Question Oldtimer wanting to upgrade my current tower

[portalbreaker]

Hi all,

I am looking to upgrade my gaming rig to be more robust and enchance it's preformance.

I have the following specs:
CPU: AMD RYzen 5 2600X
RAM: Ballistix Sport LT DDR4 16GB (2 x 8GB) 2666MHZ
GPU: ASUS GeForce RTX 3070 DUAL OC
Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX X470-F GAMING, Socket-AM4
Storage: 118GB SSD, 931GB SSD

I feel like I need a new processor. It's old and I feel it bottlenecks the rest of my system. I also feel like I should get two more ram sticks, so I get 32GB total. I am unsure what I should get. And of course, what is compatible with the rest of my system. As I understand it, I can only get 5-series Ryzen CPU due to compability with my motherboard.
A friend of mine (a self proclaimed expert lol) said I should get a Ryzen 7 5800X or Ryzen 9 5900X. Thoughts on this?

Also, I need to upgrade my RAM to 32gb? As I understand it I need exactly the same sticks that I already have, or at least the same speed, which I presume is 2666mhz?

If you have any other suggestions or tips, please share.
Thanks for the help

 

[Gururu]

Its all on budget. If you can do a motherboard, cpu/fan and memory in one swipe that would offer the biggest improvement and then in the near future determine what GPU fits budget and need.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Agreed. As a budget option you could likely update the bios and then drop in a 5700x3d and it would be a nice improvement. But if you can do a motherboard cpu and ram swap to socket am5 that would be a big upgrade and leave you room for a better cpu later on. More cost of course.

If you’re in the USA and have a Microcenter near you I’d highly recommend checking out their bundles. They’ve got a ryzen 7 7700x with a board and 32gb ram for $400. Personally I paid a little extra and got the ryzen 5 7600x3d which is a little brother to the 7800x3d and exclusive to Microcenter. But it’s a little monster of a cpu for gaming imo.

 

[portalbreaker]

Its all on budget. If you can do a motherboard, cpu/fan and memory in one swipe that would offer the biggest improvement and then in the near future determine what GPU fits budget and need.

Ok, thanks.

Do you have any recommendations for a new motherboard and a new CPU? Also, should I then get new RAM? I heart 2666mhz is slow now a days.
Budget is whatever it is, I don't need anything ultra high tech, but something like 500 to 800 USD total?

 

[portalbreaker]

Agreed. As a budget option you could likely update the bios and then drop in a 5700x3d and it would be a nice improvement. But if you can do a motherboard cpu and ram swap to socket am5 that would be a big upgrade and leave you room for a better cpu later on. More cost of course.

If you’re in the USA and have a Microcenter near you I’d highly recommend checking out their bundles. They’ve got a ryzen 7 7700x with a board and 32gb ram for $400. Personally I paid a little extra and got the ryzen 5 7600x3d which is a little brother to the 7800x3d and exclusive to Microcenter. But it’s a little monster of a cpu for gaming imo.

Hey, thanks for the reply.

I am from Norway unfortunately, so that will be an issue.
But i did find a suitable bundle (i think).

It contains:
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X
MSI B650 Gaming Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5 5600MHz 32GB
NZXT T120 CPU Fan

It costs around 750$ but its the cheapest I could find.

What do you think?

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Some of the guys here are pretty good. Might head over to pcpartpicker.com and take a look.

I’m from the USA so that price is about 300-350 more than I’d have to pay for similar parts.

Edit quick bit of looking that may not be so bad. I’m spoiled to Microcenter pricing lol. It looks like that cpu is 329 by itself in the USA.

Here’s a link to why I’m spoiled to Microcenter.


https://www.microcenter.com/product...ies-32gb-ddr5-6000-kit,-computer-build-bundle


If I wanted to pay more I could get this bundle with the 7800x3d

https://www.microcenter.com/product...ies-32gb-ddr5-6000-kit,-computer-build-bundle

 

[beyondlogic]

Hi all,

I am looking to upgrade my gaming rig to be more robust and enchance it's preformance.

I have the following specs:
CPU: AMD RYzen 5 2600X
RAM: Ballistix Sport LT DDR4 16GB (2 x 8GB) 2666MHZ
GPU: ASUS GeForce RTX 3070 DUAL OC
Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX X470-F GAMING, Socket-AM4
Storage: 118GB SSD, 931GB SSD

I feel like I need a new processor. It's old and I feel it bottlenecks the rest of my system. I also feel like I should get two more ram sticks, so I get 32GB total. I am unsure what I should get. And of course, what is compatible with the rest of my system. As I understand it, I can only get 5-series Ryzen CPU due to compability with my motherboard.
A friend of mine (a self proclaimed expert lol) said I should get a Ryzen 7 5800X or Ryzen 9 5900X. Thoughts on this?

Also, I need to upgrade my RAM to 32gb? As I understand it I need exactly the same sticks that I already have, or at least the same speed, which I presume is 2666mhz?

If you have any other suggestions or tips, please share.
Thanks for the help

cheap and cheerful budget and power sipper.
5700x ( not to be confused with ryzen 7 5700) 8 core. max ive seen 100w

12 core
2. ryzen 5900x its a good cpu especially if you do more then gaming. its a pain in the rear end to cool.
iv deepcool assassin i have this cpu locked at 1.3v all cores 4.7. power draw is quite high at full load about 188w

8 core
3.
ryzen 7 5700x3d is a good cpu as well i would pair it with the deep cool assassin iv as well as the extra v cache makes it run hot draws less watts though. 122w

going from 16 to 32gb would be a better upgrade. sell of the old kit at 3200 mhz will be a decent jump.

really depends on your budget and what your willing to spend.


5000 series is a big jump on these older platforms but ryzen 5700 x3d is best for overall gaming and larger cache.

i went with 5900x only because of the extra cores does make a diffrence in some games they are few but hogwarts legacy and fornite i saw a much better time with less stutter this was a upgrade from 5700x.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Don’t get me wrong, am4 is a great platform so you can certainly drop in more ram and say a 5700x3d and it’s going to be an amazing upgrade from your 2600x.

Honestly with the swap to am5 you will spend more money and may not even get quite as much performance but you will get an upgrade path. I think AMD is supporting am5 through 2027 so I’d expect another generation or 2 of CPUs on that platform. So that’s a bit off the trade off. It comes down to what you want to spend. One consideration might be to upgrade the cpu and then see if you have enough left to upgrade the gpu as well. But ultimately it’s up to you what to spend. The good part is, any of the options are going to be amazing for you.

 

[LordVile]

Why do you feel you need to upgrade? What’s the bottleneck you’re experiencing?

 

[CountMike]

2600x, not a bottleneck per se but definitively slow for modern games. 5600x/5700x + about 35% performance in games. 5700x3D/5800x3D over50% but only in games which would fit 3070GPU just fine. for1080/1444 resolution. That should be good for next 3-5 years.

 

[Why_Me]

Ok, thanks.

Do you have any recommendations for a new motherboard and a new CPU? Also, should I then get new RAM? I heart 2666mhz is slow now a days.
Budget is whatever it is, I don't need anything ultra high tech, but something like 500 to 800 USD total?

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: *AMD Ryzen 5 5600 3.5 GHz 6-Core Processor (kr1322.00 @ Proshop)
Memory: *Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory (kr724.00 @ Proshop)
Total: kr2046.00
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
*Lowest price parts chosen from parametric criteria
Generated by PCPartPicker 2025-01-05 14:31 CET+0100

 

[geofelt]

Take the time to run this simple test:

Run YOUR games, but lower your resolution and eye candy.
This makes the graphics card loaf a bit.
If your FPS increases, it indicates that your cpu is strong enough to drive a better graphics configuration.
If your FPS stays the same, you are likely more cpu limited.

To verify that your current 2600x is operating normally, run the cpu-z bench test and look at the single thread performance rating.
It should be about 478:
https://valid.x86.fr/bench/p2d7tu

Single thread performance is arguably the most important cpu metric for gaming.

Assuming your cpu is your limiting factor you have a couple of options:
1) Update your bios and replace the 2600x with a 5600x.
Other 5xxx upgrades give you more processing threads but small upgrades in single thread performance. the X3D versions are interesting. By using a huge cache, they deliver impressive performance for a single task like typical games. OTOH running other apps which use many threads the cache gets emptied and performance is not so good.

2) Upgrade the motherboard to allow the use of 7xxx series of processors like the R7-7700X.
That will also require a change to ddr5 ram.

On ram, 16gb used to be enough, but perhaps not these days.
Simply adding ram may bring issues.

Ram is sold in kits for a reason.
A motherboard must manage all the ram using the same specs of voltage, cas and speed.
The internal workings are designed for the capacity of the kit.
Ram from the same vendor and part number can be made up of differing manufacturing components over time.
Some motherboards, can be very sensitive to this.
This is more difficult when more sticks are involved.
Ram must be matched for proper operation.

It turns out that the price for DDR4 and DDR5ram is comparable.
If you want more ram, and no issues, buy a compatible kit for your cpu/motherboard combo

To test what you have, activate task manager while you are fully loaded.
Look at the resource manager/ memory tab.
Look at the hard fault rate. If you see a sustained hard fault rate of more than zero, you can use more ram.

 

[punkncat]

IMO a 5800X or X3D variant would be a great and easy update to this system and would be more than adequate for the current graphics card. Back around Oct or so the 5800X was on an insane sale price. IDK if they have completely gone out of stock, and of course your location would matter, but if they hit that sale price again it is nearly impossible to ignore. You have a fine motherboard and no real point in wasting that over a few percentage more CPU performance to cost, especially if you are going to stay with the 3070.

 

[Bob.B]

Hi all,

I am looking to upgrade my gaming rig to be more robust and enchance it's preformance.

I have the following specs:
CPU: AMD RYzen 5 2600X
RAM: Ballistix Sport LT DDR4 16GB (2 x 8GB) 2666MHZ
GPU: ASUS GeForce RTX 3070 DUAL OC
Motherboard: ASUS ROG STRIX X470-F GAMING, Socket-AM4
Storage: 118GB SSD, 931GB SSD

I feel like I need a new processor. It's old and I feel it bottlenecks the rest of my system. I also feel like I should get two more ram sticks, so I get 32GB total. I am unsure what I should get. And of course, what is compatible with the rest of my system. As I understand it, I can only get 5-series Ryzen CPU due to compability with my motherboard.
A friend of mine (a self proclaimed expert lol) said I should get a Ryzen 7 5800X or Ryzen 9 5900X. Thoughts on this?

Also, I need to upgrade my RAM to 32gb? As I understand it I need exactly the same sticks that I already have, or at least the same speed, which I presume is 2666mhz?

If you have any other suggestions or tips, please share.
Thanks for the help

Start with the free stuff.
Proper bios and drivers.
Don't run unneeded background stuff.
Do some house cleaning on the disk.

If no help then it comes down to how high up the perf ladder you want to go and how fat is your wallet.