Small upgrade to increase performance

[desm0nd]

Hi gents, looking to upgrade my setup to gain some extra performance out of my setup. Budget is around £200-300.

I use the PC for 1080P gaming and only play fortnite. My PC typically gets around 100FPS on average, but can drift from anywhere between 60 and 144fps. Ideally I'd like to up this so I can get consistent 144FPS. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I did think about overclocking my setup, but sometimes the fans run quite loud and this is off putting to me whilst playing. Happy to consider this if persuaded though.

Current setup is:

Ryzen 5 2600
RX580 Red Dragon Graphics Card
MSI B450 Tomahawk DDR4 Motherboard
16GB Corsair 3000MHz RAM
Bitfenix Formula 550W PSU

Thanks in advance.

 

[joelk2]

Upgrading the GPU would be the route. 5700/5700xt would be a good upgrade.

 

[Gray2233]

You could sell that RX580 for around £100 I'm guessing and add it to your budget.

A 5700 and a nice heatsink upgrade for the CPU to help keep noise down?

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 Gaming OC 8GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card= £299.99
• 1 x Alpenfohn Brocken 3 CPU Cooler - 140mm= £42.95

Total: £342.94 (includes shipping: £0.00)
​

Granted I expect most of the noise is coming from your RX580 Red Dragon, I have the same card and it's like a jet taking off at stock, I had to undervolt and set a custom fan profile before the noise was in check.

 

[desm0nd]

Thanks for the advice gents, really appreciate it. With fortnite being a game that I run on the lowest graphics settings, would it not be better to upgrade my CPU instead? Or is this completely illogical?

 

[Gray2233]

Try running the MSI Afterburner OSD in game and monitor your CPU and GPU usage, that'll give you a definitive answer.

 

[keylion]

I suspect once you upgrade your graphics card then the processor will be the next weak link as it'll struggle to feed the graphics card at 1080p. Best to do as Gray2233 says as this will give you the answer.

 

[philmo]

I know this is a little off you question ref graphical performance - but what HDD do you have. I just updated my old machine) to a Samsung SSD and it’s made such an overall difference. All be has more effect in speed to simply boot/ and getting around. Also in less frantic games it has also helped when ram limits are pushed and drive access is needed.

 

[desm0nd]

Try running the MSI Afterburner OSD in game and monitor your CPU and GPU usage, that'll give you a definitive answer.

Will give this a try, thanks.

I know this is a little off you question ref graphical performance - but what HDD do you have. I just updated my old machine) to a Samsung SSD and it’s made such an overall difference. All be has more effect in speed to simply boot/ and getting around. Also in less frantic games it has also helped when ram limits are pushed and drive access is needed.

I have a Samsung SSD too, which is the most recent part of my PC. I specifically bought it just to put games onto.

 

[Drumroll]

GPU. Even a much faster GPU won't be bottlenecked by your CPU. At least under normal circumstances.

 

[desm0nd]

Thanks for all of your help and advice, I've decided to overclock the CPU/RAM to get a little performance boost, and will look into upgrading in the future.

 

[mattyfez]

Confused, you should be running higher than minimum graphics if you're averaging 100fps with lows of 60 fps?

What monitor are you using?
Maybe a monitor upgrade would be better?
You could pick up a 1080p 144hz freesync monitor in budjet...

 

[Gray2233]

Confused, you should be running higher than minimum graphics if you're averaging 100fps with lows of 60 fps?

What monitor are you using?
Maybe a monitor upgrade would be better?
You could pick up a 1080p 144hz freesync monitor in budjet...

Given his initial post I'm confident he already has a 144hz monitor.

He's running low settings because framerate is more important to him than graphical fidelity.