Upgrade CPU or RAM first?

mattl1598 · July 30, 2017

I've got two deals, one for a cheap CPU (i5-750 LGA 1156) and one for ram (ddr3 4gb), both the same price meaning I can only afford one at the moment.

I was wondering which one to upgrade first.

My main priority is for running Just Cause 3 a bit better as I got it in a sale on Steam last week but it has lots of frame dips.

My PC Specs:

i3-540 3.07gHz

6gb ddr3

MSI H55M-E23 motherboard

MSI GTX 1050 2GB

I have checked for compatibility for all my upgrade parts and they are.

I would appreciate if I could get a quick response so I can order the part asap.

I just ran JC3 with Afterburner so I could look at what was being used and my ram is almost all being used and my CPU is occasionally hitting 93% upwards so I'm leaning towards a CPU but an extra opinion would be great.

Mi26 · July 30, 2017

CPU

aisle9 · July 30, 2017

I don't know that either upgrade you've mentioned would do much for you, tbqh. The platform is just so, so old that a step from an i3 to a quad i5 wouldn't really accomplish all that much. Unless it's a free upgrade, I'd keep pinching pennies for an 1150 board and a Haswell i5/i7/Xeon.

mattl1598 · July 30, 2017

9 minutes ago, CUDA_Cores said:

Upgrade your CPU first. 6GB of DDR3 is borderline these days but is better than that i3 you have. Also try overclocking if you can. I would also suggest looking at the Intel xeon lineup to get a core core 8 thread CPU like the xeon x3460 for cheap.

How much of a performance increase would the Xeon be over the i5? In rough terms.

mattl1598 · July 30, 2017

3 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

I don't know that either upgrade you've mentioned would do much for you, tbqh. The platform is just so, so old that a step from an i3 to a quad i5 wouldn't really accomplish all that much. Unless it's a free upgrade, I'd keep pinching pennies for an 1150 board and a Haswell i5/i7/Xeon.

The cinebench results I've looked up are over double my i3s so for £12, a quad core i5 is a bargain but so is a 4gb stick of ram in today's prices to give me 8gb over 6

aisle9 · July 31, 2017

1 hour ago, mattl1598 said:

The cinebench results I've looked up are over double my i3s so for £12, a quad core i5 is a bargain but so is a 4gb stick of ram in today's prices to give me 8gb over 6

Between those two, I'd take the CPU. Getting two physical cores is better than getting 2GB of RAM for the sort of games that a first-gen i5 can handle well.