Upgrade Recommendations for 2 year old system

frustrated1

Dec 2018 - 1st time I built a PC from scratch with loads of great advise and help from this forum, was for my son, who is now going on 12.

GPU is maxing out during some games (maybe normal?)
Its running pretty well 99% of the time, the odd time a game or two will freeze / glitch or run slowly in that frame rate appears slow but it is not frequent.
Have noticed CPU temps at times can run high but not for long periods of time.

Its used primarily as a gaming PC only, he has done some video editing on it before but not regularly.
More recently, he plays Sea of Thieves, Apex Legends.

Given things move relatively quickly, looking for opinions on what may be worth looking at in terms of upgrades in near future.
List of whats in the build currently below

ASUS TUF B450-PLUS GAMING AMD B450 Socket AM4 ATX
AMD Ryzen 5 2600 3.4GHz 16MB L3 Box processor
Kingston Technology ValueRAM 8GB DDR4 2400MHz Module 8GB DDR4 2400MHz memory
PowerColor Red Dragon AXRX 580 8GBD5-3DHDV2/OC Radeon RX 580 8GB GDDR5 graphic
Sandisk SDSSDA-120G-G27 120GB 2.5" Serial ATA III internal solid state drive -
CIT Venom Mesh Gaming Case Black Interior 12cm Blue LED Fan
Cougar GX-S 550W 80 Plus Gold Power Supply - GX-S550

I also have a standard 500Gb HDD in the build that I had lying around and put a DVD drive in to case as got it cheap (although the drive must be full of dust by now from lack of use)



Thoughts ?

Skerries

maybe higher clocked memory 3200mhz and one of the newer AMD or Nvidia cards that are coming out at the end of the month
upgrade the mechanical hdd to a 1TB SSD?

Samuel T. Cogley

As above I'd look at 3200 memory it's pretty cheap (£55) at the moment. You dont say what resolution/ refresh you're aiming for but I'd wait to see if I could score a bargain on a secondhand card. If not hang on for as long as you can for the new mainstream cards.

Aodhan5000

Is 3600mhz much better? Ryzen infinity clock runs at 1800mhz and I thought it was best to have a 1:2 ratio

Samuel T. Cogley

Aodhan5000 wrote: »

Is 3600mhz much better? Ryzen infinity clock runs at 1800mhz and I thought it was best to have a 1:2 ratio

Can run upto that on the 3000 series, and a bit beyond on some chips. This is a 2600 though so not sure what the IF can do. They clock down though so will run at 1600 on 3200 RAM.

Actually a bit of IF overclocking might give some benefit without changing the RAM. Must dig out the video.

Aodhan5000

Heard infinity fabric is hard af to OC on third gen Ryzen. Dno about 2nd tho. I mean he might even be able to OC 3200mhz ram to 3600

Samuel T. Cogley

I can't find the video but the upshot was by upping the IF speed you could negate some of the disadvantage of slower memory. I'm not sure enough of Zen+ to offer any guidance on doing that or whether it's limited to Zen 2.

BloodBath

I think the main problem is you have a single stick of slower 8gb ram.

You want 16gb with 2 sticks ideally for dual channel 3200Mhz CL16 will do just fine.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Corsair-CMK16GX4M2B3200C16-Vengeance-Performance-Desktop/dp/B0143UM4TC/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=corsair+3200mhz&qid=1599679777&sr=8-1

If performance still isn't what you want then upgrade the graphics card.

bobbyy gee

clean case out for dust.make sure fans are blowing in correct direction you need minimum 2 but 3 is good.back up everything and format drive and put clean install windows 10
make sure gpu has newest drivers.as the old ones crashed..you will see gpu prices drop in
December.nvida does gpu drivers better maybe move off amd.you need another ssd drive to store the games
https://www.seaofthieves.com/forum/topic/88460/only-using-80-of-gpu-at-1440p/10

Samuel T. Cogley

BloodBath wrote: »

I think the main problem is you have a single stick of slower 8gb ram.

You want 16gb with 2 sticks ideally for dual channel 3200Mhz CL16 will do just fine.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Corsair-CMK16GX4M2B3200C16-Vengeance-Performance-Desktop/dp/B0143UM4TC/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=corsair+3200mhz&qid=1599679777&sr=8-1

If performance still isn't what you want then upgrade the graphics card.

Didn't even clock that was a single stick. OP definitely upgrade the RAM that will probably resolve the issue.

How high is high on the CPU btw?