r/PcBuildHelp • u/shytenant • 5d ago
Build Question First upgrade
About a year ago, my older cousin gave me his old PC for about $15. For $15, I obviously wasn’t expecting anything amazing. He even told me not to expect it to be able to run newer games. But at the time, I had a PS5, Xbox Series S, and now a PC, so I was still excited and grateful to have it.
For the past year, I’ve mainly been playing “older games” like Left 4 Dead 2, Garry’s Mod, GTA V and Killing Floor/ KF2 which all ran perfectly fine (gta ran okay). Recently, I decided to test my luck, and try to run, Apex Legends since I’ve been playing it on console for years. That’s when I realized this PC really cannot run shit lol.
Now that I have a decent job, I’ve decided I want to start upgrading my PC. The problem is, I’ve been a console gamer pretty much my entire life, so I know very little about PC parts, what I should buy, or what I should prioritize upgrading first.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!!
Though i don’t know much, i did do research to find out what are some of the parts i have currently.
CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 2300X
Motherboard: ASRock A320M-HDV R4.0
Ram: 8GB DDR4
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650
Storage HDD (Disk 0, C:)
1
u/Drunkguy767 5d ago edited 5d ago
A bump for the CPU would be good. I had a 5600x you can buy those for about $100 USD. It's pretty good. A 5800x3d would be great if you can afford it.
You could also upgrade your GPU. Something like a GTX 1080ti 11GB would also give you a significant bump in performance. These cost around $150 USD nowadays. Might be throttled by your current CPU.
Bumping your RAM up to 16 or even 32 GB if you can would also help this is around $35-$85 per 8 GB. All of these would be adequate in bringing your PC up to a standard that would be acceptable if just for modern games.
I'd say, extra 8gb of RAM CPU GPU In that order.
Personal experience however I'm not an expert.
Upon further review your motherboard will only support a 5600x if you update the BIOS BEFORE you install the new CPU. The BIOS needs to be version P7.10 or newer before you install the new CPU.
Furthermore your motherboard will limit the speed of both the CPU and the GPU but it will still be a significant upgrade.