I bought my first gaming PC in 2023, and it has worked reasonably well, but gaming has gradually become less enjoyable. I mainly play Minecraft, Roblox, and cozy games with my girlfriend, not demanding modern titles. Lately I've been dealing with severe screen tearing, Minecraft lag, and occasional freezing. I'm not sure whether the monitor, PC, or both are responsible.
The system has a 30-inch 200Hz Sceptre monitor, an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, a GeForce RTX 4060 with 8GB of VRAM, 16GB of RAM, and 1.36TB of storage, with about 1.12TB currently used. I've already tried cleaning up Windows, checking startup programs, and performing a factory reset, but the problems remained. I also switched from HDMI to DisplayPort without much improvement. I haven't changed the V-Sync or variable-refresh settings yet.
Would it make more sense to upgrade a component, increase the RAM, or save for a new PC? I'd prefer the least expensive option that actually fixes the problem.
3 Answers
That hardware should handle Minecraft, Roblox, and cozy games comfortably, so I wouldn’t replace the entire PC yet. Start with the monitor settings: make sure Windows is actually set to 200Hz, enable FreeSync or another variable-refresh option if the monitor supports it, and try enabling V-Sync in the game or graphics driver. Screen tearing usually comes from the frame rate and refresh rate being out of sync, and changing from HDMI to DisplayPort alone won’t necessarily fix it.
Using 1.12TB of a 1.36TB drive usually won’t cause severe problems by itself, although leaving more free space is helpful, especially if it’s an SSD. The system sounds capable on paper, so a full replacement should be the last step. Check background tasks, temperatures, drive health, and whether the RAM is installed as a matched dual-channel kit. If everything checks out, moving from 16GB to 32GB is a relatively inexpensive upgrade, but a new GPU or PC would be excessive for these games.
I’ve already checked startup programs and performed a factory reset, and neither changed much. I’ll focus next on hardware monitoring, RAM configuration, and the display-sync settings.
Before buying parts, monitor your CPU and GPU temperatures, usage, clock speeds, and memory usage while Minecraft is running. Also check whether Minecraft is using the correct graphics card and update or clean-install the graphics driver. If the game is modded, make sure it has an appropriate amount of RAM allocated; 16GB system memory is usable, but 32GB could help if you run large modpacks or several programs at once.
I haven’t changed V-Sync or variable refresh yet, so I’ll try those before spending money. The DisplayPort switch didn’t make a noticeable difference.