I'm looking to upgrade my little brother's gaming PC as a birthday gift, but I'm not very tech-savvy when it comes to specs. We got him a Corsair Vengeance A7200 a few years back, and since then, I've only added more RAM. Now, I've noticed that RAM has shifted to DDR5, while his is still DDR4. He's been having trouble running some games, especially with graphics-intensive ones like Call of Duty and Monster Hunter, experiencing lag and crashes. We've tried updating his drivers and scanning for viruses, so I'm thinking it must be a hardware issue. I'm planning to spend around $1000-1500 for upgrades, which the family is chipping in for, rather than just buying him a new PC. Here are his current specs: Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, 32GB DDR4 RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, 750W Power Supply, and an MSI B550-A Pro motherboard. Any advice on the best upgrades?
3 Answers
Have you considered checking out some gaming PCs from places like Costco or Sam's Club? They've gotten decent reviews. Otherwise, you might have to go for a new platform and upgrade the motherboard, RAM, GPU, and CPU to reuse the case and power supply.
Honestly, unless he’s using a 4K monitor, I doubt the hardware is the issue. You could think about upgrading to a Ryzen 5700X3D and put the extra budget towards the 5070 Ti instead.
I think he might be trying to run games on high settings. I’ll check what monitor he’s using when I visit my parents this week.
The main thing he needs is a better GPU. I recommend the RTX 5070; it's a solid option for about $550. It should give him a noticeable boost in performance for all those games he likes.
That's surprisingly affordable! I was bracing for something closer to $1,000 for a good graphics card.
Good point! I thought we would need to upgrade all those parts anyway, especially the motherboard and the graphics card, but maybe I underestimated the GPU's cost.