What should I upgrade first?

[Avenol]

So, I haven't really put any money into my PC in a bit. I'm wondering what I should buy in order to just jack up the old girl a few notches. I'm pretty happy with her performance to date, and I can still play most things I want with no issues on high or ultra...but on some of the newer, more intesive games, when I've got OBS, teamspeak, game, nightbot, and some other things running it starts to slow down a bit.

So, lemme throw down the specs and lets see what I'm working with. I don't know everything someone would want to know to see what to upgrade, so lets just list everything lol.


Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4670K CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3401 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)
Installed Physical Memory (RAM): 16.0 GB
Total Virtual Memory 20.9 GB
BaseBoard: ASRock ASRock Z87 Extreme4
Adapter Description NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780
Drive 1: Size 931.07 GB (999,730,180,096 bytes)
Drive 2 (SSD): Size 111.27 GB (119,479,988,224 bytes)


Any advice would be helpful, what I do first for the most bang for my buck. I got the i5, cause I didn't think I'd really be doing streaming any like multi threading stuff...but now I think I should have gone for the i7 haha...oh well.

I don't have my 4670k OC'ed at all, and while it's not water cooled, there is definitely more then adequate cooling going on. My case has a ton of fans.


Anything, thanks ahead of time for lookin!

[Chandler]

I assume you're using a 1tb HDD? That could be why things are slowing down with alot of programs running, You could swap it out with another SSD. But it'd be costly, other than that. Your rig looks fine, and I7 wouldn't provide that much of a performance improvement for the price, and your Gpuis still more than enough, so that's the only reasonable upgrade I could think of. Hope this helps!

-Chandler

[Avenol]

That's cool. I wonder if I shouldn't double my ram. I believe I have two 8gig sticks in there now. I wonder if it would be noticeable to go up to 32gig of ram. I'm pretty sure I remember the type, and I've got a microcenter right down the street heh.

[CapnVG]

That's cool. I wonder if I shouldn't double my ram. I believe I have two 8gig sticks in there now. I wonder if it would be noticeable to go up to 32gig of ram. I'm pretty sure I remember the type, and I've got a microcenter right down the street heh.

I'd go for a graphics card upgrade before I go for 32gigs of ram

Maybe go for a new monitor too, depending on what you have now

[ZED]

That's cool. I wonder if I shouldn't double my ram. I believe I have two 8gig sticks in there now. I wonder if it would be noticeable to go up to 32gig of ram. I'm pretty sure I remember the type, and I've got a microcenter right down the street heh.

If you have enough RAM when you run all programs, games etc, then there is no need for upgrade because it will make 0 difference. RAM amount does not improve system speed unless it is running out of free space. 16 GB is MORE than enough for gaming.

As for things slowing down and get full potential out of your current system, I would recommend to get water cooler on your CPU and overclock it. Then get another 250 GB SSD and install games on it. I have Samsung 850 PRO 256 GB and Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB. All games and programs are installed on the SSD and they run smooth. 250 GB SSD is dirt cheap now, so you can get one easily. You can get one as low as $60 https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Digi...rds=250+gb+ssd

[AshawTalos]

When I built my new box I bought 32 Gigs of RAM (4 8 Gig sticks) because I had the money to play with. My son's machine had some bad memory so we took half of my RAM and put it in his box while he RMA'ed his failed memory. I noticed zero difference in performance. The best bang for the buck in your system would be a new video card. If it were me I'd look at an nVidia 1070.

[ZED]

When I built my new box I bought 32 Gigs of RAM (4 8 Gig sticks) because I had the money to play with. My son's machine had some bad memory so we took half of my RAM and put it in his box while he RMA'ed his failed memory. I noticed zero difference in performance. The best bang for the buck in your system would be a new video card. If it were me I'd look at an nVidia 1070.

That's cause RAM is a Volatile memory, which is a temporary memory for CPU due to that CPU has a very low cache memory. RAM helps CPU to pull data faster from data storage. So what RAM does is it stores most frequently used files by CPU. In other words it's a large cache memory for CPU. If the system has enough of RAM then adding more RAM will not make any difference, but if the system is running out of it then the system needs more RAM to function on full capacity and take off that stress of CPU.
A faster RAM can make some difference in system performance. However, that difference will be so minimum in gaming that it's not worth spending extra $ on some 0.2 fps, which you will not even notice. But on the other hand, if you use your PC for work and especially for Video Editing then faster RAM will make a huge difference and you will notice much faster Render times.

[onypanda]

Graphics card then hypertheaded CPU. Could also do an sli

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[AshawTalos]

Graphics card then hypertheaded CPU. Could also do an sli

I have never seen anything that showed a gaming performance benefit from hyperthreading. If the object is a decent gaming machine on a budget, picking a CPU just because it supports hyperthreading isn't a wise move. If someone has documentation that proves me wrong, I'd love to see it.

[KaosC57]

I have never seen anything that showed a gaming performance benefit from hyperthreading. If the object is a decent gaming machine on a budget, picking a CPU just because it supports hyperthreading isn't a wise move. If someone has documentation that proves me wrong, I'd love to see it.

I'm fairly sure that i3's do better in gaming than Pentiums of the same clock speed. Now, there is one major exception to this rule, and that is the Haswell Generation Pentium G3258, which is the only Overclockable Pentium that is out. It can get clock speeds of around 4.5Ghz on a non-stock Air cooler, which is rivaling my i5-6600k's 4.6Ghz on non-stock Air. So, it does beat out the i3-4130 which it competes with. But, if we were to take the i3-6100 and pit it against the Pentium G4400, The i3-6100 beats it by sheer clock speed.

[ZED]

I'm fairly sure that i3's do better in gaming than Pentiums of the same clock speed. Now, there is one major exception to this rule, and that is the Haswell Generation Pentium G3258, which is the only Overclockable Pentium that is out. It can get clock speeds of around 4.5Ghz on a non-stock Air cooler, which is rivaling my i5-6600k's 4.6Ghz on non-stock Air. So, it does beat out the i3-4130 which it competes with. But, if we were to take the i3-6100 and pit it against the Pentium G4400, The i3-6100 beats it by sheer clock speed.

The reason why i3 is doing better in this case is because there are many games out there that support multicore CPU's. Some modern games utilize all 4 cores. Therefore a dual core i3 CPU with Hyper Threading will perform better due to that game takes 2 virtual cores as actual cores. Thus, the game thinks that i3 is as quad core CPU.

Since most modern games do not support more than 4 cores then there is very little difference in gaming between i5 and i7 of the same generation. Also, there are tests out there that show that some games actually perform by 2% worse when Hyper Threading is turned on. The advantage of i7 over i5 in gaming is the difference in core clocks, since i7 has slightly higher clocks than i5.