Was Hoping Someone Could help me Upgrade a 4 year old gaming PC!

[elitebattlemage]

I have found a few similiar threads, but everyone's computer components are so different! My computer is extremely slow lately and I have just ordered a solid state drive off of Amazon (Kingston A400 SSD 120GB SATA 3 2.5” Solid State Drive SA400S37/120G) to put just my operating system (Windows 7) on. I'll see if that gets things running a little faster. I thought it was my internet that was inhibiting me from playing online games, Counter-Strike I've been getting 450 ping and it's unplayable. I spent 2.5 hours on the phone with the internet company last week and we ended up isolating the problem to my computer! I turned it off and my internet speed test on other devices was substantially faster when computer was off. So, here are the current specs: I'm hoping some of the components are still decent and maybe be able to hold off upgrading them. I'll let you pro's decide:

Power Supply:
Corsair CX Series 500 Watt ATX/EPS Modular 80 Plus Bronze ATX12V/EPS12V 456 Power Supply (CX500M)

Motherboard:
Asus Socket AM3+/AMD 990X/Quad CrossFireX/Quad SLI/A, GbE/SATA3/USB3.0/ATX Motherboard M5A99X EVO R2.0

CPU
AMD FD6300WMHKBOX FX-6300 6-Core Processor Black Edition

RAM:
Corsair Vengeance Blue 8 GB, 2X4 GB, PC3-12800 1600mHz DDR3 240-Pin SDRAM Dual Channel Memory Kit (CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9B)

GPU:
NVIDIA GEFORCE GT640

I have Witcher 3 that I want to get into, and was thinking of starting to play Elderscrolls Online. Farcry 5 is also in the cards eventually. Thanks in advance to anyone who replies to my thread, your input is valuable to me.

 

[R4DIO4CT1VE]

if the performance has suddenly decreased you might want to run a virus scan, reinstall drivers and such.

what GPU do you have?

you could buy a FX8350, its still and older CPU at this point, but provides a decent performance boost over the FX6300.
You could also buy a new GPU, an FX8350 can handle up to an RX580 or a GTX 1060.

 

[BFG-9000]

The thing that hammers your router and internet connection most is the thousands of connections from torrenting, whether you installed it or malware did.

You did not specify a GPU, but for everything else have at least the minimum requirements for all of those games, and better than the recommended for Elderscrolls. Any substantial upgrade would require replacing Motherboard, CPU, RAM and OS. At that point it's a whole new replacement computer except for PSU, SSD and GPU.

 

[photonboy]

1) SSD has little to do with games other than initial load times and level loads (a few exceptions related to texture streaming exist but that's it)

2) FX-6300 will be a bottleneck to a good graphics card for most modern games... I wouldn't bother with an FX-8350/8370 as that won't do very much to address the issue... you'd need a modern i5/i7 Intel or Ryzen (such as R5-2600).

3) Graphics Card - that would be the best choice as everything else requires building a new PC (Motherboard + CPU + DDR4 memory + W10 reinstall)

*The benefit to the graphics card upgrade depends on:
a) how much a particular game is bottlenecked by your CPU (it varies a lot between games), and
b) how much better the new card is vs the old card, and

So let's say the new card is "4x" better than the old card. In theory you could get up to 4x the FPS. In practice due to CPU bottlenecks it might be closer to 3x average, getting close to 4x for some and dropping closer to 2x for others (vs what you'd get with say an i7-8700K that eliminates the CPU bottleneck)

4) your PC starting to get "slow" sounds like a software issue so reinstalling Windows should fix that (or otherwise finding the software problem but I'd need far more info to help troubleshoot something so vague as a "slow" PC).

Thus the SSD is a fine choice and it would make things snappier, but I'd still reinstall Windows (plan carefully.. backup data, write down programs to reinstall etc).

 

[photonboy]

As for TORRENTING sure that could saturate the ISP... if you aren't doing that then you should open Task Manager (Performance-> Ethernet/Wi-FI) to see what your network download is.

For example my max ISP download is 1.3MBps (10.4Mbps). I usually get roughly that running SPEEDTEST if nothing else is downloading (including media box with someone watching Netflix).

*In TM my ethernet download graph currently (it's dynamic) goes up only to 100Kbps and I'm averaging (due to Google Chrome) maybe 10Kbps so about 1/1000th of my max.

**So if your download bandwidth is low BUT YOU STILL HAVE ISSUES (including other PC's) with the network then I'd suspect your PC is doing some odd communication to the router.

If it's not low you need to find out what software is downloading stuff.

 

[R4DIO4CT1VE]

Okay given that you have a GT640 the quickest/cheapest FPS boost would be to get a new GPU, something like a 1050ti or an rx570.

that being said in in modern games any FX cpu will begin to show its age.

step one is to get rid of the virus/malware you quite possibly have, and as a previous comment mentioned a fresh OS install on your SSD is a good idea as well

 

[coozie7]

Hold fire until the SSD arrives then do a full, fresh install to it, don't try to clone or move the existing Windows install and nuke the current HDD at the same time-after saving out your important data obviously!
While you're waiting, download and save out the latest drivers for all the system components to a USB stick, that way they'll be available once the Windows install is finished.
If the current motherboard supports AHCI mode for HDDs, activate that first, SSDs work best under this mode but be aware the existing HDD may not be accessible if it was formatted under another mode, meaning you'll HAVE to nuke it before it can be used.

And yes, a stronger graphics card is really called for.