Birthday money upgrade: CPU or GPU?

milltown

My son wants to put some birthday money into upgrading the PC for better gaming. It's an off the shelf Lenovo "gaming" PC at the moment.
Brief specs:
i3-7100
1050Ti
8GB RAM

Budget is only €2/300

Likelihood seems to be that a processor upgrade would require a new mobo too so probably blowing through the €300 ceiling right away?

Other option may be to stick another 8GB of RAM in and upgrade the GPU to a 1660 or something similar. Would that be a better idea? Or is the CPU going to be too much of a drag on performance?

All advice very welcome. I've been away from building and upgrading for too long to know whats what these days.

Homelander

Well the i3-7100 is extremely limiting, at least with the 1050Ti you can lower settings to get good framerates, but the i3-7100 will cause bad stuttering in a lot of newer games.

Assuming the power supply/motherboard design in the Lenovo are off-the-shelf parts, I would get a Ryzen 1600AF + A320M motherboard first for less than €200. Huge boost.

Of course the other thing is that you could just sell the PC for €300 or whatever and just buy a new one. Realistically €600 would buy a new one that would be twice as fast.

EG this PC at £480 is a steal.

K.O.Kiki

The Lenovo has other areas that compromise it (e.g. the 280W PSU).

If sticking with the machine, a GTX 1650 Super (170-180eur), 1x 8Gb RAM (assuming there is only 1x RAM stick in PC) and a 480-512Gb SSD.

Sell the 1050 Ti on Adverts for 70-odd.

Move/reinstall Windows to the SSD.

You'd still get a decent experience on less-demanding games with Medium graphics settings.

Tea drinker

milltown wrote: »

My son wants to put some birthday money into upgrading the PC for better gaming. It's an off the shelf Lenovo "gaming" PC at the moment.
Brief specs:
i3-7100
1050Ti
8GB RAM

Budget is only €2/300

Likelihood seems to be that a processor upgrade would require a new mobo too so probably blowing through the €300 ceiling right away?

Other option may be to stick another 8GB of RAM in and upgrade the GPU to a 1660 or something similar. Would that be a better idea? Or is the CPU going to be too much of a drag on performance?

All advice very welcome. I've been away from building and upgrading for too long to know whats what these days.

It's the same socket for the i5-9600 as the I3-7100
Might not need a new mobo, maybe a BIOS upgrade. Check the manfacturers CPU support chart, they are usually easy to understand.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/134896/intel-core-i5-9600k-processor-9m-cache-up-to-4-60-ghz.html

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97455/intel-core-i3-7100-processor-3m-cache-3-90-ghz.html?_ga=1.65962222.1784474952.1480145622

That processor is seemingly less than 250 euro.


1660 vs a 2060
https://www.pcgamer.com/geforce-rtx-2060-vs-gtx-1660-ti-which-graphics-card-should-you-buy/#:~:text=If%20it%20can%2C%20though%2C%20the,has%20RTX%20features%20to%20boot.&text=It%20makes%20more%20sense%20to,just%20upgrading%20your%20GPU%20alone.

As a fix to your performance situation the bad news is I think there is no single universal panacea... but the excellent news is probably very few poor choices to make a good leap in performance from where you are.

Homelander

They're not compatible. The best CPU for the motherboard is the 6700/7700K but even 2nd hand they go for €200-250, meanwhile a new £99 Ryzen 3300X performs the exact same and supports newer features while a £120 Ryzen 2600 is a superior processor.

There aren't really any options with those old Intel boards any more unless you're happy to pay way over the odds for convenience.

The i3-7100 is the first thing that needs upgrading. You can put whatever GPU or RAM into it you like, but a dual core i3 will still completely choke on modern games and completely bottleneck any card.

K.O.Kiki

You're being a bit OTT - the 7100 is a weak 2c/4t yes, but to claim i3 + 1650 Super would run worse than 1600 + 1050 Ti is outright false.

The 1050 Ti was always a bad card, its only saving grace being low power consumption.
Upgrading just the GPU would likely double FPS, and dual-channel (2 sticks) RAM & SSD will help alleviate some bad performance too.

Homelander

It's not false. Anything that runs very well on the i3-7100 will by default run well enough on the 1050Ti.

Upgrading to a GTX1650 will give you better image quality but it won't alleviate stuttering or low frames. The processor is the core of the system, and it makes sense to upgrade that first, GPU later.

I'm not advocating or promoting a 1050Ti, but I'd 100% want it with a 1600 over a dual core i3 and a GTX1650 Super as a temporary measure until I could afford a better card.

Modern games like the newest Call of Duty or Battlefield are actually completely unplayable on those dual core i3's - we're not talking about 50fps v 60fps, in some of the latest games the constant stuttering and drops are so bad that you just can't play. People struggle badly with 7th gen i5's as it is.

Hence why if making an investment in this PC, now, with a limited budget, it would make more sense to get a new CPU. There is no game the 1050Ti will not run with settings adjusted and still having a semi-decent visual experience.

There are tons of games where the i3-7100 is a big problem. Older games are fine obviously - but equally, a 1050Ti is fine for older games at high settings already.