Question If it was for you to buy one of these "Gaming prebuilds", what would you change first?

[ImRenix]

Hello! As the title says, I found myself in quite of a dilemma.

About a year ago I dare to say, I found this gem (https://support.hp.com/at-de/document/c06266717) for a great price. (Just under 1k)

So I decided to purchase it, not knowing what I would get myself into. I made some upgrades. I changed the case, to a Coolermaster TD500 mesh front, changed the ram sticks... I even changed the cooler that comes with the CPU to the known 212 Evo. I also upgraded, I dare to say the motherboard, I went with a z390 UD from Gigabyte.

This is my latest run of Userbenchmark after changing everything. ( https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/45853889 )

Now, my issue is. I feel the computer is not performing as well as it should. In a lot of games I have jaggies which I got used to, really. Anyways back to the main topic, in games like csgo I only can mantain 200-300 FPS on Mirage. I do find that very concerning, as a friend of mine switched to AMD side of things and he's getting literally double my FPS with a ryzen 5 3600.

My question now is, moving to AMD is THAT much of a difference or is there something in my sistem that is slowing me down? Honestly all I can think that is bad would be the RAM I have, it's very old and I have it from 2 builds ago. I replaced it because the computer came with only 1 stick.

Thank you for reading.

 

[4745454b]

The ram is odd, most don't use 2400MHz anymore. Does it have any faster settings? XMP enabled? I'm not sure moving to 3000/3200MHz will really change things that much. Certainly not double your frame rates.

Drivers? Temps? What frame rates with what settings in what games?

 

[ImRenix]

I know the ram is odd, it's also very old. It is from a older build of mine and came from another prebuilt. I had to change the one that came with the computer because it was single channel memory, though it was just a tad faster (2666 MHz). Anyways, now running dual channel 8 gigs. I was planning on changing the ram cause I found some great offerings at 3000 mhz for about 60 euro's.

I can "overclock" this ram up to 2666 MHz. (Or that is what HWinfo recommanded me to do, I am guessing the RAM is limited to 2666 MHz even with an overclock)and yes, XMP enabled.

I am on my latest GPU drivers. I got Nvidia GeForce installed just because of Shadowplay.

Since I moved to air cooling, my temps have been lower on the CPU. 50 to 60-65 in heavy CPU usage games (csgo, BeamNG). My GPU is another story though. It has a crappy cooler with only one fan (blower) which has a VERY bad fan courve. I would hit even 95 degrees (open case) on the hottest spot of the GPU(according to HWinfo). I adjusted the fan courve with MSI afterburner and seems that it's been fixed, now blowing a bit louder but definitely cooler, at about 75 Celsius.

I am quite a bit of a graphic "whore" and that is also why I got this rather expensive PC, I tend to play most of my games on max settings, even x8 MSAA where able to.

I believe I fixed my issue last night when I changed my fan curve of my GPU, as HWinfo was informing me that I was getting thermal throttling from the GPU. I guess you should never trust HP's fan curve on expensive blower GPU's.

Anyways my next step is to change the RAM, and I don't know if I will, or able to upgrade my CPU at some point, maybe only going Ryzen? I also for some reason don't trust this PSU, even though it's Plat rated and 750 W from HP.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Good idea not trusting that power supply. Sometimes where corners are cut is the power supply, but if they go out they can take your components with them potentially depending on the build quality of the power supply.

 

[4745454b]

You had jaggies with 8x AA?

05C is rather close to the max temp for a gpu. And because it was throttling it should have been even higher. (65C is the max i let me cpu run. Make sure no throttling is happening there.) If it's fixed by increasing the fam speed then that's the way to go. Keep the heatsink free of dust and you should be good.

As for the power supply I'd bet you are ok there. Hp, dell, etc wouldn't lie. If it's a 750W plat unit then that's what you have. One issue oems like them have is people buying basic machines and sticking gpus in them. The basic office model doesn't have a 750W unit I it. But if you have a purpose built gaming unit that psu should be good enough. I'd be more worried about getting better ram sticks in there than replacing the psu.

 

[ImRenix]

A great example where I have jaggies even with x8 MSAA and in-game resolution scaling set to 2.5x would be GTA 5. BeamNG also happens but I guess that is just 1080p stuff.

Anyways, I do keep my PC dust-free as I tend to clean it up every other weekend, as it happens to sit near me and open.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

I disagree on the psu. Some lower quality high wattage psus appear to be floating around. Look at gigabytes recent psu embarrassment.

 

[4745454b]

Thats gigabyte, not HP, dell, etc. That's also not their top end line.

 

[ImRenix]

Well. HP is known to be "power limited", but I think that is more of a GPU thing? As I mentioned I got a HP RTX 2080. From what i've seen it's not that far off from any other RTX 2080 but by nvec coding.

How did I find that? I watched Linux's video about secret PC shopping. (

View: https://youtu.be/Go5tLO6ipxw?t=960
)

Now I am thinking it would be the PSU not performing, or rather PSU not giving the GPU enough power to properly encode for streaming as an example. But that is chasing unicorns, so I guess we will never know.