Need advice on if I need to upgrade or not?

Canton78 · March 25

Hi all, this is my first post here. I need some advice on if I need an upgrade or not. I built my PC in 2020 during lockdown.

Here is my parts list

GPU - Radeon 5700XT

CPU - Ryzen 5 3600

Motherboard - TUF B450-Plus

RAM - 2x 8GB G.Skill F4-3600C18-8GVK

Storage - 500GB SSD and 2TB HDD

PSU - 650W 80 PLUS BRONZE

It's mostly been problem free but lately it's been giving me some major issues in-game. I'm trying to play some of these minecraft modpacks and I'm lagging like crazy. It can handle stuff for a bit, but then it just freezes up for seconds at a time. Earlier today I was playing one while watching youtube on my other monitor. It was running like 80fps fine, but then it just dropped down to like 5fps and ended up crashing after like a minute. It's not just in the game too, cause it froze up the video too. It's like the PC had an aneurysm. Haven't really played any other games recently so can't attest to performance in a more demanding game, but I figure if it's struggling with Minecraft then y'know.

P.S. Yes I've fully updated my drivers, checked for viruses, turned down ingame graphics, etc.

Am I cooked?

CatTNT · March 25

Ensure that your Minecraft installation can use more ram. Just having more RAM won't allow Minecraft to use it, you need to manually change a value to set your new max RAM, i am 99.9% confident RAM allocation is your issue. Here's how to do it:

The number just means the max gigabytes of RAM that Minecraft is allowed to use. For most mudpacks you can do 4-8GB, but since I have 64GGB and I use a shit ton of mods, I do 24-32GB so I don't need to care about it. For 90%+ of people and cases 8-12GB max should be just fine. You can also see exactly how much RAM you need by tapping F3 and looking in the top right corner, you'll see how much Minecraft is using at any given moment.

Remember, in any game or any program, running at good performance and then suddenly running into missives shutters and freezes is usually an indication of running out of memory, Minecraft is no different.

Canton78 · March 25

Thank you for your response. This is one of the things that I have tried, but no luck. I currently have it set for 11GB and in game it never uses more than 6-7 gigs. The problem also continues for maybe half a minute after I close the game, so I'm really not sure.

CatTNT · March 25

These may be a leap in logic, but I think if your PC is still weird even after closing the games, maybe something to do with Xbox game bar, or how it detects games is something to look into. Also check your page file, make that default or see a guide if/to what to increase it to.

As a last thing to test, try removing the HDD entirely from your system and booting up and running games with just the SSD.

Also, was this happening in vanilla Minecraft, other games, all modpacks, or just one modpack? I've used some mods, or combinations of mods that I couldn't diagnose lag issues with and just had to revert versions or removes dozens of mods at a time to fix lag. I have this one modpack with 260 mods that runs just fine, but if i update their versions i get terrible lag when crossing chunk borders and i have no idea what to do for that, so i just keep the mods on their current, older version.

Canton78 · March 25

I booted up vanilla minecraft and it didn't seem to be giving me the issue. There's still an occasional jutter/framedrop but nothing like what's happening with the modpacks. Haven't tried other more intensive games since I don't have any installed right now, but will test tomorrow. The weird thing is that it's happening with almost every modpack I try, so it doesn't seem to be an issue with any specific mod. I'm not familiar with game bar or pagefile, but looked at both and didn't see anything that would interfere with the game. My pagefile is at the default since I haven't messed with it. Also, Minecraft, Curseforge, and all the modpacks are downloaded onto the SSD so I don't think that's the issue.