Question Looking for help in deciding what to upgrade in my System to see performance increases at a cost effective pace.

[Blkrosephoenix]

Hello there, I'm rocking a pretty nice system that I'm quite happy with. I get pretty good performance in most games. However I tend to multitask and that ends up in performance issues here and there. As well as some more graphically extreme or unoptimized games could use some extra performance (Looking at you Tarkov), but I don't think my GPU is really what I need to be upgrading, at least not first. I'm rocking a 1080 ti which still runs great. Starting to sound like It migiht need a fan replaced but temps are still good. I do run 4 monitors, 2 1440p and 2 1080p. I know the extra monitors is probably draining performance and causing some of the hiccups I get when playing games and hoping I can upgrade to resolve that to some extent. One day I'll just have two computers one for multitasking and one for pure gaming.

I've really become out of date with building specs and not really sure what in my system is slowing things down. I think it's probably the motherboard as nothing really ever hits 90% usage CPU/GPU wise other then a few exceptions. Also I'm wondering if there is a motherboard upgrade that will work with my current Ram but I also can upgrade to the newest DDR ram as well? Just so I can split costs over a couple months. I wish my current board supported more ram I would just throw more in to the two empty slots and that would help a bunch for some slowdowns.

Here are my system specs below.

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
• Motherboard: ROG Strix B350-F Gaming
• RAM: 2x Corsair DDR4-2666 16GB 2133 MHz (32GB total)
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
• OS Drive (Windows 10): Patriot Burst 240GB Sata III 6Gbps
• Monitor: Acer XV272U 2560 x 1440 144hz
• PSU: Rosewill 1000W

Any help or suggestions is appreciated.

 

[Flayed]

Hello there, I'm rocking a pretty nice system that I'm quite happy with. I get pretty good performance in most games. However I tend to multitask and that ends up in performance issues here and there. As well as some more graphically extreme or unoptimized games could use some extra performance (Looking at you Tarkov), but I don't think my GPU is really what I need to be upgrading, at least not first. I'm rocking a 1080 ti which still runs great. Starting to sound like It migiht need a fan replaced but temps are still good. I do run 4 monitors, 2 1440p and 2 1080p. I know the extra monitors is probably draining performance and causing some of the hiccups I get when playing games and hoping I can upgrade to resolve that to some extent. One day I'll just have two computers one for multitasking and one for pure gaming.

I've really become out of date with building specs and not really sure what in my system is slowing things down. I think it's probably the motherboard as nothing really ever hits 90% usage CPU/GPU wise other then a few exceptions. Also I'm wondering if there is a motherboard upgrade that will work with my current Ram but I also can upgrade to the newest DDR ram as well? Just so I can split costs over a couple months. I wish my current board supported more ram I would just throw more in to the two empty slots and that would help a bunch for some slowdowns.

Here are my system specs below.

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
• Motherboard: ROG Strix B350-F Gaming
• RAM: 2x Corsair DDR4-2666 16GB 2133 MHz (32GB total)
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
• OS Drive (Windows 10): Patriot Burst 240GB Sata III 6Gbps
• Monitor: Acer XV272U 2560 x 1440 144hz
• PSU: Rosewill 1000W

Any help or suggestions is appreciated.

You could update the motherboard bios and swap in a Ryzen 5700X for more performance. Swap out the ram for a matched set of 2x16GB 3600 would probably be a good idea too.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Take a look at your motherboard’s vendor website and look at the cpu support list. I’d be willing to guess your board will support the ryzen 5000 CPUs. If you are multitasking as much as you say you do, I’d probably consider something such as going to a ryzen 9 5900x, 12 cores 24 threads.

Your board appears to support 64gb of ram. So maybe grab a matched kit and remove your old stuff. Sometimes mismatched kits don’t play well but you could try if you wished to.


According to the support page for your board it looks like you can also use an m.2 nvme drive or 2. You’d be limited to gen 3 but that’s plenty far. Read speeds of like 1800-3000mbps depending on the drive vs sata is limited to 500 something..

Double check with the manufacturer but it appears that your board will accept up to a 5950x cpu. I can about guarantee you though, swap out for something like a 5700x, you are probably talking a 70% faster cpu across the board.

You can always build a new box as well. If you want to upgrade on a budget, grab say a ryzen 7 5700x for about $180, sell your current cpu for 70-100 bucks. And pick up say a 1tb nvme drive. I would guess those 2 things and doing nothing else would make you go wow! It would likely feel like a new pc at that point. Even if you did only the cpu I think you’d see a huge difference.

As far as the gpu, it still competes with new cards in the 300-400 dollar range, so to get a good upgrade there you’d need to spend for at least rx 6800xt/7800xt level performance. But you might find a cpu upgrade really wakes up the 1080ti since you would be able to process a lot of fps than before.

As the poster above said you could swap the board but honestly if you are going to do that you might as well be taking new build. DDR4 3200 is relatively cheap so it may be worth replacing for that. 3600 is a few bucks more.

You’ve got options but i wouldn’t recommend moving to a new am4 board at this point. If you are doing that go am5 or Intel. Personally I went to a z690 ddr4 boards that I picked up around 100 dollars and an i5 12600kf because I got that on sale for $140. So with those things I could reuse my old ram and for gaming people I talked to say there isn’t much difference between ddr4 and ddr5.

Just my 2 cents. But you’ve got lots of options. Even a bios update on your existing board and say a 5700x will feel like you got a new pc.

Also I did find this video. I have a 6800xt so it fits but it’s showing for example on your board you’re linked to pci e 3.0 slots. So if you upgraded to a pci e 4 card like a 6800xt what performance you can expect. As you see you would lose a few fps with your current motherboard but not enough in my opinion to swap out the board unless you want to. Most of the time with that card for example you are talking just a few fps at least on the games they tested.

View: https://youtu.be/kNvoWrXEHdU?feature=shared

 

[Blkrosephoenix]

Take a look at your motherboard’s vendor website and look at the cpu support list. I’d be willing to guess your board will support the ryzen 5000 CPUs. If you are multitasking as much as you say you do, I’d probably consider something such as going to a ryzen 9 5900x, 12 cores 24 threads.

Your board appears to support 64gb of ram. So maybe grab a matched kit and remove your old stuff. Sometimes mismatched kits don’t play well but you could try if you wished to.


According to the support page for your board it looks like you can also use an m.2 nvme drive or 2. You’d be limited to gen 3 but that’s plenty far. Read speeds of like 1800-3000mbps depending on the drive vs sata is limited to 500 something..

Double check with the manufacturer but it appears that your board will accept up to a 5950x cpu. I can about guarantee you though, swap out for something like a 5700x, you are probably talking a 70% faster cpu across the board.

You can always build a new box as well. If you want to upgrade on a budget, grab say a ryzen 7 5700x for about $180, sell your current cpu for 70-100 bucks. And pick up say a 1tb nvme drive. I would guess those 2 things and doing nothing else would make you go wow! It would likely feel like a new pc at that point. Even if you did only the cpu I think you’d see a huge difference.

As far as the gpu, it still competes with new cards in the 300-400 dollar range, so to get a good upgrade there you’d need to spend for at least rx 6800xt/7800xt level performance. But you might find a cpu upgrade really wakes up the 1080ti since you would be able to process a lot of fps than before.

As the poster above said you could swap the board but honestly if you are going to do that you might as well be taking new build. DDR4 3200 is relatively cheap so it may be worth replacing for that. 3600 is a few bucks more.

You’ve got options but i wouldn’t recommend moving to a new am4 board at this point. If you are doing that go am5 or Intel. Personally I went to a z690 ddr4 boards that I picked up around 100 dollars and an i5 12600kf because I got that on sale for $140. So with those things I could reuse my old ram and for gaming people I talked to say there isn’t much difference between ddr4 and ddr5.

Just my 2 cents. But you’ve got lots of options. Even a bios update on your existing board and say a 5700x will feel like you got a new pc.

Okay all of that is great information and has probably set me down the right path. the only thing is when I last looked I saw my motherboard only supported 32GB otherwise I would of already gotten another 32GB the exact ram I got is pretty affordable. Maybe I made a mistake and was just saving money at the time and was suppose to get another 32 and forgot, but are you positive it supports 64GB? I'm going to go double check now.

EDIT: Okay yeah idk why I thought it only supported 32GB. I made a mistake at some point looking stuff up or just misrembering things. Thanks alot!

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Just double check. If you wanted to be safe here a matched kit and remove the older ram. After that as I said, the value option is the ryzen 7 5700x.

You could go 5600 for less but as much multitasking as you do, you probably don’t want to go down in core count.

 

[Blkrosephoenix]

Take a look at your motherboard’s vendor website and look at the cpu support list. I’d be willing to guess your board will support the ryzen 5000 CPUs. If you are multitasking as much as you say you do, I’d probably consider something such as going to a ryzen 9 5900x, 12 cores 24 threads.

Your board appears to support 64gb of ram. So maybe grab a matched kit and remove your old stuff. Sometimes mismatched kits don’t play well but you could try if you wished to.


According to the support page for your board it looks like you can also use an m.2 nvme drive or 2. You’d be limited to gen 3 but that’s plenty far. Read speeds of like 1800-3000mbps depending on the drive vs sata is limited to 500 something..

Double check with the manufacturer but it appears that your board will accept up to a 5950x cpu. I can about guarantee you though, swap out for something like a 5700x, you are probably talking a 70% faster cpu across the board.

You can always build a new box as well. If you want to upgrade on a budget, grab say a ryzen 7 5700x for about $180, sell your current cpu for 70-100 bucks. And pick up say a 1tb nvme drive. I would guess those 2 things and doing nothing else would make you go wow! It would likely feel like a new pc at that point. Even if you did only the cpu I think you’d see a huge difference.

As far as the gpu, it still competes with new cards in the 300-400 dollar range, so to get a good upgrade there you’d need to spend for at least rx 6800xt/7800xt level performance. But you might find a cpu upgrade really wakes up the 1080ti since you would be able to process a lot of fps than before.

As the poster above said you could swap the board but honestly if you are going to do that you might as well be taking new build. DDR4 3200 is relatively cheap so it may be worth replacing for that. 3600 is a few bucks more.

You’ve got options but i wouldn’t recommend moving to a new am4 board at this point. If you are doing that go am5 or Intel. Personally I went to a z690 ddr4 boards that I picked up around 100 dollars and an i5 12600kf because I got that on sale for $140. So with those things I could reuse my old ram and for gaming people I talked to say there isn’t much difference between ddr4 and ddr5.

Just my 2 cents. But you’ve got lots of options. Even a bios update on your existing board and say a 5700x will feel like you got a new pc.

Also I did find this video. I have a 6800xt so it fits but it’s showing for example on your board you’re linked to pci e 3.0 slots. So if you upgraded to a pci e 4 card like a 6800xt what performance you can expect. As you see you would lose a few fps with your current motherboard but not enough in my opinion to swap out the board unless you want to. Most of the time with that card for example you are talking just a few fps at least on the games they tested.

View: https://youtu.be/kNvoWrXEHdU?feature=shared

So looking into the 32gb vs 64gb support for my Motherboard, I did find some reports that some configurations of ram won't for 64gb. I have 2 of these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0134EW44S/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&th=1

and am about to buy another 2 but not sure if it will work or not. I'm second guessing that I did read something specifically about this combo that wouldn't work for 64 gb for whatever reason.

But with that added info you mentioned, it deft sounds like I should just keep my Motherboard for now and upgrade my ram and CPU and get a m2 drive for OS at least. All which is pretty dang affordable so that's awesome.

EDIT: Okay I think I understand now, I can't just buy two more sticks of ram and be guaranteed it will work, it's a dice roll if it will work or not because of slight timmings differences if they aren't made in the same batch. If I had bought 4 sticks at the same time in a pack it would work. (which technically isn't available I would need to buy two 32gb sticks) . Hmmm pretty sure amazon will let me return so I might as well try.

Thanks for the help dude, I think I'm all set for my upgrades now! Buying a 5700x now and maybe another 2 ram sticks! God I'm going to hate taking off the watercooling and swapping.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Given that your aio is probably 5 years old let me throw something else at you. You can get t these in like 6 different configurations with rgb or white etc. Its a dual tower air cooler and is huge but it does the job. My i5 12600kf seems to top out around 60 degrees. Just make sure you have a long screwdriver. For 35 bucks it’s not bad at all. Plus I once fried a board with a water cooler myself. So air cooling for me. Just a consideration since aios usually go 3-5 years anyway, with that build you are at that mark. And on the air cooler, if a fan fails just grab a 120mm fan and life is good.

https://www.amazon.com/Thermalright-Peerless-Assassin-Aluminium-Technology/dp/B08S77DVDS

 

[Blkrosephoenix]

Given that your aio is probably 5 years old let me throw something else at you. You can get t these in like 6 different configurations with rgb or white etc. Its a dual tower air cooler and is huge but it does the job. My i5 12600kf seems to top out around 60 degrees. Just make sure you have a long screwdriver. For 35 bucks it’s not bad at all. Plus I once fried a board with a water cooler myself. So air cooling for me. Just a consideration since aios usually go 3-5 years anyway, with that build you are at that mark. And on the air cooler, if a fan fails just grab a 120mm fan and life is good.

https://www.amazon.com/Thermalright-Peerless-Assassin-Aluminium-Technology/dp/B08S77DVDS

I appreciate it! My watercooling system is deft old, it's about 6 years now AND I bought it slightly used. This was my first watercooling system and I wasn't super impresssed, maybe I cheaped out on it. I've also always had great luck with the aircoolers I've bought.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Yeah totally up to you but you sure don’t want to spend money and have a leak then boom.

This is the one I have.

Amazon.com

But I’ve got a blue case with a side window so it seems to work for me.

 

[Blkrosephoenix]

Yeah totally up to you but you sure don’t want to spend money and have a leak then boom.

This is the one I have.

Amazon.com

But I’ve got a blue case with a side window so it seems to work for me.

Yeah I'm getting the air cooler as well, with the 5700x and a 2tb nvme drive. I'll wait on the ram. I've been scared of my watercooling failing with how old it is and I don't think it's working that well right now anyway. Well i'm at 50c currently with a minor load in a hot room. So not bad. Still I've always feared that. The hoses are looking really nasty also.

Do you have a recommendation for a nvme drive? I was looking at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08M446772/ref=ewc_pr_img_2?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1

 

[ohio_buckeye]

I usually go for the cheaper ones myself. But a lot of guys like Samsung or I think there’s another called solidgm, it’s early I’m probably not spending that right. But I’d say if the reviews are good it’s fine. You might check the prices of the V pcie 4 drive vs the pcie 3. Even though your board would turn it down to pcie 3 speeds I’m assuming you’d have it to carry over whenever you build again.

On the cooler double check the height vs what your case can accept as it is big.

 

[Blkrosephoenix]

I usually go for the cheaper ones myself. But a lot of guys like Samsung or I think there’s another called solidgm, it’s early I’m probably not spending that right. But I’d say if the reviews are good it’s fine. You might check the prices of the V pcie 4 drive vs the pcie 3. Even though your board would turn it down to pcie 3 speeds I’m assuming you’d have it to carry over whenever you build again.

On the cooler double check the height vs what your case can accept as it is big.

My case is semi open right now lol so it'll fit either way and very large. I'm looking at getting a fancy case eventually. Oh and yeah I'll prob get a pcie4 instead if they are 3 compatible. I appreciate all your help!