I'm planning to upgrade my PC and would appreciate advice on where the money would make the biggest difference. My current system has a Ryzen 7 5700G, RX 9060 XT 16GB, Gigabyte A520M S2H motherboard, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3000 memory, a Corsair RM650x power supply, a 500GB SATA SSD, and a 1TB hard drive. I'm using Windows 11 Pro with a 1920×1080 240Hz monitor.
The graphics card is currently running through PCIe 3.0, and I'm considering upgrading to a Gigabyte B550 Gaming X V2 motherboard, Ryzen 7 5700X3D, Thermalright Assassin X 120 SE cooler, and a new ATX case. My budget is roughly £450–£500. Would this combination be worthwhile, or should I prioritize different components such as storage, memory, or the CPU?
3 Answers
The 5700X3D would be the only part of that proposed upgrade likely to make a substantial difference, especially at 1080p and high refresh rates. Changing the case and motherboard alone won’t improve gaming performance, and moving from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0 should only provide a very small boost with this graphics card.
I’d upgrade the storage before replacing the motherboard. A larger NVMe SSD would be a much nicer everyday improvement than moving from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0, since the current PCIe limitation only costs around a percent of GPU performance in most situations. Your board should also support Resizable BAR.
If the motherboard only has two memory slots, replacing it could make sense for expansion, but I’d sell the existing 2×8GB kit and move to 2×16GB rather than adding a mismatched kit. For the processor, a Ryzen 5 5600 is a sensible value upgrade, while a Ryzen 7 5700X makes more sense if you also do productivity work. The 5700X3D is excellent, but it may not offer the best value with this GPU at 1080p.
The motherboard upgrade isn’t required just to get better gaming performance. It mainly gives you PCIe 4.0 and more expansion flexibility, while the actual difference from PCIe 3.0 is minimal here. I’d put the budget toward a 1TB or 2TB NVMe drive and 32GB of RAM first, then consider a CPU upgrade if you’re seeing CPU-limited frame rates.
Would I still need a new motherboard for the CPU upgrade, since my current board is limited to PCIe 3.0?