I’m helping a family member upgrade their PC, and thought it might be good to get a second opinion on it since I’m not a pro either when it comes to PC parts.
Here are the specs:
- Intel Core i5 6600K
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 970
- Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB (and a 2TB HDD)
- 2x4GB DDR4 RAM from Corsair
- ASUS Maximus VIII Ranger
- Corsair RM750i
Intent of the upgrade is to enhance gaming experience.
My first thought was to upgrade the SSD since 500GB isn’t a lot anyways and the product page of the 850 EVO says it has 540 MB/s read speed which doesn’t seem like a lot to me these days. Then also maybe the RAM, but I have no idea how much of an impact upgrading it has.
The other thing is upgrading CPU and/or GPU, but for that to be worth it I think you need to spend a lot more. I was thinking about giving them my RTX 3070 when I upgrade my own PC soon, in that case what would be a good CPU to go with it. Or would it be fine to just upgrade the GPU?
The parts are all old. The main performance boost will come from upgrading the gpu and CPU.
The 3070 will be a massive bump in potential performance, but depending on the games played, will be bottlenecked by the cpu and ram.
Upgrading just the cpu or just the ram doesn’t make much sense, they are sort of tied together, along with the motherboard.
So, what I would suggest is that you pick up a new cpu, ram and mobo bundle.
The 3070 upgrade can happen before or after that.
A new mobo will also come with a m.2 ssd port, which would be a massive bump to boot and load speed, but negligible for game fps. But that can be done later also.
You can look to PcPartPicker.com to see what others have put together.
You’re looking at what cpu, motherboard and ram they use.
Here’s a nice example that won’t break the bank: https://pcpartpicker.com/b/6Vhtt6
And here’s one from the other end of the scale 😁: https://pcpartpicker.com/b/WkVcCJ
Yeah, maybe an upgrade like that is needed in the not-to-far future. And thanks for the links, I’ll look into that.