I'm planning to upgrade my PC and could spend around €600, but I'm not sure where the money would make the biggest difference. My current setup is an AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 16 GB of dual-channel DDR4 running at about 1596 MHz according to Speccy, an ASUS PRIME A320M-K motherboard, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 4 GB, a 500 GB SSD, and a 1 TB hard drive. What components should I prioritize upgrading, and are there any compatibility or power-supply concerns I should check first?
3 Answers
An NVMe SSD would make Windows and applications feel more responsive, but it usually won’t improve gaming performance as much as replacing the GTX 1650. Your A320 motherboard may support an NVMe drive, but check its manual and available M.2 slot first. Also, the memory speed shown by Speccy is normal for DDR memory—it reports the clock rate, so the effective speed is roughly double.
Before choosing any parts, find the exact make and model of the power supply. Wattage alone doesn’t tell you whether it’s reliable or suitable for a newer graphics card. Once that’s confirmed, the GPU is still likely to provide the largest gaming upgrade, while the Ryzen 5 3600 can remain usable for now.
The graphics card is probably your biggest limitation, so I’d prioritize that first. A Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB could be a major improvement over the GTX 1650, assuming your power supply has enough capacity and the correct connectors. After that, you could save for a Ryzen 5 5600 or a compatible X3D processor, depending on your motherboard’s BIOS support.
Definitely check the exact power-supply model before buying the graphics card. Knowing only that it is somewhere around 500–600 W isn’t enough, since quality and available PCIe power connectors matter too.