Advice on upgrading my Pc for 144Hrtz gaming

[koppriley1]

Howdy,

I built my current PC a few years ago and am looking for advice on which components to upgrade to drive my new 1080p 144hrtz monitor. specs are:

i5 4460 (1150)
El cheapo motherboard
8gb of ram
1050ti

i primarily play esports games like cs go and overwatch, but i am finding that i cant maintain stable high frame rates, even with lowered settings. i am on a budget, so i am looking for the biggest performance swing. I live in Australia.

i understand that the 1050ti is meant to be an excellent entry level GPU, so am i being held back by my CPU? Would i get more stable FPS with a new GPU?

Would i be better off upgrading to an i5 8400 with 16gb of ram? Also there is a cheap used 4790(non K) near me, would that be a better option?

Thanks for reading, sorry for any formatting and grammar errors, Im bad at forums and English

 

[terry4536]

If you are going to upgrade, I would skip the I5-8400. I would chose the I5-8600K instead. It is $60 more, but it is worth it for a faster CPU and the option to overclock. if you stick to the $199 for the I5-8400, then you are probably better off going the Ryzen route with the RYZEN 5 2600X 6-Core 3.6 GHz (4.2 GHz Max Boost) at $219 or RYZEN 5 1600X 6-Core 3.6 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) at $199. And you could stick with the 16 GB of DDR4.

I wouldn't get the used I7-4790. Yes you could reuse your motherboard, but it wouldn't be an upgrade as much as going sideways.

You probably would get more for your money upgrading the graphics card, but you would be still stuck with the i5 4460.

 

[guanyu210379]

If you want to go for platoform upgrade get only one of these (best solution):
Oc: Ryzen 5 2600 or Ryzen 7 2700 or I5 8600k or I7 8700k. the best values are the 2600 and 8600k, no need to go higher for budget gaming.
No-OC: Ryzen 5 2600x or Ryzen 7 2700x. The best value is only the 2600x, no need to go higher for budget gaming. There is no Intel here to my liking.
Note: you can go higher if you do more stuffs e.g. gaming+streaming, editing, etc.

Going for 4770 or 4790 (k or no k) or E3-1230V3 or 1231V3 is also ok but only if you can find dirt cheap second-handed item.

Now, I5 4460 is not yet a bottleneck for most games but already a bottleneck on some new processor heavy AAA games.
For CS-GO and Overwatch, your I5 4460 should be actually still good enough. Going for stronger GPU, get an SSD and add 8GB more RAM would be perhaps better.

Note: I would go for that cheapo 4790, if it is really cheap then wait for a couple more generation before going for big upgrade.