I recently upgraded to an LG 45-inch 5K2K monitor and already bought an RTX 5090 with this upgrade in mind. My current system has a Ryzen 9 7900X with 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? Would a newer AM5 processor be worthwhile for CPU-heavy games such as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora?
3 Answers
Since you already own the RTX 5090, start with the practical upgrades: install the card and replace the 850W PSU with a high-quality 1,000W or 1,200W model. Your 7900X, X670E motherboard, and 32GB of memory should be perfectly usable at 5K2K. You can check performance first before deciding whether a CPU upgrade is actually needed.
The easiest way to confirm the power requirement is to put the parts into a power-supply calculator. NVIDIA recommends around 1,000W for an RTX 5090, so a quality 1,000W unit should be suitable, with 1,200W giving you extra headroom. A 2,000W supply is probably unnecessary unless it is an unusually good deal from a reputable manufacturer. Your 32GB of RAM is enough for gaming; 64GB is mainly useful for heavy workloads such as rendering or other memory-intensive applications.
That makes sense. I was thinking the 850W unit definitely would not be enough for the 5090.
Good to know the RAM is fine. I was mainly unsure about the CPU because some games I play, including Avatar, can be pretty CPU-heavy.
For the initial upgrade, replacing the PSU and graphics card should be enough. The Ryzen 9 7900X is still a strong AM5 processor, and at 5K2K the GPU will usually be the main limitation. If you later find that certain games are CPU-limited, you could consider an AM5 gaming-focused X3D chip, but it is better to measure your frame rates and CPU usage first rather than upgrade blindly.
Sounds good. I’ll start with the PSU and 5090, then see whether the CPU actually becomes a limitation.
The 2,000W PSU was offered to me from someone else's old build, but I understand why it may be more than I need.