Upgrading suggestions for my sons rig

Steviep146 · 19 Jun 2020 at 13:19

Hello everyone.
Firstly thanks for reading this and I would appreciate your input and which way to go.
My son's 14 end of next month and he has said he doesn't really want anything for his birthday. I should leave it at that and be fine but I can't because he never really asks for anything.
Anyway his current pc is
I5 4690k not overclocked on gigabyte mobo
16gb ddr3 ram 1600
Rx 580 8gb
SSD for operating system
HDD for games
144hz freesync monitor.
It plays everything he wants it to and well apart from his favourite game ark survival evolved. It's purely optimised and he runs out on a mix of low to med settings.
So I've been looking at and cards because of the freesync monitor. Was looking at Vega 64 and Rx 5600 xt. Not sure which way to go to improve ark.
Originally I was looking to upgrade his other components with a ryzen setup but back tracked as the 4690 is still ok for gaming and I think he'll see better gains from that money spent upgrading his GPU. There's more choice in that bracket in Nvidia range but then he loses freesync side of it.

Any suggestions that I might be missing would be most appreciated.
Thanks Steve

Disco Boy · 19 Jun 2020 at 13:55

I'd probably start with spending the time to overclock his CPU. That is of course free and a nice thing to do for him.

After that, what are his peripherals like? Any scope for a nice new keyboard/ mouse/ headset?

bagel · 19 Jun 2020 at 13:57

GPU upgrade likely will see the most gains, 5600xt/5700(xt) would be a decent improvement

Steviep146 · 19 Jun 2020 at 14:12

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm leaning towards the Rx 5600 xt. Was looking at the Vegas 64 and then undervolting it.
I was looking to overclock it as he has a hyper 212 cooler on it but it runs at 3.9 GHz when on any demanding games anyway and I'm not sure what gains I would get overclocking it. I will do it when it bottlenecks the gpu.

Steviep146 · 28 Jun 2020 at 15:45

I ended up swapping my Ryzen 2600 plus mobo and 16gb ram for his one and I've bought him a Rx Vega 56 sapphire pulse with Morpheus cooler off eBay. Seller didn't use it much and checked the memory for me and it's Samsung so hopefully I can undervolt and overclock it and keep it cool.