I'm planning to upgrade my gaming PC and would appreciate some 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 Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3000 memory, Corsair RM650x power supply, a 500GB SATA SSD, and a 1TB hard drive. I use Windows 11 Pro with a 1080p 240Hz monitor. The graphics card is limited to PCIe 3.0 by the motherboard, and I'm considering a Gigabyte B550 Gaming X V2, Ryzen 7 5700X3D, Thermalright Assassin X 120 SE cooler, and a new mid-tower case. My budget is roughly £450–£500. Would this be a worthwhile upgrade, or should I prioritize different parts?
3 Answers
The 5700X3D would be the only part of that upgrade likely to make a major difference in gaming. Changing the motherboard and case won’t noticeably improve performance by themselves, and PCIe 3.0 only costs your graphics card around 1% of its performance in this setup.
For value, you probably don’t need the 5700X3D. A Ryzen 5 5600 should already be a solid step up from the 5700G for gaming with this graphics card, while a Ryzen 7 5700X makes more sense if you also do productivity work. The X3D chip is worthwhile mainly if you want the best possible high-refresh gaming performance and plan to keep the platform for a while.
I’d upgrade storage and memory before spending the whole budget on a new board and the 5700X3D. A 1TB NVMe SSD would feel much better than the hard drive, and 32GB of RAM would be useful if your motherboard only has two slots. Sell the current 2x8GB kit and replace it with a matched 2x16GB kit rather than mixing memory.
So I’d still need a new motherboard for the CPU, but replacing the board just to get PCIe 4.0 isn’t really worthwhile?