I'm looking for advice on upgrading my two-year-old PO3-630 prebuilt PC. I've been experiencing high idle temperatures (60-90°C) on my CPU, and during gaming and benchmarking (like 3DMark), my GPU usage is at 100% while the CPU only hits about 20%, which spikes my CPU temps even more. I've heard that this could be a thermal paste issue or a CPU cooler problem, but there might also be GPU bottlenecking. I'm really worried about fitting a new GPU into my case since my RTX 3070 is already taking up a lot of space. Plus, I'm not sure if my motherboard can support a higher watt PSU for newer components. Should I just try to upgrade my existing setup or consider building a new PC from scratch? I'm somewhat familiar with PCs but have never built one before, so I'm open to advice!
1 Answer
Your specs should be good enough for 1080p gaming at medium to high settings. Temperatures reaching 60-75°C are normal, but hitting 90°C can be a bit concerning, especially with synthetic loads. As for the 100% GPU usage, that's fine if you're maintaining a decent frame rate on your ultrawide 3440x1440 monitor. You might want to clean out your PC, reapply thermal paste (consider using PTM7950 or Thermal Grizzly), and check your power settings to make sure everything's optimized for performance. Your CPU usage isn't a big deal in gaming unless you notice frame drops.
Thanks for the tips! I have a similar setup and what you mentioned helped a lot. I think I'm also going toward upgrading the GPU since I'm aiming for better performance in my games.