Hello everyone,
A friend told me to try posting this question here for help upgrading my 15 yr old son's gaming pc.
Please forgive my lack of knowledge... I am a total newb to all things gaming LOL
I've included screenshots of the specs on his current pc. He plays Apex Legends mostly, as well as GTA and Sniper Elite 4 & he wants to live stream with his own Twitch channel... but the current setup is too slow and the graphics aren't working well. I am thinking we either need a new graphics card or processor... or perhaps both. I have no idea what would be required to make upgrades work with his pc.
Any help you can give on specific items we can purchase & other tips to fix this would be MUCH appreciated :-)
Thanks so much,
Sarai
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Userlevel 1
The gpu might be alright at medium settings - given that it supports nvenc for video encoding; make sure that's being used by whatever he's using to stream.
CPU is going to be a bottleneck to the gpu - it's 8 years old, single thread perf is not good and multi thread perf on that model is pretty bad; back then amd would do well on multi-threaded performance and lose out on single threaded, but this chip is bad all round.
8gb memory - not enough to be doing streaming competently, I would imagine it's a single stick as well so you'd take a hit for single channel. Hard drive instead of an SSD, is going to be bad for loading times and sequential read whilst streaming will be terrible.
Here's a budget reccomendation:
- AMD Ryzen 5 3500X
- ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming (or Any B550 chipset mobo)
- 16GB (2x8GB) Corsair DDR4 Vengeance (or Any cheap 3000mhz+ ddr4 - must be a min of 2 sticks for dual channel)
- 250GB WD Blue SN550, M.2 (2280) PCIe 3.0 (or any SSD that has a dram cache)
- Keep the existing hard drive for a game library cache or general purpose storage.
I price that at about $330
He could obviously get a better GPU as well - not necessary, but would yield higher framerates and visual fidelity.
CPU is going to be a bottleneck to the gpu - it's 8 years old, single thread perf is not good and multi thread perf on that model is pretty bad; back then amd would do well on multi-threaded performance and lose out on single threaded, but this chip is bad all round.
8gb memory - not enough to be doing streaming competently, I would imagine it's a single stick as well so you'd take a hit for single channel. Hard drive instead of an SSD, is going to be bad for loading times and sequential read whilst streaming will be terrible.
Here's a budget reccomendation:
- AMD Ryzen 5 3500X
- ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming (or Any B550 chipset mobo)
- 16GB (2x8GB) Corsair DDR4 Vengeance (or Any cheap 3000mhz+ ddr4 - must be a min of 2 sticks for dual channel)
- 250GB WD Blue SN550, M.2 (2280) PCIe 3.0 (or any SSD that has a dram cache)
- Keep the existing hard drive for a game library cache or general purpose storage.
I price that at about $330
He could obviously get a better GPU as well - not necessary, but would yield higher framerates and visual fidelity.
dcrdev
The gpu might be alright at medium settings - given that it supports nvenc for video encoding; make sure that's being used by whatever he's using to stream.
CPU is going to be a bottleneck to the gpu - it's 8 years old, single thread perf is not good and multi thread perf on that model is pretty bad; back then amd would do well on multi-threaded performance and lose out on single threaded, but this chip is bad all round.
8gb memory - not enough to be doing streaming competently, I would imagine it's a single stick as well so you'd take a hit for single channel. Hard drive instead of an SSD, is going to be bad for loading times and sequential read whilst streaming will be terrible.
Here's a budget reccomendation:
- AMD Ryzen 5 3500X
- ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming (or Any B550 chipset mobo)
- 16GB (2x8GB) Corsair DDR4 Vengeance (or Any cheap 3000mhz+ ddr4 - must be a min of 2 sticks for dual channel)
- 250GB WD Blue SN550, M.2 (2280) PCIe 3.0 (or any SSD that has a dram cache)
- Keep the existing hard drive for a game library cache or general purpose storage.
I price that at about $330
He could obviously get a better GPU as well - not necessary, but would yield higher framerates and visual fidelity.
———————
Thanks so much for replying with all that wonderful info!! One question though... how did you arrive at the total of $330? I can’t seem to find the ryzen 3500x... but the ryzen 5 3600 is upwards of $333 on Amazon. Is there another place I should look for these items on a budget?
Userlevel 1
I'm in the UK - it appears to be cheaper here than it is in the us.
But this seems like the best us price: https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-5-3500x/p/274-000M-001B6
But this seems like the best us price: https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-5-3500x/p/274-000M-001B6
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