allow for max turbo on all cores with an older microcode (6f2 for xeon) but ill have to dig more into that, might just send a modbios if i figure it out

2400mhz ddr3 likely hynix mfrs which are capable of 3000+, id try clocking those sticks higher, max vdimm = skys the limit, max vccsa/io probs around 1.45v if neccesary

Also try running higher bclk to oc the cpu, 105 should be doable for most but you may have a sample that can do higher bclk, and no all those claims of damage are unfounded garbage same goes for corruption though i suspect corruption will only happen on an unstable bclk overclock similar to how a particularly unstable ram oc can cause corruption

jaslion · October 30, 2023

8 hours ago, CookieKenpachi said:

Thank you for pointing out that video to me. I missed that one.

As I see in Far Cry 6. Which has a min req of 8 GB and recommended req of 16 GB, the FPS gain was noticeable there.

Ark Survival Ascended (This is the remastered version which just got released) has a minimum requirement of 16GB, and a recommended requirement of 32GB. I probably should have mentioned this in my original post. Sorry for that.

That's why I got to thinking if the 16GB upgrade at least for now would be noticeable.

@Crunchy Dragon Yes I sadly know I will have to upgrade that as well. But that's in my far future, which will come then. As I see from you and others answers, getting the GPU upgrade would be a good thing at least. And overclocking is not in the stars for me. I'm far too scared I'll break the parts. So I really rather not mess with that.

So I would still notice a improvement? I understand it would be bottlenecked right now, but it would also hold up for when I can upgrade CPU/MOBO/RAM in 2ish years time.

As for gpu I'd say just send it and get the best you can afford new or used ( for the price of a new 3060ti you can often get quite a bit better stuff used) as long as the psu is good.

Which then brings me to the point. What is the make and model of the psu you have?

As for ram upgrade in the new big games it might be needed however aversly those games will max your cpu easily. So expect to hover at 60 most of the time and hope it's stable. Ark is a optimization mess so that might not happen but who knows