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Need help figuring out what I should be upgrading to.

S

SecludedS

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Joined
Oct 13, 2022
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I'm relatively new to PC building in general, so as I have a few hundred dollars I want to put towards an upgrade, I'm not sure which pieces of hardware specifically I should be looking at.

My thoughts as of now are to upgrade my CPU, and then down the road, my graphics card, and eventually, mobo/ram etc.

Current build is:
  • RTX 2060 Super
  • Ryzen 5 2600
  • Rog Strix b450f
  • 16 gb ddr4
  • 1TB m.2
I am looking at upgrading the CPU to either a Ryzen 5 5600x or a Ryzen 7 5700x. I typically play the standard aaa games, halo, warzone etc. and things like valorant and league on occasion. I also really enjoy emulating ps3 games, which currently don't perform well on my pc, which is one reason I wanted to upgrade the CPU.

Any advice on how I should spend about $300 for an upgrade here?

Thanks everyone
 
I agree, a CPU upgrade first, after that you could do a GPU upgrade.

Also check if your PSU is good enough once you upgrade the GPU....
 
P4-630 said:
I agree, a CPU upgrade first, after that you could do a GPU upgrade.

Also check if your PSU is good enough once you upgrade the GPU....
Click to expand...
I have an 800W PSU so I assume that should be enough for something like a 3060 or 3070. Do you think I should go with the Ryzen 5 5600x or Ryzen 7 5700x?
 
SecludedS said:
I have an 800W PSU so I assume that should be enough for something like a 3060 or 3070. Do you think I should go with the Ryzen 5 5600x or Ryzen 7 5700x?
Click to expand...
Personally I'd go with 8 core or better, others might say the 5600x though.

800 Watts PSU should be ok with a new 6/8 core CPU and a 3070...... As long as it is a reputable brand PSU and not too old....
 
dirtyferret said:
not sure if you have seen this article, if not hope it helps

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X Tops PS3 Emulation Rankings, Thanks to AVX-512

AVX-512 support drives AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X to top spot in RPCS3.
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com

vDEk6Mf6hvi2jyErMPQnxa.png
Click to expand...
I hadn't seen this but that's very helpful. No wonder i've had issues with ps3 games seeing as my current cpu is D tier haha. I'll probably go for the 5700x then. May also take a look at some intel options as well

P4-630 said:
Personally I'd go with 8 core or better, others might say the 5600x though.

800 Watts PSU should be ok with a new 6/8 core CPU and a 3070...... As long as it is a reputable brand PSU and not too old....
Click to expand...
Its about 3 years old, but not a great brand so its definitely something I'll be upgrading in the future as well. If I go with the Ryzen 7 5700x, I'll save about a hundred dollars I could put toward a psu upgrade in the next couple months before getting a new GPU
 
If you're in the US, the 5700X at Newegg might be the best CPU deal going right now.* And is conveniently one of your candidates.

*Emphasis on right now; sale supposedly expires today
 
What speed is your DDR4?

IMO the 5700X is the sweet spot for a B450 board these days, but you don't want to cripple it with DDR4-2400.

If you have DDR4-3200 or better, then you'll be fine, otherwise you'll want to buy new RAM and realistically the sweet spot for new RAM is a cheap 3600 kit - even CL18 or CL17 will be fine - it'll let you run your infinity fabric at 1800MHz which is close to optimal.

The 2060S is still a solid gaming card, and there's nothing on the market right now that's an improvement of any significance at $300. Hell, used 2060S cards sell for about $250 still.
Wait to see what AMD and Nvidia come up with in the midrange a few months from now.
 
Welcome to TPU!

To upgrade to a 5000 series Ryzen, you will most likely have to update the BIOS. Are you comfortable with that? And yes, right now in the USA, the 5700X is less than $10 more than the 5600X, making it a no-brainer which one to buy.
What M.2 drive do you have?
 
SecludedS said:
I'm relatively new to PC building in general, so as I have a few hundred dollars I want to put towards an upgrade, I'm not sure which pieces of hardware specifically I should be looking at.

My thoughts as of now are to upgrade my CPU, and then down the road, my graphics card, and eventually, mobo/ram etc.

Current build is:
  • RTX 2060 Super
  • Ryzen 5 2600
  • Rog Strix b450f
  • 16 gb ddr4
  • 1TB m.2
I am looking at upgrading the CPU to either a Ryzen 5 5600x or a Ryzen 7 5700x. I typically play the standard aaa games, halo, warzone etc. and things like valorant and league on occasion. I also really enjoy emulating ps3 games, which currently don't perform well on my pc, which is one reason I wanted to upgrade the CPU.

Any advice on how I should spend about $300 for an upgrade here?

Thanks everyone
Click to expand...
I would pick up a 5600 on sale, the 5600x is not really a big upgrade for the price difference. You don't really need anything bigger for gaming right now. I would save the rest of the money for either a GPU or ram upgrade being that ram is practically free at the moment.
 
thebluebumblebee said:
Welcome to TPU!

To upgrade to a 5000 series Ryzen, you will most likely have to update the BIOS. Are you comfortable with that? And yes, right now in the USA, the 5700X is less than $10 more than the 5600X, making it a no-brainer which one to buy.
What M.2 drive do you have?
Click to expand...
I've not personally updated the bios before, but I'm ready to learn how to do it if necessary. The M.2 I have is an MP600 Corsair Force

Chrispy_ said:
What speed is your DDR4?

IMO the 5700X is the sweet spot for a B450 board these days, but you don't want to cripple it with DDR4-2400.

If you have DDR4-3200 or better, then you'll be fine, otherwise you'll want to buy new RAM and realistically the sweet spot for new RAM is a cheap 3600 kit - even CL18 or CL17 will be fine - it'll let you run your infinity fabric at 1800MHz which is close to optimal.

The 2060S is still a solid gaming card, and there's nothing on the market right now that's an improvement of any significance at $300. Hell, used 2060S cards sell for about $250 still.
Wait to see what AMD and Nvidia come up with in the midrange a few months from now.
Click to expand...
Right now I have 16gb 3200C16. With the 5700x being on sale right now I could definitely afford to beef up the RAM. edit: I currently have 2x8 G SKill F4-3200C16, should I grab two more of those or upgrade to something like the corsair vengeance 4x8 3200C16 which is going for about 120 on amazon right now? (Which I'm not sure would necessarily be an "upgrade")
 
Last edited:
SecludedS said:
Right now I have 16gb 3200C16. With the 5700x being on sale right now I could definitely afford to beef up the RAM. edit: I currently have 2x8 G SKill F4-3200C16, should I grab two more of those or upgrade to something like the corsair vengeance 4x8 3200C16 which is going for about 120 on amazon right now? (Which I'm not sure would necessarily be an "upgrade")
Click to expand...
16GB is fine for a gaming rig unless you like to have 500 chrome tabs open in the background.

The problem with running 4 DIMMs is that the 3200C16 timings are only guaranteed for a single pair of memory sticks and it also depends on your motherboard topology. Most B450 boards use daisy-chain topology so the chances of getting 3200MHz to work seamlessly over all four DIMM slots at once is lower. You'll probably be alright at DDR4-3200 but I definitely had problems with Zen2 and four sticks of DDR4-3600 until I moved to a T-topology X570 board. Same CPU, same RAM worked on that board that failed on both an Asrock and Gigabyte B450. I can't guarantee you won't have issues, basically.

My personal advice is to stick with 16GB for now and save your money. If you find yourself running out of RAM in the future, my recommendation is to buy a 2x16GB or 2x32GB kit of DDR4-3600 and sell your old 2x8 kit. It's a bit more hassle but there are non-negligible gains for running your CPU's infinity fabric at 1800MHz with DDR4-3600 instead of the 1600MHz you'll be using with DDR4-3200.

If you do decide to add to your existing memory I would definitely try to match it with two more G SKill F4-3200C16 sticks. That gives you the best chance of running on a B450 at 3200MHz, but the worst-case scenario is you may have to loosen the timings manually or drop down to DDR4-3000 or something.
 
Last edited:
Nike_486DX said:
I wonder why they just put "all the sandy and ivy bridge" cpus into the F list, even though a tuned 3770K or even 2600K can achieve really similar performance to stock 6700K and 7700K? Also the "Tuned" section of the D tier is completely empty.
Click to expand...
I don't use PS3 and am hardly an expert, my "guess" is sandy and ivy had AVX extensions but not AVX2 (which started with Haswell if I recall correctly). I may be wrong, you would need to ask someone who is into PS3 emulation if you want a detailed and knowledgeable answer beyond my guess.
 
If emulation is what you are looking for I would go for Intel. I would sell ryzen and mobo and get 12400f plus new mobo . Gpu is fine. If there was any money left I would get Psu.
 
error1984 said:
If emulation is what you are looking for I would go for Intel. I would sell ryzen and mobo and get 12400f plus new mobo . Gpu is fine. If there was any money left I would get Psu.
Click to expand...
That is so wrong. If you want to focus on PS3 emulation buy yourself a 5600G of 5700G and be happy. If you want to get a GPU get a 5600 but your GPU may not benefit from the jump in generation it provides. If nothing else it is the cheapest you can get and I guarantee that you will feel the difference vs a 2600.
 
SecludedS said:
I'm relatively new to PC building in general, so as I have a few hundred dollars I want to put towards an upgrade, I'm not sure which pieces of hardware specifically I should be looking at.

My thoughts as of now are to upgrade my CPU, and then down the road, my graphics card, and eventually, mobo/ram etc.

Current build is:
  • RTX 2060 Super
  • Ryzen 5 2600
  • Rog Strix b450f
  • 16 gb ddr4
  • 1TB m.2
I am looking at upgrading the CPU to either a Ryzen 5 5600x or a Ryzen 7 5700x. I typically play the standard aaa games, halo, warzone etc. and things like valorant and league on occasion. I also really enjoy emulating ps3 games, which currently don't perform well on my pc, which is one reason I wanted to upgrade the CPU.

Any advice on how I should spend about $300 for an upgrade here?

Thanks everyone
Click to expand...

Not sure what others are suggesting... i'm too lazy to read comments sometimes but...

I'd bag a 5700X/5800X. Both are similarily priced. The 5700X being a little more efficient (my preference) and the 5800X delivering a little extra performance if it can be a had for 10-20 bucks more. Both options add 2 additional cores/4 threads which is definitely proving useful in games... some games more than others, but its heading that way. A friend of mine swapped his 3600X for a used 3900X on the cheap primarily for plex transcoding and the casually-occasional rendering... although the 3900X showboats similar single core performance he suggested having more cores/threads 100% improved his gaming experience. Not necessarily wider FPS gains but something along the lines of "can't describe it, games just feel so much more smoother" (maybe the experts here can expand on that). All the while, the faster 5700X/5800X gets you a performance uplift in FPS + additional compute power securing some/more of that buttery smooth gaming experience!
 
wheresmycar said:
Not sure what others are suggesting... i'm too lazy to read comments sometimes but...

I'd bag a 5700X/5800X. Both are similarily priced. The 5700X being a little more efficient (my preference) and the 5800X delivering a little extra performance if it can be a had for 10-20 bucks more. Both options add 2 additional cores/4 threads which is definitely proving useful in games... some games more than others, but its heading that way. A friend of mine swapped his 3600X for a used 3900X on the cheap primarily for plex transcoding and the casually-occasional rendering... although the 3900X showboats similar single core performance he suggested having more cores/threads 100% improved his gaming experience. Not necessarily wider FPS gains but something along the lines of "can't describe it, games just feel so much more smoother" (maybe the experts here can expand on that). All the while, the faster 5700X/5800X gets you a performance uplift in FPS + additional compute power securing some/more of that buttery smooth gaming experience!
Click to expand...
well said! I ended up getting the 5700x even though I missed out on the newegg deal of a lifetime, still got one for 220 which I'm happy with. I've noticed with some CPU heavy games there will be little hiccups I notice when gaming, just a few things here and there that don't feel super smooth, so I'm excited to see the difference. The big thing will be figuring out the bios update for my motherboard. Something I'll likely need to make a new threat for.
 
SecludedS said:
well said! I ended up getting the 5700x even though I missed out on the newegg deal of a lifetime, still got one for 220 which I'm happy with. I've noticed with some CPU heavy games there will be little hiccups I notice when gaming, just a few things here and there that don't feel super smooth, so I'm excited to see the difference. The big thing will be figuring out the bios update for my motherboard. Something I'll likely need to make a new threat for.
Click to expand...
If you check your BIOS version, it supports the 5700X from version 4801. Your motherboard's manual states that the DVD that came in the box has a utility to update the BIOS from within Windows. You can also enter the BIOS and flash from there using a FAT32 formatted USB or via the internet.
 
SecludedS said:
I hadn't seen this but that's very helpful. No wonder i've had issues with ps3 games seeing as my current cpu is D tier haha. I'll probably go for the 5700x then. May also take a look at some intel options as well


Its about 3 years old, but not a great brand so its definitely something I'll be upgrading in the future as well. If I go with the Ryzen 7 5700x, I'll save about a hundred dollars I could put toward a psu upgrade in the next couple months before getting a new GPU
Click to expand...

See if you can get a used 5800x3D (Ah, you already got 5700x, ok)

What's your monitor? Getting a bigger display is cool. Perhaps 2k

If your M.2 is filled up, get a hard drive
 
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