Upgrading Old PC

[William Ackerman]

Budget (including currency): $600 USD

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: fortnite, Call of duty, or Apex. Mainly used for photoshop or video editing like after effects or premiere. 

Other details: 

Graphics card: gtx 1050 2GB

CPU: ryzen 1400

Motherboard: MSI Gaming AMD ryzen B350 DDR4 ( B350 Tomahawk) 

Ram: G.Skill Ripjaws V series ( Intel XMP) DDR4 Ram 16GB ( 2x8GB)  

Memory: sea gate Barracuda 3TB 7200 RPM SATA 3 internal hard drive 

 

 

I use 2 monitors, Windows 10, I don’t need any monitors, or anything else. Just looking to upgrade. So it’s faster and more efficient and run better if I want to play games. 
 

I have a generic PC case from Amazon, don’t remember what it’s called. I plan to buy within a month or two for the holiday sales. 
 

I know nothing about computers, I only built this pc from recommendations back then and pc part picker. 
to replace any parts would it be difficult if I need to take apart the whole pc? 
 

thank you for any suggestions! 

 

[Dutch_Master]

For that budget, stick to AMD Ryzen and DDR4. Use the pcpartpicker site to select an AMD B550 mainboard, Ryzen 5 5000 series CPU and a AMD Radeon 5500 GPU. Alternatively, consider the Ryzen 4000 series CPU. If your budget allows, get a 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD for Win-OS. You can keep the 3TB HDD for storage. Reuse the 2x8GB RAM sticks or upgrade to 2x 16GB.

[mariushm]

For games, the best investment would be a M.2 SSD and a video card.

 

A good 500GB or bigger M.2 SSD starts from around $50, and you'll want a video card with at least 8 GB VRAM, ideally more. I would go straight for a RX 6600 8 GB at around $200, maybe a RX 7600 8 GB at $250,  or a RX 6700 XT at around $300.  On nVidia, I guess a rtx 4060 or something like that.

 

The 4 core RX 1400 is borderline these days, ideally you would want at least 6 cores / 12 threads, the RX 1400 is only 4 cores, 4 threads and old generation - newer generations have higher IPC (do more work in a Hz compared to first Ryzen generation) and have bigger caches. 

 

If you want to spend the least, after a bios update, you should be fine with a Ryzen 5 5600 / 5600 / 5700  - they're low TDP enough that you wouldn't need to change the motherboard and ram.

 

Don't get a cpu with integrated graphics, as you'll lower the maximum number of pci-e lanes to 8 on the pci-e x16 slot dedicated for graphics, and the B350 motherboard is already pci-e 3.0 only, so you'll lose a tiny bit of performance by running a pci-e 4.0 card into a pci-e 3.0 slot.

 

 

[William Ackerman]

8 hours ago, Dutch_Master said:

For that budget, stick to AMD Ryzen and DDR4. Use the pcpartpicker site to select an AMD B550 mainboard, Ryzen 5 5000 series CPU and a AMD Radeon 5500 GPU. Alternatively, consider the Ryzen 4000 series CPU. If your budget allows, get a 1 TB M.2 NVMe SSD for Win-OS. You can keep the 3TB HDD for storage. Reuse the 2x8GB RAM sticks or upgrade to 2x 16GB.

Thank you so much for the reply. I will take a look at all this on pc part picker. 

[William Ackerman]

7 hours ago, mariushm said:

For games, the best investment would be a M.2 SSD and a video card.

 

A good 500GB or bigger M.2 SSD starts from around $50, and you'll want a video card with at least 8 GB VRAM, ideally more. I would go straight for a RX 6600 8 GB at around $200, maybe a RX 7600 8 GB at $250,  or a RX 6700 XT at around $300.  On nVidia, I guess a rtx 4060 or something like that.

 

The 4 core RX 1400 is borderline these days, ideally you would want at least 6 cores / 12 threads, the RX 1400 is only 4 cores, 4 threads and old generation - newer generations have higher IPC (do more work in a Hz compared to first Ryzen generation) and have bigger caches. 

 

If you want to spend the least, after a bios update, you should be fine with a Ryzen 5 5600 / 5600 / 5700  - they're low TDP enough that you wouldn't need to change the motherboard and ram.

 

Don't get a cpu with integrated graphics, as you'll lower the maximum number of pci-e lanes to 8 on the pci-e x16 slot dedicated for graphics, and the B350 motherboard is already pci-e 3.0 only, so you'll lose a tiny bit of performance by running a pci-e 4.0 card into a pci-e 3.0 slot.

 

 

Thank you for the reply, and all the suggestions. I truly appreciate it! 
do you mind if I send you a message to ask you more questions I have?