A friend's PC is overdue for an upgrade. It currently has an ASRock H310M-ITX motherboard, an Intel G5400 dual-core CPU, and 8GB of DDR4-2400 memory in two sticks. The proposed upgrade is an Intel i5-8500 and 16GB of DDR4-2666 memory, replacing the existing RAM rather than mixing the kits. The system also has an RX 570 graphics card and a 450W Corsair power supply, and it is used mainly for gaming with some web browsing. The total cost would be about €160, and spending more is not practical right now. Would this be a worthwhile upgrade, and is the lower clock speed of the i5-8500 a concern? Are there any other RAM or compatibility details to check?
3 Answers
If you replace the current memory with the 2x8GB kit, the main things to check are that it is DDR4, the total capacity stays within the board’s 16GB limit, and the motherboard supports the kit. The RAM may run at a lower configured speed depending on the board and CPU, but that is normally fine. If you mixed the old and new sticks, everything would generally run at the speed of the slowest module, so replacing the existing 8GB is the cleaner option.
For gaming, this should be a noticeable and sensible upgrade, especially in games that struggle with only two CPU cores. The RX 570 will often remain the limiting component at higher graphics settings, but the i5 should improve frame-time consistency and reduce CPU bottlenecks. The 450W Corsair PSU should generally be adequate for an i5-8500 and RX 570 as long as it is a decent, healthy model.
The exact games and resolution still matter, but the extra CPU cores should help a lot with modern games and multitasking compared with the G5400.
The i5-8500 is definitely an upgrade over the G5400 despite having a lower listed clock speed. Clock speed is not directly comparable across different CPUs, and the i5 has six cores instead of two, along with much stronger overall performance. Benchmarks are a better comparison than GHz alone, and they show a substantial improvement. Just verify that the motherboard BIOS supports the i5-8500 before installing it.
I checked some benchmarks and the i5 scores more than twice as high, so I was mostly confused about how to interpret the different performance measurements.
That makes sense. I’ll replace the existing kit instead of trying to combine both sets.