Question about HDD and memory bottleneck

[diegofkda]

Hello, first post yay;

 

Well, I have a computer that stinks and couldn't be a worse gaming rig (or anything more than netflix & tumblr sessions tbh):

 

NVIDIA Geforce GT 730

Intel i5 4660K

4 GB DDR3 x1 memory

7200 rpm 500 GB HDD

(But worry not as I'll replace this thing shortly with a worthy rig)

 

So, I've been reading about my question a bit before asking because it is 2018, almost any question has already been asked, but answers for this one didn't quite convince me: Can the RAM and HDD, together or both separately, bottleneck my system in a gaming environment & how? (Answers I've found so far are 'no, impossibru')

The reason I'm asking is because well, to be fair, this rig can in fact run games at low settings & playable FPS values (say Fortnite, GPU's constantly at > 95% usage, but always 30 >= FPS), though the screen, shortly but constantly, freezes (I believe these are called lag spikes), and sometimes objects and textures take longer than expected to load (objects have a hard time taking the place of their LOD counterparts), the core of the problem being object streaming I suppose; disk usage is constantly at 100% and when Windows does some housekeeping (which happens frequently), the game becomes unstable and unplayable. This is the case for a lot of low-end PCs, but others, mainly those with SSD drives, hardly have this problem; they are able to maintain a stable ~ 20 FPS. The thing with this is, SSDs are not known really for speeding FPS up, why would my HDD (if it is the problem) bottleneck my system then? I realized that RAM amount & paging could be the answer; Windows itself already takes almost 2 gigs and Fortnite seems to be a bit RAM hungry, but that doesn't make sense because any system with 4GB RAM and a HDD couldn't properly run Fortnite in that case.

 

Yes, I'm building a worthy rig so this problem wouldn't matter, but I'm asking out of curiosity & to learn. Why would my system lag like that & what would you do to troubleshoot?

Thank you all in advance.

 

[WereCat]

Since you have only one stick of 4GB RAM and you run Windows and Fortnite on the same mechanical drive, you're running out of RAM and game like Fortnite constantly then needs to access the HDD because RAM doesn't have enough space for caching both the game and OS files. 

On top of that, your GT 730 is pretty bad for today's standards so that doesn't help either. 

 

Your CPU is solid. 

Best upgrade path for you is to get another 4GB stick of RAM, grab 120GB SSD and move OS on it and grab some used GTX 960 or 780 or R9 280X.

GTX 1050 or 1050ti will be a huge upgrade as well if you want new HW. 

[SSD Sean]

Exactly what I was gonna say.^

[diegofkda]

Thanks for answering! I was gonna replace this entire build, the case is a generic thing that's got a PSU that miraculously works and shouldn't be using tbh. This is what's on my mind if someone wants to give me thoughts on it:
 

Deepcool Earlkase & Deepcool 500W PSU
GTX 1050ti although I'll save up for when the 2060 arrives
Ryzen 5 2600
Kingston SSD 240GB & 1 TB HDD
8 GB Hyper-X Kingston x 2
LG ultra-wide 29WK600-W
Mainly for programming, 2D & 3D editing, and some light gaming. 
 

[SSD Sean]

Do you have a motherboard picked out for that new CPU too? I just ask because you list everything else but one. Your current board isn’t compatible.

[diegofkda]

Dammit sorry, it's the A320M-K from Asus. I was wondering how long could the AM4 socket last though. Could it last a few more builds?