Hey guys, please review my upgrade considerations.

Goal: good bang for the buck upgrade. No need for high end. Just a cheap but good step forward. Does my choice make sense or do you think this little step is not worth it? I am a little flexible on the budget. Is there something more valuable in that range?

Duties:

  • mostly workstation / office / many browser tabs / hobby programming (small projects) / a couple apps incl. electron apps running at the same time
  • little gaming (grand strategy). So far the GPU and RAM are …fine, i guess. I will upgrade them some time in the future, to play KCD2
  • no video editing, almost no 3d modeling, little virtualization, no Image processing

Current system:

  • i5-7600K CPU
  • MS-7A71 mainboard
  • 16 GiB of RAM (slow 2133 MT/s)
  • Radeon RX 480 Graphics

Low cost upgrade idea:

  • AMD Ryzen 5 5600 6x 3.50GHz So.AM4 90€
    • there is a 5600X for 100€ but just 1% faster in benchmarks
  • Gigabyte B550 Gaming X V2 AMD B550 So.AM4 Dual Channel DDR4 ATX Retail € 106
    • There are B550s for 10€ cheaper but this one supports my old DDR4-2133 RAMs and up to DDR4-3200

196€ for a good upgrade doesn’t sound too bad. I probably need a new cooler too because of the new socket. I could get faster RAMs but figured that i would probably not feel the difference. These give me upgrade options in the future but don’t cost much right now, since i hope to keep all other parts (PSU, midi tower, etc.). Is it correct, that i don’t need a new PSU since the power consumption does not increase (for now)? And does the old PSU cable fit the new mainboard?

What else do i need to consider?

Thank you :-)

  • klay@lemm.eeOPEnglish
    1·
    15 hours ago

    you’d still be limited by the now ancient rx480, so your CPU will be running laps around it while it struggles to ouput 30 fps in modern games. The speed of the ram isn’t great, but since the GPU is so slow, I don’t think it’ll really matter.

    I’d recommend the following upgrade path […]

    Thanks for your hint especially with the PSU and cables i am more confident now. But did you read that i don’t do so much gaming? And if i do then its grand strategy games (CPU heavy) or kcd2, which should run ok because kcd1 was already acceptable in my current system. Would you still recommend a GPU upgrade and your mentioned upgrade path?

    • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      14 hours ago

      I don’t really know. I’ll give you that the current CPU is very weak (whereas I wouldn’t recommend upgrading yet if it was say 1st gen Ryzen) and if you need that for your workload then go for that really.

      My recommendation to upgrade to AM5 stands.