[SOLVED] Budget build upgrade

[nhardinger2003]

So ive got a budget build that was my first pc 2 years ago now. I think its time to look at upgrades. My question is so ive got a asrock ab350m pro 4 motherboard a 2400g and 2x4gb ddr4 3200 corsair vengence ram. My main question is if id put a 3600 in would that be a bad idea since its a b350 chipset instead of 450 or 570? My other question is if id get 16 gigs would it benefit me more gaming and being productive or not? My other main question is ive got a 1060 6gb, if id throw a 3600 in their and 16 gigs of ram, would the 1060 be a bottleneck or no? Im betting that this would be the last deacnt upgrade i can afford with this system before i should just look at upgrading the whole thing. Basically what im asking is if id throw a 3600, 16 gigs of ram onto my b350 motherboard along with my 1060, would i have to worry about any instability or bottlenecks? Would upgrading the motherboard help? Or should i just stick with what ive got wait a few more years and just upgrade the whole system for whatever comes out then?

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Your motherboard would work fine with a 3600 however you would need to update the BIOS.

16gb ram would definitely be nice benefit for multitasking, though most games run fine on 8g.

Honestly, the 2400g is a decent CPU. I would upgrade your GPU and ram before I would worry about your CPU.

 

[jeremyj_83]

With an upgrade to the P5.90 or later BIOS your motherboard will support the newest Ryzen CPUs. https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/AB350M Pro4/index.asp#CPU That CPU upgrade will be pretty significant. Clock for clock the 3600 will be about 15% faster than the 2400G. When it comes to single threaded applications the 3600 will boost 300MHz higher than the 2400G adding more performance. All that said with your current GPU the difference between the 2 CPUs while gaming will be minimal. When you get into GTX 1080 or higher territory at 1080p is when the difference in the CPUs will be more noticeable. However, even then it is game specific and the difference in FPS might be exceeding your monitors refresh rate. https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2594?vs=2333 I concur that going with more RAM and a better GPU will help out more right now. Then in a couple years when Ryzen 5000 or 6000 is out, going with a new motherboard & DDR5 RAM will be the way to go.

 

[nhardinger2003]

Your motherboard would work fine with a 3600 however you would need to update the BIOS.

16gb ram would definitely be nice benefit for multitasking, though most games run fine on 8g.

Honestly, the 2400g is a decent CPU. I would upgrade your GPU and ram before I would worry about your CPU.

Yep i know about the bios update, as for memory thats the main reason is i do light video editing and im always running out of ram, plus some games like bf5 and space engineers use up almost all 8 gigs, makes it hard to run that and say discord at the same time. I know i dont necessarily need to upgrade the cpu but having another 2 cores and 4 threads will make it a little better preformance wise while gaming. As for better gpu, thats where money starts to become an issue, i could try to score a 1080 used but not sure how well it would work on the mb. Id love to go rtx for the ray tracing but theirs no way i can afford another 300 investment for one component. At that point even for a 2060 my cpu would probably be bottlenecked by either the board or gpu.

 

[nhardinger2003]

With an upgrade to the P5.90 or later BIOS your motherboard will support the newest Ryzen CPUs. https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/AB350M Pro4/index.asp#CPU That CPU upgrade will be pretty significant. Clock for clock the 3600 will be about 15% faster than the 2400G. When it comes to single threaded applications the 3600 will boost 300MHz higher than the 2400G adding more performance. All that said with your current GPU the difference between the 2 CPUs while gaming will be minimal. When you get into GTX 1080 or higher territory at 1080p is when the difference in the CPUs will be more noticeable. However, even then it is game specific and the difference in FPS might be exceeding your monitors refresh rate. https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2594?vs=2333 I concur that going with more RAM and a better GPU will help out more right now. Then in a couple years when Ryzen 5000 or 6000 is out, going with a new motherboard & DDR5 RAM will be the way to go.

At that point though i might as well just not upgrade anything in the system save the money now and just use it in a few years when new things come out. Id love to just drop a couple hundred and get a whole new system, i really want ray tracing and the storage stuff that comes with the 3rd gen ryzen. Maybe upgrading my ram to 16 gigs at least and holding off on cpu and gpu upgrade may be the best solution? I know the motherboard was the main concern i had too with future upgrades.

 

[jeremyj_83]

At that point though i might as well just not upgrade anything in the system save the money now and just use it in a few years when new things come out. Id love to just drop a couple hundred and get a whole new system, i really want ray tracing and the storage stuff that comes with the 3rd gen ryzen. Maybe upgrading my ram to 16 gigs at least and holding off on cpu and gpu upgrade may be the best solution? I know the motherboard was the main concern i had too with future upgrades.

The additional RAM will be a worthwhile upgrade. With the cost of RAM right now, unless the budget is very tight there is no reason to go less than 16GB. My home desktop has 32GB and when I upgrade it I won't go less than that. Right now it is using 9.6GB with 4 Firefox tabs, Slack, Outlook , and RDP running. A lot of it is then used by the OS, average fresh boot uses 4.5-5GB.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

The additional RAM will be a worthwhile upgrade. With the cost of RAM right now, unless the budget is very tight there is no reason to go less than 16GB. My home desktop has 32GB and when I upgrade it I won't go less than that. Right now it is using 9.6GB with 4 Firefox tabs, Slack, Outlook , and RDP running. A lot of it is then used by the OS, average fresh boot uses 4.5-5GB.

Should be noted, with a smaller amount of ram windows will cache fewer things and use less ram, so someone with 4gb of ram will probably see windows use more like 3-4gb at idle.

 

[nhardinger2003]

The additional RAM will be a worthwhile upgrade. With the cost of RAM right now, unless the budget is very tight there is no reason to go less than 16GB. My home desktop has 32GB and when I upgrade it I won't go less than that. Right now it is using 9.6GB with 4 Firefox tabs, Slack, Outlook , and RDP running. A lot of it is then used by the OS, average fresh boot uses 4.5-5GB.

Yeah ive currently got 8 gigs, planning on going to 16 gigs, i really dont need 32 for what im doing/playing. Im currently using 3.5 gigs with one google tab and discord open. I want to make sure i dont run out of memory, last time i tried to upgrade however i had lots of bsod and memtest 86 came back with lots of errors.

 

[nhardinger2003]

Should be noted, with a smaller amount of ram windows will cache fewer things and use less ram, so someone with 4gb of ram will probably see windows use more like 3-4gb at idle.

Yeah, im seeing like 3.5 gigs to 1.5 used at idle, playing bf5 im up to 7.8/8. Id like to get 16 to have a little more head room.

 

[jeremyj_83]

Yeah, im seeing like 3.5 gigs to 1.5 used at idle, playing bf5 im up to 7.8/8. Id like to get 16 to have a little more head room.

When someone has 8GB RAM, you will find that performance of the computer starts to drop when 6GB is being used. At that point you will find that the computer starts having micro-stutters as not everything is in cache. Once you get to 16GB RAM then you don't have that as often for a desktop as there is enough space in the RAM for caching.

Should be noted, with a smaller amount of ram windows will cache fewer things and use less ram, so someone with 4gb of ram will probably see windows use more like 3-4gb at idle.

I know that all to well with my laptop from 2013. I cannot upgrade the RAM due to it being all soldered onto the motherboard. 4GB RAM on Win 10 64bit is almost unusable. The amount of time it takes to do anything just because the OS goes to disk all the time is infuriating.