Best CPU + Mobo for my needs?

P4r4gr4ph · November 21, 2018

Hey,

So I recently got a good upgrade for my system, at least good in my perspective. I was able to get a case from a friend for free because it's crappy and he no longer needed it. However, that case is still better than the one my crappy pre-build came in, and I was able to transfer my PC to the case. The case actually opened up a lot of opportunities for me that I didn't have before such as being able to fit a second graphics card. So I dug up my previous card, a GTX 750 Ti, and now I'm able to use it along with my current R9 270. Surprisingly, my temperatures were barely impacted, and the airflow is great. I was also able to pick up a crappy Dell square monitor for $10 and use it on my 750 Ti. Although the monitor is crappy, it allowed me to do things like watch YouTube while gaming without impacting performance since the load would be on my 750 while I use my 270 for gaming. It also allowed me to do things like record videos without impacting performance, which even allowed me to return to using Linux over Windows since without ReLive or Shadowplay, which aren't available on Linux, my performance would suck while recording. However, now that I have a separate card to do the encoding, my performance has been better than ever as well as the quality of my recordings. In short, I can do pretty much anything now without impacting my performance while gaming since I can just put the strain on my 750, separate from whatever game I'm playing on my 270. It may sound primitive, but for a poor low-spec kid like me, it feels like I'm in technology paradise. However, there's still one last problem that's impacting my performance, and that's my CPU.

Since my entire system's base is a pre-build, it's no surprise that there's a bottleneck. I gotta say though, all things considered, it's not that bad. However, it's still a problem I really need to get rid of. My CPU is an AMD A10-6700, which is pretty much an FX-4300 with crappy integrated graphics that I never use. My RAM's 16GB DDR3-1333 without heat spreaders, and although I'm not educated enough on RAM to know for sure, I think it might be thermal throttling, and if not, it's still giving me long loading times, stutters when it suddenly has to read/write small and random bits of info, etc. My heatsink is the stock one that comes with the CPU, if not some weird OEM one, and it's pretty astounding that it can even manage 70 degrees celsius under load. At some point, I actually had to clean the previous thermal paste and apply some new one since I discovered my previous thermal paste actually dried up. Needless to say, I need an upgrade. However, I'm not sure what to get. Since everything in my system is an aftermarket except for my 1TB HDD which isn't even my boot drive, I can simply reuse everything in a new build as well as put my pre-build in it's original case and sell it, and I'm sure it'll sell for at least $200 ontop of the $150 I already have. I already have a hard drive, GPU, case, fans, and even an optical drive, so all I need is a new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and PSU. I already have RAM and a PSU picked out, so all I need is a CPU and motherboard. With the PSU and RAM I've picked out, it gives me around ~$250 to work with, although I'd like to spend as little as I can since after this I plan on saving for an 144hz monitor and I want at least ~$125 to start with.

I hope I'm proven wrong, but as I have multiple GPUs that perform different tasks, mainly multi-threaded ones, I'd say I'd at least need 6 cores, whether or not the CPU is hyper-threaded. This is because usually my programs take up around 3-4 cores which should leave my 2 GPUs with 2-3 cores to work with. Really, I don't know if my setup could get away with 4 cores, even if it's hyper threaded and even with the more up-to-date architectures and whatnot. At this point, I'm pretty much looking at a poor man's threadripper. Also, call me an ideologist, but I'd prefer my CPU to be AMD. I seriously don't want to use Intel unless I have to, not only because of the major hardware-level security breach in Intel's older processors, but also for more personal reasons I don't think anyone would understand. There isn't much to say about the motherboard other than that I strongly prefer it to be overclockable, and although I wouldn't care too much, it would be nice to have some sort of feature to assign how much PCI-E lanes each PCI-E device gets so I can give my 270 more PCI-E lanes than my 750.

So given all of the previous I've said, what CPU do you all think I should get? Personally, I think my best bet would be the Ryzen 5 1600 with any motherboard with a B350 chipset or better. However, maybe there's something I don't know about, which is why I'm posting this thread. I really don't want to screw this up, and although I'm confident in what I've chosen, I wonder if there's any better option.

Thanks,

p4r4gr4ph