I have about $500 USD to improve my gaming PC. It currently has a Ryzen 5 3600, Radeon RX 580, ASRock B450 Pro4 motherboard, 16GB of RAM, and Windows 11. Storage includes a 128GB Kingston SSD, a 240GB PNY CS900 SSD, and a 2TB Western Digital hard drive. I'm open to upgrading one major component or several parts, and I'm willing to buy reliable used hardware if that gives me better performance. What upgrade combination would make the most sense for gaming?
4 Answers
A used Ryzen 7 5700X paired with a used RX 6800, RX 6800 XT, or RTX 3080 would be a strong overall upgrade. Just verify your power supply has enough wattage and the necessary PCIe power connectors before buying a higher-end card. Update the motherboard BIOS before installing the 5700X if needed.
The 128GB SSD isn’t your only storage. You also have a 240GB SSD and a 2TB hard drive, so storage capacity is less urgent than the GPU. That said, a 1TB or 2TB SATA or NVMe SSD would be a worthwhile quality-of-life upgrade if your games are currently installed on the hard drive.
The graphics card should be your first priority. A used RX 6800 or RX 6800 XT would be a huge jump over the RX 580 and should fit within much of the budget, depending on local prices. You could keep the Ryzen 5 3600 for now and upgrade the CPU later if you notice it limiting performance at high frame rates.
You probably don’t need to spend the whole budget on the processor. The 3600 is still usable for most games, while the RX 580 is the much bigger performance bottleneck. I’d put roughly $350–$450 toward the best GPU you can find, then save the rest for a later CPU upgrade or a larger SSD.
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