Upgrade advice for gaming and Ableton live

[Logan_ps]

Hi,

I wonder if anyone can give me some guidance.

I currently have:

u2713mh display - 60hz 1440p
8gb 1800 ddr3 Hyper x predator
gfx card msi gaming X - 1080, 8gb ram (I got this cos I thought it was what I needed to run 1440p - my monitor native)
power supplycorsair ax750
2x 250gb ssd
i30 arctic cooler
i7 3770k clocked to 4.2g
ASUS p8z77-v pro motherboard

Only the graphics card is newish. The rest I've had for 6 years.

I've recently been playing BfV and noticed that my system struggles with it. I thought I may be able to solve this by upgrading to 16gb ram - but it would mean I have to get 2 new 8g sticks, because my CPU cooler blocks one of the ram sockets. This would cost me around £100 and I could sell the 2 sticks of 4g ddr3 ram for about £30 on ebay (I think).

I'm not certain that's my total bottleneck, so it could be money wasted - and i've recently had health problems and lost my job, so I'm not flush with cash.

Instead of doing this upgrade of ram, I considered getting a new MB, ddr4 ram and CPU - but i've only really got about £450 to spend; maybe a little more at a stretch.

Could anyone tell me whether they think it's worth me getting some new ram, or do I have to hold off till I can afford to upgrade to a new MB/CPU/ddr4 ram? Is my 3770k past it's use by date?

I'm really not sure what to do. I use my PC for gaming and music production, running Ableton Live.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Danny75]

Hi, welcome to the forum.

I would proceed on the assumption that the 3770K, albeit getting on, should still cut the mustard for gaming. You won't get quite as much fps as with modern chips in some scenarios but the experience should still be good. So would try other things first.

Low-profile RAM fits under the i30 Arctic Freezer's fan from pics I've seen. Just have to remove the cooler to fit the RAM then mount it again with new thermal paste. DDR3 won't be re-usable with a more recent platform when the time comes, so save some money and get used 2x4GB for £25-ish. That wouldn't be a huge expense to test whether 16GB improves the BFV experience and you can just resell it at basically the same price if not. Or borrow some DDR3 from someone to test if they don't mind.

There are also things you can do to bring RAM usage down, including disabling Superfetch in Windows Services, and Prefetch in the Registry. I'm not even sure the latter needs doing, the former has more impact now, but there's no harm in doing both.

SuperFetch has also been known to cause performance issues while gaming, particularly on systems that have 4GB of RAM or less. It’s unclear why this happens because it doesn’t occur for everybody, but we suspect it has to do with RAM-heavy games that constantly request and free up memory, which may cause SuperFetch to constantly load and unload data.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/what-is-superfetch/

NOTE: Superfetch has recently been renamed as "SysMain" in Services.

You can also go into your Network Adapter properties, hit Configure and Advanced, and check what size the Receive and Transmit buffers are set to. There's usually no issues setting them to 512MB each, even less in some cases. If you find they are set to 1024MB each, that basically frees 1GB right there. Can even test at 256MB and see how it goes.

While in there, check "Maximum number of RSS Queues Enabled". If it's set to 4, bring it down to 2.

If you still want a new mobo/cpu/ram, it's doable no problem. Just that if you can sort out any issues and keep going you'll get better for your money when time comes with even newer stuff. Ryzen 3xxx for example.

 

[Danny75]

Here's the instructions for disabling Prefetch which I forgot to add earlier:

Disable Prefetch: Type Regedit into the Start menu's Search box - Select the file path "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters"
Right-click on both EnablePrefetcher and EnableSuperfetch
Select Modify on each of these to change the value from 1 (or 3) to 0
Restart

To squeeze even more MB's, you can also disable Windows Search (through Services) and Indexing (in your Drive/s Properties). And disable write caching on your drive/s through Device Manager > right-click on drive/s and Policies tab.

Might be a bit of a faff but it could well free up just about enough memory to see whether lack of it is the issue.

 

[Logan_ps]

Thanks for your help Danny. Followed your instructions and it does seem to be running smoother.
I'm going to try and hold out on upgrading till next year when hopefully my finances will be in better order and I can afford a decent upgrade.

 

[Danny75]

You're welcome. Should be more competition between AMD and Intel and AMD and Nvidia around then.

And disable write caching on your drive/s through Device Manager > right-click on drive/s and Policies tab.

This can impact performance in other ways (SSD benchmarks and writes with mechanical drives) so now that it's smoother, I'd turn it back on and leave it on if it doesn't impact gaming.