I recently upgraded to an LG 45-inch 5K2K monitor and already have an RTX 5090 that I bought with this upgrade in mind. My current system includes a Ryzen 9 7900X cooled by a 240mm AIO, an ASUS TUF Gaming X670E-PLUS motherboard, 32GB of DDR5-5600 memory, and a be quiet! System Power 10 850W Gold PSU. I also currently have an RTX 4070 Ti, which I plan to sell. Is the motherboard, CPU, and memory sufficient for gaming at 5K2K, or should I upgrade anything besides the graphics card and power supply? I'm especially wondering whether a different AM5 CPU would help in CPU-heavy games such as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. I was considering a 2,000W PSU, but I'm not sure whether that is actually necessary.
2 Answers
Since you already own the RTX 5090, start by installing it and checking how the system performs. The 7900X is still a strong processor, and you can always upgrade the CPU later if monitoring shows that it is limiting performance. The bigger immediate concern is replacing the 850W PSU with a high-quality model that meets the GPU manufacturer’s requirements.
Your 7900X, X670E motherboard, and 32GB of RAM should be perfectly usable for 5K2K gaming. Resolution mostly puts the load on the GPU, and RAM capacity is more about the applications you run than the monitor resolution. Consider 64GB only if you also do demanding rendering, development, or other memory-heavy work. For the PSU, use a reliable 1,000W unit at minimum for an RTX 5090; around 1,200W gives you extra headroom. A 2,000W model is generally excessive.
That makes sense. I was mainly worried because some games I play, including Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, seem quite CPU-heavy.
The 2,000W PSU was offered to me from an older build, but I understand that a good 1,000W or 1,200W unit would probably be the better choice.