I built my gaming PC in late 2019 for roughly €650. It has served me well because I mostly play older or less demanding games, but newer titles such as Baldur's Gate 3 and Total War: Warhammer III require very low settings, and I often struggle to maintain 60 FPS.
I'm considering buying a completely new system, though current component prices make me wonder whether upgrading gradually would be more sensible. I suspect the Radeon RX 570 is the biggest limitation, but I'm unsure how powerful a graphics card the rest of the system can support. I've also experienced a few rare crashes that may be related to the power supply.
My current hardware is a Ryzen 5 2600, MSI B450M PRO-M2 MAX motherboard, 16 GB of DDR4-3000 memory, a 240 GB SATA SSD, a 1 TB Seagate FireCuda hard drive, Radeon RX 570 8 GB, and an EVGA 450W Bronze power supply.
Would you recommend upgrading individual parts, such as the GPU, power supply, and possibly CPU, or replacing the whole build? Which components are still worth keeping, and is 16 GB of RAM enough for modern gaming?
3 Answers
The existing platform isn’t useless. AM4 gives you a practical upgrade option: keep the motherboard and DDR4 memory, update the BIOS if necessary, and move to a Ryzen 5 5600 or a similar supported processor. The difference from a Ryzen 5 2600 can be substantial in CPU-limited games, particularly for frame-time consistency and minimum FPS.
That said, the graphics card will make the biggest difference at higher resolutions and settings. A sensible staged upgrade would be a reliable power supply, then the GPU, followed by the CPU if performance monitoring shows the processor is limiting the card.
Your upgrade path depends mostly on budget, but the power supply should be addressed before installing a much faster graphics card. A quality 650W unit would give you considerably more headroom, especially since you’ve already seen occasional crashes that might be power-related.
The RX 570 is definitely the main gaming bottleneck, but a significantly faster GPU could also expose the Ryzen 5 2600’s limitations in CPU-heavy games. Your B450 motherboard can still support a reasonably modern AM4 processor after a BIOS update, so a Ryzen 5 5600 would be a relatively inexpensive way to improve minimum FPS without replacing the board and memory.
If you can comfortably spend around $2,000, a new build would provide a cleaner long-term upgrade path. If you want to spread out the expense, replace the PSU and GPU first, then see whether the CPU is holding back performance.
That makes sense. I’m not limited to a small budget, but I’d rather avoid replacing parts unnecessarily. The possible power-supply issue is probably reason enough to replace that component first.
Building from scratch becomes more attractive when you want the newest platform, because current CPUs may require a different motherboard and DDR5 memory. That means the processor, board, and RAM often need to be purchased together rather than upgraded independently.
For your current system, the case, storage drives, and possibly the motherboard can still be reused if they meet your needs. However, the 240 GB SSD is very small for modern games, and installing games on the older hybrid hard drive may cause long loading times. A larger SSD would be a worthwhile quality-of-life upgrade. Sixteen gigabytes is still usable, but 32 GB is a more comfortable target for newer games and multitasking.
The CPU model numbers can be misleading, but the 5600 is a meaningful improvement rather than just a small refresh. It has a newer architecture and much better per-core performance while remaining compatible with the AM4 platform.