I'm looking to modernize my gaming PC with a budget of roughly £650, mainly to achieve at least 60 FPS at 1080p on medium settings. My current system has an Intel Core i5-12600KF, RTX 2070 8GB, 16GB DDR4-2400 memory using two sticks, an ASUS TUF Gaming B760-PLUS WiFi D4 motherboard, Corsair RM850 850W power supply, a 1TB SSD, and Windows 11. I use a 1080p 144Hz monitor and the PC is housed in an MSI MAG Forge 100R case.
Star Wars Outlaws currently drops to around 20 FPS when I'm exploring its open world, so I'm particularly interested in an upgrade that can make that game more comfortable. I'd also like the system to handle newer games such as Forza Horizon 6 at around medium settings, with smooth frame rates being more important to me than visual quality. The CPU, motherboard, and power supply were replaced about two years ago, while the GPU and RAM are older upgrades. Should I replace both the graphics card and memory, or should I first investigate whether something is wrong with my current system, such as temperatures or settings? I'm not very experienced with PC upgrades, so practical advice would be appreciated.
2 Answers
A sensible upgrade within that budget would be 32GB of DDR4-3200 CL16 memory along with a modern 16GB graphics card such as an RX 9060 XT. That would be a substantial improvement over the RTX 2070 and should be suitable for 1080p medium settings, with enough headroom for some 1440p gaming too. Your 850W power supply is more than sufficient. Moving from NVIDIA to AMD is generally straightforward: remove the old graphics drivers, install the new card, and then install the latest AMD drivers.
Before spending the full budget, check whether the poor performance is caused by something else. Monitor CPU and GPU temperatures, GPU usage, clock speeds, memory usage, and whether the game is running from the SSD. Also make sure the RAM is running at its intended speed by enabling the appropriate memory profile in the motherboard firmware. If the GPU is reaching high usage and temperatures are normal, then it is likely the main limitation; if usage is unexpectedly low or temperatures are excessive, fixing that may improve performance without immediately replacing parts.
That gives me a good starting point. I’ll check temperatures, usage, and memory settings before ordering anything, since I’m not very familiar with diagnosing performance problems.
Thanks! I’ll look into that. I wasn’t sure whether changing from NVIDIA to AMD would cause problems, but it sounds like it’s mainly a matter of cleaning out the old drivers and installing the new ones.