Looking for advice on easiest wins to upgrade current gaming setup

orrow11 · 2 Jul 2023 at 16:15

Hi all,

I want to upgrade my gaming computer that I built about 3 years ago as a little side project. I enjoy thinking about my build and looking into spec but am clealry not a tech expert and my knowledge is outdated.

My current build is the following:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
Motherboard: MSI X570-A PRO
Memory: 2 x 8 GB Corsair vengeance
GPU: XFX AMD Radeon RX 5700
Power supply: Seasonic SS-620GM2

Are there some easy wins that I could achieve but upgrading some parts such as the CPU and/or GPU, RAM, or anything else? Or would I get more value for money by looking at a completely new rig? Budget for upgrade for be around £600.

Any advice appreciated.

Cheers,

Orrow

orrow11 · 2 Jul 2023 at 16:17

Forgot to add:

Cooler: Noctua NH-U12S SE-AM4

throwaway4372 · 2 Jul 2023 at 16:26

tell us what games you're playing
what resolution / fps / quality
if you've had any problems

have you used task manager to see whether your cpu/ram/gpu are at 100% utilization?

orrow11 · 2 Jul 2023 at 16:38

Yes. Task manager for utilization and monitoring temps etc. using HWiNFO64. I play games such as CoD, Apex, LoL, or Sea of Thieves and find myself turning down graphic settings to be able to run the games. Experience quite a few crashes and can't have other programmes open when gaming. So I feel utilization is high

orrow11 · 2 Jul 2023 at 16:38

I limit fps at 90 mostly and turn graphics settings down to medium/low. Still getting high temps and a sense that the setup is struggling

mickyflinn · 2 Jul 2023 at 16:48

16gb of memory probably isn't enough when gaming and then trying to open other programs at the same time.

High temps GPU , CPU ?

What temps are they.

What case and fans do you have ?

Tetras · 2 Jul 2023 at 17:09

orrow11 said:
Are there some easy wins that I could achieve but upgrading some parts such as the CPU and/or GPU, RAM, or anything else? Or would I get more value for money by looking at a completely new rig? Budget for upgrade for be around £600.

The 5700 is still fairly decent, so would be hard to upgrade CPU, RAM and GPU for this budget.

A RX 6800 would be a reasonable upgrade, but that costs £400-£450.
A 5800X3D would be a great CPU upgrade, but that costs £250-£300.

Your PSU is quite old too and not well-suited to modern systems, but that'd be another £100 or so.

Headache all around.

What kind of crashes do you mean? CTDs? Blue screens? If you can narrow that down, it might help you decide which to upgrade first.

orrow11 · 2 Jul 2023 at 17:09

GPU in the high 80s at times 90C and above.
CPU in the 65-75C range.

Case: NZXT H510
Fans: Only the cooler (Noctua NH-U12S SE-AM4) and built-in fans in the case.

I have two free RAM slots on the motherboard so adding another 16GB should be feasible.

orrow11 · 2 Jul 2023 at 17:12

Tetras said:
The 5700 is still fairly decent, so would be hard to upgrade CPU, RAM and GPU for this budget.

A RX 6800 would be a reasonable upgrade, but that costs £400-£450.
A 5800X3D would be a great CPU upgrade, but that costs £250-£300.

Your PSU is quite old too and not well-suited to modern systems, but that'd be another £100 or so.

Headache all around.

What kind of crashes do you mean? CTDs? Blue screens? If you can narrow that down, it might help you decide which to upgrade first.

Crashes are quite diverse. When gaming, driver crashes and black screens which I attributed to the high temps, but unsure. I also started getting a lot of blue screens and crashes when opening and closing files, chrome, pictures, etc. Reading up on it that does not sound like GPU issue. Lots to think about and a bit lost tbh...

throwaway4372 · 2 Jul 2023 at 17:12

that case looks like it has very restricted airflow.
give it a test with the front and side off.

Tetras · 2 Jul 2023 at 17:25

orrow11 said:
Crashes are quite diverse. When gaming, driver crashes and black screens which I attributed to the high temps, but unsure. I also started getting a lot of blue screens and crashes when opening and closing files, chrome, pictures, etc. Reading up on it that does not sound like GPU issue. Lots to think about and a bit lost tbh...

Yikes, it sounds like your system is pretty unstable right now.

Without doing any investigation and off the top of my head:
- Driver crashes and black screens can be PSU and GPU, RDNA 1 was known for not being the most stable of cards I'm afraid (though if it worked fine initially, then I'd put less weight on that).
- Blue screens and crashes when opening and close files, chrome and pictures: the most likely is SSD or memory, you could run memtest for the memory and scan the SSD with manufacturer tools, or check the smart data.

When was the last time you did a fresh install?

If you're really sick of your PC and want to start again, you could do something like this:

My basket at OcUK:

1 x AMD Ryzen 5 5600 Six Core 4.4GHz (Socket AM4) Processor - Retail (SKU: CP-3D2-AM) = £149.99
1 x Gigabyte B550 Gaming X V2 (AMD AM4) B550 ATX Motherboard (SKU: MB-594-GI) = £115.99
1 x Team Group Vulcan Z T-Force 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 3200MHz Dual Channel Kit - Grey (SKU: MY-0AJ-TG) = £79.99
1 x PowerColor Radeon RX 6700 XT Fighter 12GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card (SKU: GX-1A5-PC) = £338.99
1 x be quiet! Pure Power 12 M 750W ATX 3.0 80 Plus Gold Power Supply (SKU: CA-14S-BQ) = £109.99

Total: £802.94 (includes delivery: £7.99)

But, it would be hard to get your money back on your parts when you'd have to sell them as potentially faulty and it's rather poor value compared to buying the best value upgrades that you actually need.

orrow11 · 2 Jul 2023 at 17:39

Very yikes... Quite fed up with the setup currently. Thank you for the feedback so far.

Did a complete reformat 2 weeks ago in the hope that might fix some things. Fresh windows install, BIOS update, chipset update, GPU driver update, thermal paste renewal... The crashes and errors are the same as before unfortunetely. My GPU was relatively unstable early on with CTDs fairly frequently but not as bad as currently.

Given the blue screens and crashes, before opting for a new rig, would you recommend trying a new SSD? If that eliminates the blue screen crashes what would be the next best upgrades?
- 16GB of RAM, power supply, & 5800X3D
- and RX 6800 a bit later?

Would my motherboard be good enough if I upgrade the other parts over time?

Or would I just be patching holes and I should rather ride it out a bit longer to get a complete new build?

tamzzy · 2 Jul 2023 at 17:47

your rig has life left tbh. i would be trying to isolate the problem part if this were my rig.
if the crashes are random, i would start by resetting bios back to stock
then run memtest: https://www.memtest86.com/download.htm
those would be my first steps
if memtest passes with no issues, then start by using the rig fully at stock and see if the crashes etc reoccur

sweols · 2 Jul 2023 at 18:01

I have recently upgraded from a 3700x to a 5800x3d and the results are astounding. I have a very similar motherboard to you, and certainly 'revives' the existing architecture. I don't know what resolution you play on, but most games I play, eat RAM, so I opted for 32gb (two 16gb kit).

decto · 2 Jul 2023 at 21:18

Shop around and pick up Ryzen 5700X with RTX 4070
Sell the 3600 and RX5700, with what a used items store currently offering you'll only be a little over £600 budget.

Then scratch around the sofa cushions for a bit of extra ram, literally cheap as chips these days.

CPU and GPU are low wattage so should be no issue with the PSU.

Tetras · 2 Jul 2023 at 21:27

orrow11 said:
Given the blue screens and crashes, before opting for a new rig, would you recommend trying a new SSD?

Not yet. SSDs are one of the few items you can test fairly easily in-situ without a swap handy. Run the manufacturer tools and post the smart data from crystaldiskinfo (or similar).

Also run memtest as tamzzy suggested, since memory (or memory config) is a very common cause of BSODs.

orrow11 said:
Would my motherboard be good enough if I upgrade the other parts over time?

Yes, if the board is fully working, then it is a good board.

orrow11 said:
If that eliminates the blue screen crashes what would be the next best upgrades?
- 16GB of RAM, power supply, & 5800X3D
- and RX 6800 a bit later?

They would all be good upgrades, though I'd be inclined to buy 32GB and sell the existing 16GB, if you can confirm it isn't faulty.

orrow11 said:
Or would I just be patching holes and I should rather ride it out a bit longer to get a complete new build?

No, you absolutely can make this system a base, but try to figure out what is going wrong. If you can't start eliminating components that are causing all these crashes, then that suggests a different decision.

orrow11 said:
My GPU was relatively unstable early on with CTDs fairly frequently but not as bad as currently.

CTDs too? Blimey. I'm surprised you put up with this for so long. While CTDs can be cause by hardware (more likely unstable overclocks of CPU/memory), they can be software too, so I'm less concerned about those than the driver crashes, black screens and BSODs.

orrow11 · 2 Jul 2023 at 22:17

Thanks for all the suggestions. It will take me a bit to work through these but will try and report back soon.

jigger · 3 Jul 2023 at 12:08

orrow11 said:
Very yikes... Quite fed up with the setup currently. Thank you for the feedback so far.

Did a complete reformat 2 weeks ago in the hope that might fix some things. Fresh windows install, BIOS update, chipset update, GPU driver update, thermal paste renewal... The crashes and errors are the same as before unfortunetely. My GPU was relatively unstable early on with CTDs fairly frequently but not as bad as currently.

Given the blue screens and crashes, before opting for a new rig, would you recommend trying a new SSD? If that eliminates the blue screen crashes what would be the next best upgrades?
- 16GB of RAM, power supply, & 5800X3D
- and RX 6800 a bit later?

Would my motherboard be good enough if I upgrade the other parts over time?

Or would I just be patching holes and I should rather ride it out a bit longer to get a complete new build?

I wouldn’t upgrade the PSU unless it has developed a fault. The Seasonic KM2 is is legendary line of PSUs.

orrow11 · 4 Jul 2023 at 09:08

I secure erased my SSD yesterday and wiped my HDD. Before I did that I used crystaldiskinfo as suggested above to check the drives' health. Both passed with 'Good' and the SSD had a remaining life of 90%.

I then proceeded to perform a stock reset of the BIOS. It said everything was at default already. Next I used memtest. It has been running overnight and shows thousands of errors. I don't know how to interpret the results: https://imgur.com/a/aLd7Wh8. The test is still running after its 5th pass. Does it produce a report when it finishes and do I therefore let it run or can I cancel it now?

Would appreciate some advice on next steps.

mickyflinn · 4 Jul 2023 at 10:30

Cancel it it will keep running.

You should now run memtest one stick at a time, 2 passes is enough to see if both sticks are faulty, but you will have to return them as a pair anyway.