Help upgrading my son's gaming pc for xmas...

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.

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?

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