Upgrading a pair of Gaming PCs

ndf

Hi,

I have two sons each with their own home-built gaming PCs.
I prefer to stick to my Xbox One for gaming and Surface Pro 4 for home office work and I have not stayed current with upgrading PCs for many years now.

The spec for one of their PCs is...

Corsair Builder Series CX600 600 Watt
ASRock 970 Pro3 R2.0, AM3+, ATX
AMD FX-6300 Processor, Sockel AM3+
2 x 4GB G.Skill RipJaws PC3-12800U CL9
(I will be upgrading this to 16GB total)
HIS R9 270 iPower IceQ X² Turbo Boost Clock 2GB GDDR5 PCI-E
WD Blue 1TB 6Gb's
LG Flatron 22EA53VQ-P

The other PC is quite similar with more memory and disk but slightly older AM3 CPU, ASRock Motherboard, & Radeon.

I would like to get them something to bring these up to date and I am looking for suggestions for what and where to buy.

I was thinking of something like a GeForce GTX 1050 TI

Their games of choice are Eve, Mass Effect, R6, Battlefield for the older one and WoW, CoD/BOps, Fallout, TES for the newer PC.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Serephucus

RX 470/480 would be great bang for the buck alright, and a huge upgrade.

Can't go wrong with an SSD either. Best single all-round upgrade for any computer. Full stop.

16GB RAM would be nice, though I'd put this below the GPU and SSD in terms of priority.

I'd also hang on until Black Friday/Cyber Monday, as there's always SSD deals going. Might get luck and be able to snag GPUs and RAM for cheap as well.

ndf

Thank you. I will look at the RX 470 v 480 offers.
The SSDs would provide a huge boost. I just hate the work moving the OS across !!

Xenoronin

ndf wrote: »

Thank you. I will look at the RX 470 v 480 offers.
The SSDs would provide a huge boost. I just hate the work moving the OS across !!

It's not so bad. Plug the ssd in. Boot with Norton Ghost or equivalent on a USB and clone across. Set the ssd as the new boot drive and format the old hard drive.
Plenty of guides online, though i do agree, it never works out as easy as it does on paper.

ndf

We added RAM to his machine to bring it to 16GB. He is now interested in a 4GB RX480 Graphics card.

I understand that the RX480 is PCI-E 3.0 while his ASRock 970 Pro3 R2.0 motherboard is PCI-E 2.0 but they should work together.

I have also seen warnings of the RX480 exceeding the recommended power specifications for PCI-E and frying some motherboards.
And cooling issues with some Gigabyte models.

Is there one recommended as best for the ASRock 970 Pro3 R2.0 motherboard?

wotzgoingon

ndf wrote: »

We added RAM to his machine to bring it to 16GB. He is now interested in a 4GB RX480 Graphics card.

I understand that the RX480 is PCI-E 3.0 while his ASRock 970 Pro3 R2.0 motherboard is PCI-E 2.0 but they should work together.

I have also seen warnings of the RX480 exceeding the recommended power specifications for PCI-E and frying some motherboards.
And cooling issues with some Gigabyte models.

Is there one recommended as best for the ASRock 970 Pro3 R2.0 motherboard?

It will be fine on PEIe 2.0

I am on 2.0 myself as there is no difference at all. PCIe 3.0 only comes into play if you get a PCIe NVMe SSD.

There has been no cases of RX 480 frying motherboards and the card has been out a few months now.

Redfox25

ndf wrote: »

I have also seen warnings of the RX480 exceeding the recommended power specifications for PCI-E and frying some motherboards.
And cooling issues with some Gigabyte models.

The power draw thing was alot of hype that was fixed with a simple Bios update ages ago.

Get the new cards and the SSD's and the pc will be like a new machine. Dont underestimate the difference the SSD will make in boot time and in general.