Upgrading My Nephews 2015 Alienware x51 R3

[L3GION]

Hey all,

 

I need help upgrading my nephews 2015 Alienware X51 R3. He wants to be able to play games while having a twitch stream up and Discord. He runs a dual monitor set up and the tower seems decently well equipped. I need to know where the best bang for buck is. Included below will be bits of the configuration I figured were important to be able to help. 

• Intel core i5 4xxx
• 8gb RAM 
• Nvidia GTX 745
• 2TB HDD

Now I know I need to at least get him switched over to a SSD for his boot drive. I believe the system has an M.2 slot, but I didn't take it apart to confirm as it was getting late. He primarily plays Overwatch and Fortnite. His system starts really lagging hard whenever he loads into Fortnite and is dropping in with those other applications open. My question to you guys is what makes the most sense for me to do to make his system run smoothly. Watching the task manager showed that I was easily maxing out disk speed and when opening things and even during running fortnite with the other apps. It was also maintaining in the mid to upper 80% of the RAM usage. My thoughts were upgrading the RAM and adding an m.2 for the boot drive and possibly storing a game or 2 on it. Wanted to confirm with the good folks here that I was on the right track or if I needed to look at any of the other components.

[ethawesomee]

Okay, if you want to play fortnite, your defeninity going to have to upgrade that antiquated GTX 745 to at least a 1050ti and 256gb sata ssd should be good for boot. (you wont need the extra speed from the M.2 drive) If he is using most of the ram I would recommend 16gb. I would assume the cpu is a dual core so get a quad core i5-4460 if you want to stick to haswell. Hope this helps.

[L3GION]

52 minutes ago, ethawesomee said:

Okay, if you want to play fortnite, your defeninity going to have to upgrade that antiquated GTX 745 to at least a 1050ti and 256gb sata ssd should be good for boot. (you wont need the extra speed from the M.2 drive) If he is using most of the ram I would recommend 16gb. I would assume the cpu is a dual core so get a quad core i5-4460 if you want to stick to haswell. Hope this helps.

I believe it is a quad core i5. So basically what I am hearing is fortnite really needs a stronger GPU to be properly run. I just wasn't overly familiar with the gpu and how it was holding up to the load he puts on his machine. Also does anyone have an opinion on DP vs DVI?

[ethawesomee]

If it is a quad core you should be good. Don’t bother getting another one then. Yes. The Gpu is critical to make fortnite run smoother. With dp you can get more pixels and refresh rate, but dvi can only handle 1440p at 60hz