Currently playing Fallout 4 but I will need to upgrade soon.

[Elkattio]

Hello all,

I am currently playing Fallout 4 on my PC, but it occasionally crashes, freezes, or lags up. I know I'll need to upgrade some hardware soon if I want to keep up with the gaming market, I'm just inexperienced in this process since I'm still using the only PC I've ever built. Based upon my specs, what would be your recommendations?
_____

AMD FX-8350 Processor - 8-Core, Socket AM3+, 4GHz, 8 MB L2 Cache, 8 MB L3 Cache

Gigabyte AMD AM3+ Motherboard - ATX, Socket AM3+, AMD 970/SB950 Chipset, 2000MHz DDR3, SATA 6.0Gb/s, RAID, 7.1 Channel Audio, Gigabit LAN, USB 3.0

Kingston HyperX Fury Red 8GB Desktop Memory Module - 1866MHz DDR3, CL10, DIMM

Ultra LSP Series V2 550-Watt Power Supply - ATX, 6x SATA, 2x PCI-E, 20/24 PIN, Thermal Controlled 135mm fan, Single +12V Rail, Short Circuit, Over-Voltage and Thermal Protection

Gigabyte AMD Radeon R9 270 (GV-R927OC-2GD) 2048 MB GDDR5 SDRAM

Cooler Master - Hyper 212 EVO Universal CPU Cooler - 120mm Fan With PWM, LGA 1366, 1156, 1155, 775, FM1, AM3+, AM3, AM2+, AM2 - RR-212E-20PK-R2

Cougar Solution Black Steel Gaming ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - 1x120mm Cougar Turbine Hyper-Spin Bearing Fan, USB 3.0 port, Water Cooling Ready, Supports 320mm Long VGA Card, Air Filter Included

 

[AGiLE KiTTY]

Hello,

Everything looks good. You have a decent PC. I would recommend doing few upgrades though. I would suggest buying a new GPU. Probably a GTX 970. And do a healthy overclock to FX-8350. Therefore you might need a better cooler. Plus consider buying a Seasonic PSU.

Hope this helped

 

[Elkattio]

Hello,

Everything looks good. You have a decent PC. I would recommend doing few upgrades though. I would suggest buying a new GPU. Probably a GTX 970. And do a healthy overclock to FX-8350. Therefore you might need a better cooler. Plus consider buying a Seasonic PSU.

Hope this helped

I forgot to mention the aftermarket cooling unit I installed. I went ahead and edited it into the original post.

Cooler Master - Hyper 212 EVO Universal CPU Cooler - 120mm Fan With PWM, LGA 1366, 1156, 1155, 775, FM1, AM3+, AM3, AM2+, AM2 - RR-212E-20PK-R2

 

[James Mason]

Hello,

Everything looks good. You have a decent PC. I would recommend doing few upgrades though. I would suggest buying a new GPU. Probably a GTX 970. And do a healthy overclock to FX-8350. Therefore you might need a better cooler. Plus consider buying a Seasonic PSU.

Hope this helped

I agree. Your CPU is okayish, a bigger GPU like a 970, or if you can wait a month or two, the vastly superior 1070 and a new PSU (because yours is low quality and actually kind of dangerous to use) like a seasonic/xfx of the 550-650 watt range.

 

[AGiLE KiTTY]

Hello,

Everything looks good. You have a decent PC. I would recommend doing few upgrades though. I would suggest buying a new GPU. Probably a GTX 970. And do a healthy overclock to FX-8350. Therefore you might need a better cooler. Plus consider buying a Seasonic PSU.

Hope this helped

I forgot to mention the aftermarket cooling unit I installed. I went ahead and edited it into the original post.

Cooler Master - Hyper 212 EVO Universal CPU Cooler - 120mm Fan With PWM, LGA 1366, 1156, 1155, 775, FM1, AM3+, AM3, AM2+, AM2 - RR-212E-20PK-R2

Hyper 212 Evo is a good cooler and probably the most famous one out there. You can achieve a decent overclock with that. But don't expect record breaking overclocks with it. And with the above mentioned upgrades you should be good to go.

 

[Elkattio]

Hello,

Everything looks good. You have a decent PC. I would recommend doing few upgrades though. I would suggest buying a new GPU. Probably a GTX 970. And do a healthy overclock to FX-8350. Therefore you might need a better cooler. Plus consider buying a Seasonic PSU.

Hope this helped

I agree. Your CPU is okayish, a bigger GPU like a 970, or if you can wait a month or two, the vastly superior 1070 and a new PSU (because yours is low quality and actually kind of dangerous to use) like a seasonic/xfx of the 550-650 watt range.

Alright, I'm curious... I understand the low quality part, but why is it dangerous?

 

[James Mason]

Alright, I'm curious... I understand the low quality part, but why is it dangerous?

In the best case scenario, it will short out and damage your computer hardware.
At worst, it could burn your house down.

It's on the "avoid at all costs" tier:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-2547993/psu-tier-list.html

 

[AGiLE KiTTY]

I personally haven't even heard about your PSU brand. I would definitely suggest something like Seasonic G550M or Seasonic S12II. Don't risk your valuable components with a low quality PSU.

 

[Elkattio]

Alright, I'm curious... I understand the low quality part, but why is it dangerous?

In the best case scenario, it will short out and damage your computer hardware.
At worst, it could burn your house down.

It's on the "avoid at all costs" tier:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-2547993/psu-tier-list.html

That is a bit worrisome considering I've been using it for nearly 2 years.

 

[jsgrant31]

I would start with the PSU as Ultra is not known to be a quality brand. Check the link in my signature for more info but something like EVGA, Seasonic, or XFX would be a good brand to start with. This is important as a bad quality PSU is more likely to fail and it can damage other components when it goes. Your case may also be relevant as it's nice to have a quality case that provides proper airflow. It's also generally quite nice to have an SSD with your OS on it for a faster system.

Everything else I would upgrade as it becomes necessary based on a specific game or thing you want to do/play and not just for the sake of upgrading. If Fallout 4 on a 270 isn't how you'd like to play it you can start with the GPU. The 8350 is still regarded as ok as far as I know; you can wait until the next line of CPUs come out otherwise the general recommendation will be to switch to an i5 if the 8350 is hurting performance.

So I'd start with looking at your PSU, case, and adding an SSD if you want and then you can assess CPU/mobo/RAM/GPU based on the games you want to play.

 

[Elkattio]

I would start with the PSU as Ultra is not known to be a quality brand. Check the link in my signature for more info but something like EVGA, Seasonic, or XFX would be a good brand to start with. This is important as a bad quality PSU is more likely to fail and it can damage other components when it goes. Your case may also be relevant as it's nice to have a quality case that provides proper airflow. It's also generally quite nice to have an SSD with your OS on it for a faster system.

Everything else I would upgrade as it becomes necessary based on a specific game or thing you want to do/play and not just for the sake of upgrading. If Fallout 4 on a 270 isn't how you'd like to play it you can start with the GPU. The 8350 is still regarded as ok as far as I know; you can wait until the next line of CPUs come out otherwise the general recommendation will be to switch to an i5 if the 8350 is hurting performance.

So I'd start with looking at your PSU, case, and adding an SSD if you want and then you can assess CPU/mobo/RAM/GPU based on the games you want to play.

Yes, based upon what I've been reading, the PSU definitely needs to go. This is my current case:

Cougar Solution Black Steel Gaming ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - 1x120mm Cougar Turbine Hyper-Spin Bearing Fan, USB 3.0 port, Water Cooling Ready, Supports 320mm Long VGA Card, Air Filter Included

I'll edit that into the original post, as well.

 

[Elkattio]

I've installed a new Seasonic 520w PSU and upped my memory to 32gb. Still having the same problems with freezing, crashing, and getting the "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered," more often than before.

This is becoming a headache.

 

[AGiLE KiTTY]

I've installed a new Seasonic 520w PSU and upped my memory to 32gb. Still having the same problems with freezing, crashing, and getting the "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered," more often than before.

This is becoming a headache.

I got multiple solutions here.
1) Try this fix withy the download. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2665946
2) Clean install Drivers. (Not Windows xD) You can use AMD clean install Utility since you have an AMD gpu.

Post results here

 

[James Mason]

If you have graphics or driver issues, one of the most common fixes is a clean uninstall and removal of your graphics drivers.

To uninstall your drivers, first download and run Display Driver Uninstaller, and follow it's recommendations of booting into safe mode and ect.
(This is a direct download link so you don't grab the wrong version)
http://www.guru3d.com/files-get/display-driver-uninstaller-download,20.html

You'll download a compressed file called "[Guru3D.com]-DDU.zip"
Right click and choose extract.
Go into the folder and run the DDU v##.##.exe
This will extract more files to this folder.
Run Display Driver Uninstaller.exe
Choose Yes when it asks you to boot into SafeMode.
After you've rebooted into safe mode.
When DDU comes up, if it hasn't selected your GPU manufacturer (Nvidia/AMD/Intel) then choose it from the drop down list
Press the Clean and Restart option
If a window comes up asking to disable the Windows automatic installation of display drivers click yes.

After (or before removing the old drivers, just put the new ones on the desktop or somewhere handy) rebooting back into Windows, manually download the latest drivers from Nvidia or AMD, don't use auto detect, choose you GPU model and OS from the drop down lists.
Nvidia: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
AMD: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download