My brother-in-law gave me his old PC, which has a GTX 1080, an ASRock AB350 Pro4 motherboard, a Ryzen 7 1700X, and 64GB of RAM. I mainly play Minecraft with performance mods at around 110–120 FPS, Destiny 2 at roughly 60–70 FPS on high settings, and Hades 2 at about 120 FPS on ultra settings. I also use a 3440×1440 ultrawide monitor. The system feels pretty good overall, but I'm wondering whether upgrading to a Ryzen 7 5700X would be the best upgrade path. I also thought the current system might be limited to DirectX 11. Are there any BIOS or compatibility issues I should know about?
4 Answers
Your GTX 1080 supports DirectX 12, and the CPU doesn’t determine which DirectX version you can use. Windows 10 should be fine, although the first-generation Ryzen chip may not be officially supported by Windows 11. A newer Ryzen 5000 chip could help with Windows 11 compatibility, but check the exact BIOS requirements first. Some early AM4 boards may drop support for older CPUs in newer BIOS versions, so the 1700X might not work after the update.
At 3440×1440, the GTX 1080 is probably the main limitation in newer games. A CPU upgrade could improve Minecraft or games that depend heavily on CPU performance, but it may barely change Destiny 2 if the GPU is already running near full usage. Use an overlay to check GPU utilization while playing: around 90% or higher usually means the graphics card is the bottleneck.
The 5700X would work well, but a Ryzen 5 5600 or 5600X is usually the better value for gaming. A 5700X3D or 5800X3D would be the stronger AM4 upgrade if you can afford one. Just update the motherboard BIOS before swapping CPUs.
If you can find one at a good price, a 5600X3D-class chip would be excellent for gaming, though availability varies. Otherwise, a 5600 or 5700X is a sensible upgrade. The 5700X gives you more cores, but the extra cores won’t necessarily translate into higher FPS compared with a 5600X.
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