Teen gamers - upgrading PC - is it worth it?

amy kemp said:
Removed sorry.

I've just left details of the two items for someone to please double check before I order
Thank you again
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Yes they are what you need

@tamzzy makes a good point about just upgrading the m2 first and getting there games on it. You should see an improvement getting a 3600 up to 20% fps but there will an increase in the low fps as well which can cause slow down.

Selling your 3350g would make it a cheaper upgrade.
 
tamzzy said:
1% lows are probably hammered due to the lack of swap file space on the small ssd

better off spending £70 initially first then the other £180 only if absolutely needed
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Agree.

Selling the 3350g for £100 will make it a easier plus 6 core 12 threads better for gaming and streaming as kids intrests evolve.
 
tamzzy said:
if you have free shipping, i would suggest that you buy the ssd first and install that. it may well just be the case that your kids are complaining about the computer's performance solely due to the lack of ssd space.
whilst there is a theoretical 20% performance difference between the ryzen 3600 and 3350G (core-for-core and not taking into account 2 more cores in the 3600), the overall performance gain is unlikely to actually be a 20% increase in frame rates unless the cpu is fully loaded.
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Ok thank you for this.
I've just been looking at the reviews of the 1tb SSD and some people have said its failed after a few weeks, someone else said it burnt their motherboard

Does anyone recommend one that I can buy please?
 
mickyflinn said:
Selling the 3350g for £100 will make it a easier plus 6 core 12 threads better for gaming and streaming as kids intrests evolve.
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agree. the immediate bottleneck is the small ssd though, so should be remedied first
can upgrade to a 3600/5600x later down the line if required
 
Just wanted to say thank you for all your help and advice. We ordered the Western digital M2 1tb SSD and installed it using your guide. Very simple and straightforward even for us!

Our sons have noticed the difference in the FPS already
Merry Christmas ☃️
 
Hi, me again.

Rather than starting a whole new thread I thought I'd continue on from here.

The Western digital M2 1tb SSD increased the FPS but it's slowly gone down again.
We are now looking to upgrade to AMD Ryzen 7
But understand our motherboard won't be compatible with this.

I'm wondering what our best option would be as obviously we have the case, SSD all ready here, so it feels like a waste buying a whole new PC? Or should I be replacing the motherboard and CPU on this PC? Is that simple enough to do?

Thank you in advance.
 
amy kemp said:
Hi, me again.

Rather than starting a whole new thread I thought I'd continue on from here.

The Western digital M2 1tb SSD increased the FPS but it's slowly gone down again.
We are now looking to upgrade to AMD Ryzen 7
But understand our motherboard won't be compatible with this.

I'm wondering what our best option would be as obviously we have the case, SSD all ready here, so it feels like a waste buying a whole new PC? Or should I be replacing the motherboard and CPU on this PC? Is that simple enough to do?

Thank you in advance.
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Your motherboard supports 5000 seies as said before , ryzen 7 are 8 core and is just a version like 3800x , 5800x, etc .

A ryzen 5 5600 6 core cpu is about the best value cpu for your system which can be had for £180. Selling your old one will offset the cost but don't expect miricales in performance boost maybe 10 to 20 %.
 
Hi Amy -

You could easily drop a Ryzen 5 (say, 5600) into that, assuming your motherboard has a BIOS that supports it. I certainly wouldn't replace the whole PC, if you wanted to upgrade the processor and motherboard (say to a B450 or B550) you could do just that.

Whereabouts in the UK are you (rough location) as you may find someone who would be willing to help you. If you weren't far away from me, I'd happily help as long as you keep the tea flowing!

One other thing worth bearing in mind is that in 4 days time, the Ryzen 5800X3D releases and you may well find a few Ryzen 5x00 (and older) CPUs available second hand, as a result.
 
TangoEchoAlpha said:
Hi Amy -

You could easily drop a Ryzen 5 (say, 5600) into that, assuming your motherboard has a BIOS that supports it. I certainly wouldn't replace the whole PC, if you wanted to upgrade the processor and motherboard (say to a B450 or B550) you could do just that.

Whereabouts in the UK are you (rough location) as you may find someone who would be willing to help you. If you weren't far away from me, I'd happily help as long as you keep the tea flowing!

One other thing worth bearing in mind is that in 4 days time, the Ryzen 5800X3D releases and you may well find a few Ryzen 5x00 (and older) CPUs available second hand, as a result.
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Our motherboard is an A320 so we found out that it wont be compatible with ryzen 7 so we will definitely need to upgrade the motherboard.

We are in the South East - thank you that's really kind.

Assuming you are too far. is upgrading the motherboard simple enough to do with an idiots guide?

Would a B450 or B550 be compatible for future upgrades too?

Is overclocking an option or too technical for us to do?

Also thank you Micky flinn, we are definitely looking to get more of a boost so will be looking to upgrade motherboard etc to do so rather than sticking with what we've got
 
amy kemp said:
Our motherboard is an A320 so we found out that it wont be compatible with ryzen 7 so we will definitely need to upgrade the motherboard.

We are in the South East - thank you that's really kind.

Assuming you are too far. is upgrading the motherboard simple enough to do with an idiots guide?

Would a B450 or B550 be compatible for future upgrades too?

Is overclocking an option or too technical for us to do?

Also thank you Micky flinn, we are definitely looking to get more of a boost so will be looking to upgrade motherboard etc to do so rather than sticking with what we've got
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What's the board model as 5000 support should be getting added to all am4 boards?.

Edit: ok it seems you listed the board as the GA-A320M-S2H V2 earlier in the thread and looking at the bios it seems support was added with bios T53B.

Screenshot-8.png
 
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@amy kemp upgrading the motherboard wont give you much of a performance boost it will add pcie4 if you go b550. B450 will just add more ports, etc but is still pcie3 the same as you have now.

Pcie4 gives you faster m2 drive support but has little effect on gpu performance, even the top tier graphics cards cant utilize pcie4 gaining 3 to 10% boost if lucky.
 
Amy, I am in the South also (J4 M3 area) so depends where you are in relation to that.

As Mickyflinn said, replacing the motherboard you have won't necessarily give a performance boost, but you will find that the components on a decent B450/B550 will likely be better for the future (I am thinking of the VRMs and cooling, which will be better and likely handle more powerful Ryzen processors better than your existing motherboard) but it's certainly not a necessity.

I would suggest you re better off getting a Ryzen 5600 and dropping that into your existing setup, assuming you have a BIOS to support it.
 
amy kemp said:
The Western digital M2 1tb SSD increased the FPS but it's slowly gone down again.
We are now looking to upgrade to AMD Ryzen 7
Click to expand...
Hi Amy,

Before you go spending money on more upgrades, I think it would be worth trying to understand what's really going on here. You say that the FPS has "slowly gone down again". In the space of four months, there's really no obvious reason why that would happen, unless your storage is completely full again.

Are we talking about the same games, played at the same settings, but slowly having worse FPS? If so, my first question would be "how much has the FPS dropped?", followed by "how do you know?".

Call me a cynic, but if I had teenage sons that were telling me "The computer's getting slower, we need an upgrade", I would not necessarily take their word for it :p

If the same hardware is performing worse at the same tasks than it was four months ago, then that's a separate question which many people on this forum will be better equipped to help you with, but I don't think further upgrades should automatically be your first choice without a bit more investigation :)
 
Hi Amy, you could also use WinDirStat to get a visual idea of what programs are using up most space. I have a teenage son who installs loads of games, plays for a week and then moves on. We uninstall a bunch of them every now and again. He also harps on about FPS, but really they're fine and it's things like online servers being laggy. May also be worth hardwiring to the interwebnet if you're currently using WiFi.
 
amy kemp said:
Hi, me again.

Rather than starting a whole new thread I thought I'd continue on from here.

The Western digital M2 1tb SSD increased the FPS but it's slowly gone down again.
We are now looking to upgrade to AMD Ryzen 7
But understand our motherboard won't be compatible with this.

I'm wondering what our best option would be as obviously we have the case, SSD all ready here, so it feels like a waste buying a whole new PC? Or should I be replacing the motherboard and CPU on this PC? Is that simple enough to do?

Thank you in advance.
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I will let others carry on in regards to the hardware side of things. However, it is also useful to note that you can often increase the frame count of a game by turning down settings of the graphic options in the game, sometimes without really noticing the difference very much. There are sometimes guides on youtube for a good graphics settings for a game,
 
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