Upgrade from a10 9700

[Timothy1201]

Should I upgrade my APU which is an A10 9700 to either a ryzen 3 or 5 or should I upgrade my gpu from a rx 560 to something more powerful?

Which option would be better for 1080p gaming with going to 3 monitors in future.

 

[jr9]

Depends on if you are experiencing maxed out CPU or GPU. I'd look at task manager and see which one is 100% in games. Certain games lean towards CPU or GPU.

Personally I'd first upgrade to Ryzen. A series is getting very dated and a very bad gaming CPU. Even my core i5 from 6 years ago outperforms it. You will need a new motherboard and DDR4 RAM. A Ryzen 5 CPU is great for gaming or Ryzen 3 on a lower budget. If you already have a graphics card, there is not much point getting the new Ryzen APU as your graphics card will be doing the rendering.

If you upgrade your graphics card to something nice like a GTX 1060 your CPU will bottleneck you in new games. This will cause shuddering gameplay in more intensive games.

 

[Timothy1201]

Depends on if you are experiencing maxed out CPU or GPU. I'd look at task manager and see which one is 100% in games. Certain games lean towards CPU or GPU.

Personally I'd first upgrade to Ryzen. A series is getting very dated and a very bad gaming CPU. Even my core i5 from 6 years ago outperforms it. You will need a new motherboard and DDR4 RAM. A Ryzen 5 CPU is great for gaming or Ryzen 3 on a lower budget. If you already have a graphics card, there is not much point getting the new Ryzen APU as your graphics card will be doing the rendering.

If you upgrade your graphics card to something nice like a GTX 1060 your CPU will bottleneck you in new games. This will cause shuddering gameplay in more intensive games.

Decides to wait on the gpu, way to expensive right now for my needs. Ordered a ryzen 5 and 8gb of ram. Didn’t have to get a new motherboard or ram as the a10 9700 uses am4 socket

 

[jr9]

Right, I keep forgetting they re-used the A series name for AM4. You'd think they'd just put A series to rest with the new Ryzen APUs. I thought you had one of those FM2+ era A series chips. AMD Ryzen 5 1600 still has a passmark score more than double what the AMD A10-9700 has. The Ryzen 5 1400 scores 8419 compared to the 5500 the 9700 gets. Has 2 more cores as well.

I would update your BIOS before installing the new CPU just to be safe.

If you mix and match RAM it may cause system stability issues. I would install the new one and then see if there are stability issues.