There's been a price hike in pretty much EVERYTHING except memory and, for right now but going up soon, storage devices. Things have leveled back out a little bit but pricing is probably never going to be what it was just two years ago. Everything from Covid work stoppages overseas, to container ships getting blocked up in the Suez canal for weeks due to the enormous Ever Given getting stuck, to container ships off the US coasts just sitting offshore due to not having anybody to process them ashore, to rare metal shortages and on and on, have made for a pretty perfect storm so to speak over the last two years. Things have recovered a little bit, but far from entirely, and probably won't for a long time, if ever, due to the very real worldwide inflation problems being felt from all those things I mentioned, plus the Ukraine conflict, etc.
The first thing you need to do is replace that power supply. What you have, is literally, about as bad as it could possibly be and that is 100% not an exaggeration. The only reason, without any doubt, that you haven't had a very serious issue is because your system is a super low power consumption configuration. Even so, that PSU model is from like 2006 and if you were wise you would not do anything more taxing than browsing the internet with that machine until you've replaced the power supply whether you buy a graphics card or not.
You have another issue as well and that is the underwhelming performance of the CPU you have. It's pretty terrible by modern standards. In fact, it's outperformed by a 9 year old FX-4300, which itself, even back in 2012, was a weak piece of crap. So a lot of your FPS limitations are coming directly from that however at some point you could likely source a used second or third gen Ryzen CPU and dramatically improve that situation.
So basically, at minimum, you really need a power supply, graphics card and CPU, to even minimally achieve anything like "decent frame rates". Of course, it greatly depends on what games we're talking about and Path of exile is pretty light in terms of resource demands. Even so, all arguments are still valid in general.
For 350 dollars, something like this might be a good place to start. Or, you could wait on the CPU and get a much better graphics card but if you're likely to stick with mostly light to medium demand games at only 1080p, this should be more than capable enough to maintain 60fps in most all of them, and even some more demanding ones. You are going to either need to offer up the information or vet the fitment for your case yourself, since we have no idea what chassis was used for your prebuilt, how many slots it has open, how tall or long of expansion/graphics cards it supports, etc.
PCPartPicker Part List
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor ($133.00 @ Amazon)
Video Card: XFX GTR XXX Radeon RX 580 8 GB Video Card ($149.99 @ Best Buy)
Power Supply: Antec NeoECO Gold ZEN 600 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply ($69.04 @ Amazon)
Total: $352.03
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2022-10-30 14:04 EDT-0400
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