I bought an HP OMEN 35L prebuilt with a Ryzen 5 8400F, 16GB of DDR5 memory, an RTX 5060, and a 1TB SSD. I believe it has an 850W power supply. I currently game at 1080p but would like to switch to 1440p. What should I upgrade first, and are there any likely bottlenecks or other components I should keep an eye on?
4 Answers
If you eventually want a major performance jump at 1440p, the graphics card would be the most noticeable upgrade. Cards in the RX 9070 class would be a much bigger step up, though the RTX 5060 is still a reasonable starting point for 1440p with adjusted settings. The Ryzen 5 8400F could also hold back very high frame rates because it has less cache than faster AM5 gaming CPUs, but it is not necessarily the first part you need to replace.
Monitor temperatures while gaming rather than relying on idle readings. Check the CPU and GPU temperatures, clock speeds, and memory usage under load. Also, 16GB of RAM is usable, but moving to 32GB could help with newer games and multitasking if you notice stuttering or memory usage getting close to the limit.
Your current system should be capable of 1440p gaming. You may need to lower a few graphics settings or use upscaling in demanding games to maintain higher frame rates, but I would try it before replacing anything.
The first upgrade should probably be a 27-inch 1440p monitor with a high refresh rate, such as 165Hz or higher, and adaptive sync. Keep the RTX 5060 until it actually fails to deliver the performance you want. That way, you can see what the system really needs before spending money on a new graphics card.
That makes sense. A new monitor lets me experience 1440p right away while waiting to see whether the GPU is actually a limitation.
Before upgrading the CPU or GPU, check your temperatures and actual game performance. Prebuilt systems can have airflow or cooling limitations, even if the components look good on paper.