So, I am currently running an absolutely ancient Ship of Theseus desktop. I have fairly modest needs, looking to play games, lets say on the order of Starfield, at 1080P, medium-ish settings, and not dropping below 30FPS when things get busy on-screen. Something like Minecraft I’d like to run a touch more aggressively, but I know it has its own technical bottlenecks that make it more intensive than you might think (don’t murder me… I still play Bedrock because I like vanilla survival and it runs well). I also do some light 3D CAD using paid-for software that I like, so some sort of legal-ish Windows partition or VM with some form of GPU acceleration would also be nice, but I’m okay with running Linux for most things.
Current specs:
- Gigabyte B450M mobo
- Ryzen 5 2400G as CPU only
- Radeon RX 580
- 16GB PC3200 DDR4
- Unholy accumulation of SATA III drives: a Lexar 250gb for Windows 10, a 120GB Samsung for a couple of games, and a 640GB 7200RPM drive for Linux and storage.
I have actually been able to get the aforementioned Starfield running at 50fps (inside and light load) and 20-25ish FPS (outside action) at a customized set of low settings that isn’t too horrifyingly ugly, but (1) that’s clearly about as good as it’s going to get, and (2) it’s probably contributing to my not playing it all that much. So, what would help, and is anything salvageable? Would prefer to keep the upgrades as cheap as possible while getting a noticeable improvement to tide me over for a couple more years of low-end gaming and CAD. I’m not targeting any specific number, just “better.” If it helps, let’s set a USD $300 cap on upgrades, but cheaper is better. I’m hoping that staying at the lower resolution will be helpful.
Get a 1TB NVME Gen 4 drive, the speedup is insane. (If you have a slot for it on your motherboard; use this as your OS drive)
Get another 16gb of PC3200 DDR4 that’s as closely matched with your existing kit as possible.
and from there, only a GPU upgrade is needed to get you pretty close to the top. I still like the 3060 12gb; because I play games that require a lot of vram, but choice is yours here.
I’m leaning towards keeping the GPU, at least for now, but looks like I could get the SSD for ~$50, some well-matched RAM for around $25 (I guess this will help with a VM quite a bit?), and maybe a Ryzen 5 4500 for around $65. Given the limited and “squishy” info I’ve provided, does that sound halfway reasonable to start, and then see if the 580 still feels like a bottleneck?
Yeah, all of those sound perfect - should keep things nice and cheap and the machine will feel way snappier.
Honestly we’re reaching a point where 32gb of system RAM should be the default for most people. Especially for games.
You’re already probably not CPU-bottlenecked on the GPU - while you’re playing games, you should be sitting at 100% (or close) to GPU utilization.
If your GPU utilization never hits 100%; then you’re CPU bottlenecked.