[SOLVED] New CPU, RAM Etc. or wait?

[weholight]

Hello All.

First of all, Happy Xmas and new year to you all.

I am currently doing music creation and gaming on this build. Its origin from end of 2011 and had a single upgrade since then (GPU)

Z68 Mobo
I5 2500k @4,4 Ghz
Coolermaster V8 CPU cooler
8 Gb Ram
Xonar Sound card
MSI Geforce 970 GTX 4 gb.

It seems to do the job of creating music fairly well (using newest Reason 10). But i am not sure if its beginning to bottleneck my Geforce 970 in newest titles.

While the 970 GTX is not new anymore, i struggle to play Star Citizen at all. my PC can hardly enter the world at all (PC locks up totally). Also i just tried the new Ark Atlas (FPS is horrible). These games are not well optimized, So that could be a decent reason why.

Yet i've begun to notice many games have a i5 2500k in their min. requirements, and also the 8 gb of memory is really struggling nowadays, and i have to shell out close to 90$ to upgrade to 16 GB. I am not sure thats money well spent.

Is it time to retire this old setup (Not the GPU, PSU, Sound coard & Case). I only can afford new CPU/Motherboard and ram, best case scenario those 3 will last me as long as this build did. So i rather spend a little extra for the same value...

Still i can't predict if it will fix my issues, Will it give my Geforce 970 GTX a extra lease of life?

Hope you all can help me steer in the right direction now i need to take a decision.

 

[xazser222]

Well have you made sure that you don't need to upgrade the PSU? Because if you get a new CPU and MOBO it could be more voltage than the old MOBO so you may or may not have to upgrade your PSU.

In terms of not buying the GPU, I would recommend you do save up and buy a new GPU, preferably with 6GB of VRAM or more. Most games now need more than 4GB of VRAM to play at decent FPS.

As for music creation, I'm not so sure because I know absolutely nothing about music creation lmao. Sorry.

 

[huntlong]

What’s your budget? A Ryzen 2600 with 2x8gb of 3000mhz ram and a B350/450 mobo would cost you about $330-350. That is a very decent midrange setup which would be about equivalent to what your 2500k was back when it was new. But the Ryzen chip also has 6c/12t which will only help in the future.

 

[weholight]

Hi again

PSU is a Be Quiet 550 watt with detachable cables. Its not their cheapest so should be fine.

Problem with new GPU is prices have gone terrible up the past few years, so it cost more to get a GPU than a set of motherboard, CPU & ram. So I really need to squeeze the most out of that 970 gtx. The 4 GB Vram limits how high my settings can go, but not playing decently. And I only got a 144hz 1080p screen, so i do not need the horsepower for 2 or 4k resolutions.

I also play PUBG and it runs smooth graphics wise, but it stutters since my CPU often runs at 100 % and memory usage is like 7,4 out of 7,9 available, so it's the CPU bottlenecking here, since the GPU is delivering a smooth gameplay. Games like star citizen it's almost impossible to play due to PC freezing, I belive I run out of power.

This system can play a lot of games still. But because the nature of the games i play (MMO, Open world, big scale) I am really pushing some of the PC into more CPU intensive games, and often these games really rely on smart optimized coding which they often are not to their best possible.

Ryzen is very attractive, also because of cheaper motherboards. But isn't a new generation around the corner?

Thank you both for the help so far

 

[huntlong]

Yes Zen 2 should be releasing around March or April. We won’t know for sure until January so it could be later than that. AM4 is supposed to be supported until 2020 so the new Ryzen cpu’s should be “supported” by current B350/450 boards. If they increase core counts i wouldn’t be surprised if only some of the new Ryzen Cpu’s will be supported by current boards. But regardless you should be able to upgrade the 2600 to a much better Zen 2 CPU midway through next year without buying another new board.

All of this is speculation but it’s seeming more and more likely to be correct. So if you got that the 2600 for around $160-170 it wouldn’t be a huge loss to sell it and upgrade when the new Zen Cpu’s come out.