[SOLVED] Looking to upgrade.

LawofJohn

Honorable
Aug 16, 2014
15
0
10,510
I have a 2 or 3 year old Gaming pc that needs upgraded, but I really dont know where to start. I have a i5-7400 CPU @ 3ghz, 4 core; B250m Bazooka (Ms-7a70); 8 gig ram; 1TB Hdd. All thats from the system menu. My card is a Radeon RX480, which is old I know. Looking to upgrade so I can better play Shadowlands. I was told my computer could handle it, but it would have long loading times. Only have about 300 or so in total to be able to upgrade it.
 
Solution
So that's the Cooler master Masterbox 5 case with the meshflow front panel. Definitely not the worst out there. I'm not a fan of Cooler master at all, but, for a prebuilt system that's a decent case to get stuck with and it has plenty of room for adding additional drives inside.

An SSD, or two, would definitely help speed a lot of things up. What it WON'T do, is give you better graphics at the same FPS or give you more FPS as the same quality settings. So you have to decide what your biggest problem or desired improvement is.

I'd say do something like this and then if you find you are not where you want to be afterwards, then start worrying about doing something with a newer platform or graphics card. At least THIS way, nothing is...
Are you most worried about load times, or frame rates, or quality settings? Where is your biggest priority, assuming of course that some combination of all of them would be nice too?

Without question your 1TB HDD is probably the first thing that needs to go and be replaced by an SSD, which is much faster, but the problem with that is that SSDs are not cheap if you want one that is large enough to hold any large games, and if you use the SSD just for the OS and applications, and put your games on the HDD, then you're still right where you started with slow load times. Having a smaller SSD (250-500GB) for the operating system and another 1TB SSD for games to live on is pretty much a standard configuration these days but then you're talking about a 200 dollar investment without even a nod in the direction of the graphics card or CPU.

Honestly, unless you are having seriously long, laggy load times to the point that they are really bothering you, maybe you ignore that for now and go elsewhere on the upgrade. But if that IS the biggest thorn in your side, then ditching the HDD or relegating it to backup duty of some kind for OS or file backups, might be a really good idea. There are few things that can immediately pick up the snappiness of a system like going from a HDD to an SSD, but it will only help your games if the games are on the SSD too, or on an SSD of their own.

Also, if you get an SSD for the operating system and applications, then it becomes a question of how much space, not counting your game folders, is being used on your current 1TB HDD because the SSD needs to be about 25% larger than whatever the total amount of space you want to move to the SSD is going to be, if you want to clone the existing operating system from the HDD to the SSD. Otherwise, you're looking at starting from scratch with a clean install and if it's been a while since you've done one, then it might not be the worst idea in the world ANYHOW to just DO a clean install if you decide to put the OS on a new SSD.
 

LawofJohn

Honorable
Aug 16, 2014
15
0
10,510
Yea I was thinking about getting a 1tb SSD and just putting two or three games on it. Mostly WoW, LoL, 7 days to die, and maybe one or two really small games. It would have to be an external, because I have little leg room, and I keep bumping into my computer. There is no way to move <Mod Edit> around to make room either :(
 
Last edited by a moderator:
So that's the Cooler master Masterbox 5 case with the meshflow front panel. Definitely not the worst out there. I'm not a fan of Cooler master at all, but, for a prebuilt system that's a decent case to get stuck with and it has plenty of room for adding additional drives inside.

An SSD, or two, would definitely help speed a lot of things up. What it WON'T do, is give you better graphics at the same FPS or give you more FPS as the same quality settings. So you have to decide what your biggest problem or desired improvement is.

I'd say do something like this and then if you find you are not where you want to be afterwards, then start worrying about doing something with a newer platform or graphics card. At least THIS way, nothing is wasted, because the drives will be beneficial no matter what else happens, or doesn't happen.

Smaller SSD for the operating system and applications and the larger SSD for your games to live on.

PCPartPicker Part List

Storage: Crucial MX500 250 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($34.99 @ Adorama)
Storage: Samsung 860 Evo 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($99.99 @ Adorama)
Total: $134.98
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-11-21 23:33 EST-0500
 
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