I'm in the UK and have around £1,000 to spend on upgrading my 1080p gaming PC. My current system has a Palit RTX 2070 Dual, Ryzen 5 3600, ASRock B450 Pro4 motherboard, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3200, a 750W EVGA GQ Gold power supply, and a 1TB Crucial MX500 SSD.
I'm considering either upgrading the CPU to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and increasing the memory to 32GB, or replacing the motherboard, CPU, and RAM to move to AM5. I'm planning to play Mortal Shell 2, Gears E-Day, and eventually Total War 40K. I currently play Space Marine 2 and Baldur's Gate 3, and Space Marine 2 can drop to around 10–20 FPS during later Siege Mode waves. What would be the best way to spend the budget?
4 Answers
For a £1,000 budget, staying on AM4 probably gives you the best overall result. A Ryzen 7 5700X3D—or a 5800X3D if you find one at a sensible price—would be a major CPU upgrade, while leaving enough money for a much stronger graphics card. You could also consider a B550 motherboard if you want a newer AM4 board, though check BIOS support before installing the new CPU.
AM5 is the more future-proof platform, but UK DDR5 pricing can make the switch expensive. A B650 board, AM5 processor, and 32GB of DDR5 could consume a large portion of the budget, leaving little for a GPU upgrade. Since your RTX 2070 is likely to limit performance in newer games, putting more of the money toward graphics would probably make a bigger difference right now.
If the PC is otherwise meeting your needs, there’s no need to upgrade just because the parts are a few years old. Your severe drops in Space Marine 2 do provide a valid reason to improve it, but I’d first identify whether the CPU or GPU is the main limitation. Another option is to put some of the budget toward a 1440p monitor and upgrade the CPU later, since higher resolutions generally shift more of the workload to the graphics card.
You could look at a Ryzen 5 5500X3D or Ryzen 7 5700X3D paired with a newer midrange GPU such as an RTX 5060 Ti or RX 9060 XT. That would keep your existing memory and platform costs down while improving gaming performance more substantially than spending the entire budget on a platform change.
The biggest issue I’m seeing is Space Marine 2 Siege Mode, where performance can fall to around 10–20 FPS after wave 15–20. I’m also thinking about upcoming games like Gears E-Day and Total War 40K, so I’d like the upgrade to last for a while.