I'm upgrading a roughly five-year-old PC mainly for 1080p gaming and programming. My current system has a Ryzen 5 2600X, RX 580 8GB, Gigabyte B450M S2H motherboard, 16GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, a 512GB NVMe SSD, a 2TB hard drive, and a 1080p BenQ MOBIUZ monitor. The power supply is an unknown model, so I plan to replace it.
My current idea is a Ryzen 7 5700X, RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, and MSI MAG A750GL PCIe 5 750W 80+ Gold PSU, while keeping the motherboard, storage, and case. I may upgrade to 32GB of RAM later, since my budget is about €650–700 in Serbia without including new memory.
Would this be a balanced upgrade, or are there better CPU and GPU combinations for the money?
1 Answer
For this budget, staying on AM4 makes sense. A Ryzen 7 5700X3D would generally be the better gaming CPU choice than a standard 5700X, especially if you want to keep the system for several more years. Pair it with the strongest GPU you can reasonably afford—an RTX 5060 Ti would work, while a used or discounted RTX 4070 Super-class card could be a worthwhile alternative if pricing is favorable.
Your B450 board may limit the graphics card to PCIe 3.0, but that usually won’t be a major issue at 1080p. Before installing a newer Ryzen processor, update the motherboard BIOS and confirm CPU support. Replacing the unknown PSU is also important; a quality 650–750W Gold unit is plenty. The existing 16GB RAM will work for now, though moving to 32GB later would be useful for modern games and heavier programming workloads.
I checked local prices, and unfortunately a 5700X3D combined with an RTX 5070 is well beyond my budget. I’ll probably keep the 5060 Ti or look for a good GPU deal instead.