My PC struggles to maintain good frame rates in many games released over the past five years, even after lowering the graphics settings. I bought this prebuilt system during the pandemic and do not know much about choosing or upgrading components. It was advertised as being capable of running almost any game at maximum settings, so I am wondering whether adding or replacing anything—especially the RAM or graphics card—would make a noticeable difference.
My system has a Ryzen 7 3700X processor, an ASRock B450M/ac motherboard, a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 Super 8GB graphics card, 16GB of Crucial DDR4-3000 memory in two 8GB sticks, and a 1TB ADATA SX6000LNP NVMe drive. The memory currently reports at about 1330MHz, which I understand corresponds to roughly 2666MT/s. I am running Windows 10 64-bit. What should I upgrade or check first to improve gaming performance?
4 Answers
Sixteen gigabytes of RAM is still generally enough for gaming, so adding more memory probably will not solve low frame rates by itself. Your RAM is running at about 2666MT/s instead of its rated 3000MT/s, which is a modest performance loss rather than a major problem. You could enable the memory's XMP or DOCP profile in the BIOS to run it closer to its rated speed, assuming the system remains stable.
The Ryzen 7 3700X and B450 motherboard can still support a worthwhile drop-in CPU upgrade, depending on the board's BIOS support. A Ryzen 7 5700X3D would significantly improve performance in CPU-limited games, but it will not help much when the RTX 2070 Super is already the bottleneck. I would identify the limiting component with an overlay such as HWiNFO or MSI Afterburner before spending money.
The graphics card is the most likely upgrade target. The RTX 2070 Super is still usable, but newer games are much more demanding, especially at higher resolutions or with ray tracing. A newer card such as a used RTX 4060 or a newer-generation equivalent could help, particularly if you sell the current card to offset the cost. Check your power supply and case clearance before buying anything.
Before replacing parts, check whether the GPU is reaching high usage while gaming. If the GPU is near 95–100% usage, a graphics-card upgrade is the right direction. If GPU usage is low while one or more CPU cores are maxed out, the processor may be limiting performance in that particular game. Also check temperatures, update graphics drivers, and make sure the games are using the dedicated RTX card rather than an unexpected integrated or power-saving setting.
The reported 1330MHz figure is normal for DDR memory because the effective speed is doubled, so it is running at roughly 2666MT/s—not 1330MT/s in the way people usually mean when discussing DDR4 speed.