Partial upgrade - hopefully

bifl

My trusty self build is now 12 years old with a partial update (memory/SSD) 6 years ago. Mainly home computing and gaming such as Fortnite. I'm finding now the graphics won't run later BF or Red Dead Redemption 2. So it's a graphics card upgrade I need but given the age of this old girl other items will be needed as well.

Rather than a specific budget (maybe €600-800) I don't get too hung up on latest cutting edge, I've always built on where the current sweet spot is as regards price/performance.

I'm hoping case, SSD, PSU, even memory can be carried over and the motherboard, CPU, cooling and 2nd hand graphics card would be what's needed. Here's my current setup - what would be your recommendations please folks?

Corsair HX 750W PSU ATX 12V V2.2, 80 Plus Silver

Cooler Master HAF 922 Midi Tower Black

Intel i5-750 Quad Core Processor - 2.66 GHz, 8MB Cache

Zalman CNPS10X-Quiet CPU Cooler

Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3, P55, Socket-1156 4xDDR3, ATX,

4GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 1600MHz Ripjaw Series (8-8-8-24) Dual Channel kit for Intel P55

plus

8GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 1600MHz Ripjaw Series (9-9-9-24) Dual Channel kit for Intel LGA1156/AM3

Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 1GB GDDR5 PCI-Express 2.0, DVI-I, HDMI, DisplayPort, Lite-Retail

1TB SSD

Sound Blaster Fatality X-FI

Homelander

You could carry over the SSD and PSU but at this point I'd probably just start fresh and sell the old machine.

You definitely need more than just a graphics upgrade as that old i5 wouldn't have a hope of running Battlefield or Read Dead 2 at acceptable levels.

It's not worth much though as a complete PC as it's so old and low performance - probably would make more selling it as parts.

Your budget should be enough to get a nice machine with a Ryzen 5600X, 16GB DDR4, a 1TB NVME and something like a Radeon RX6600.

Good for the latest games at 1080p ultra settings.

bifl

Thanks for your comments. Case is big so that should be OK. My current Corsair 750w psu should still be enough?

Homelander

More than enough. Your PC right now would be pulling less than 200w under full load.

Something like Ryzen 5800X + RX6600 would only be around 250-280w.

bifl

I notice you have suggested a 1TB NVME. Is there enough of a performance gain over my current SATA 1TB SDD and the hassle of moving everything over to a new C:drive ?

minitrue

Short term the performance gain is relatively minimal for most casual use cases but the hassle is debatable. You can just clone the C across but if this is a 12 year old windows install (or quite likely even "just" a 6 year old one) the benefits of a clean install might be worth a lot more than the change from sata to nvme. You are also coming from such an old machine I would be a lot less confident than usual that your copy of windows would just work on a new machine.

I'm also going to say that a 12 year old power supply is getting on in years and I'd be prone not to reuse it for a new build.

The killer blow here for me though would be that if you replace it all then you have a full machine to pass on/sell but if you re-use the case/ssd/psu what's left is a tough sell even just to give away.