Upgrading my PC

Hey guys,

Ordered myself a custom built PC some 5 years ago now, still going strong with no major issues (touch wood) i have of course upgraded it along the way with natural things like a new graphics card (8gb GTX1070 MSI GAMING x) and some new RAM (2x 8gb DDR3 VenganceLP 1600mhz).

My query however, is what is next?

I have very limited knowledge about upgrading PC's and the components, and that of what i do know is mainly from google searches and reading endless amounts of forums etc. Which often leads to me having to google more things that i don't understand.

After reading numerous posts, and looking up multiple different gaming setups etc. It seems that the next upgrades for my PC would be the motherboard and mainly the CPU. I just have no idea what to go with or even if its actually necessary or i will just be wasting coin.

This is my current setup;


(this is pretty much just copy paste from my order receipt apart from the upgrades i made so please excuse any useless info)

Any advice from you guys with more knowledge than i, would be really appreciated.

P.S. My goal isn't to have a super computer that obliterates all, i understand i could pretty much go and buy the best of everything an tah-dah, i just want to know if what i have needs or will need upgrading soon in terms of gaming.


Thank you in advance.

I suppose the first questions I'd ask are; are you wanting to game at a higher resolution/framerate? Do you already have the monitor to do that with etc.? Is your current rig struggling to keep up?

What you have should be running rather sweet I would imagine? The CPU/RAM combo shouldn't be holding you back with the 1070 in gaming at all so if you are happy with what you are seeing framerate wise I wouldn't worry about it.

I would estimate that you could even get away with a 2080 depending on the resolution you are looking to run, if further upgrading the GPU was something on the horizon. Have you overclocked?

All that being said, I was in a similar situation a month back. There was no point in me upgrading, it was a new system that was required, otherwise it would be like triggers brush.

By the time you buy a new Motherboard, CPU, Cooler and RAM..... the surrounding parts start to raise eyebrows..... new PSU? (Highly recommended), new Storage? (Modern M2 storage is just gravy). By this point you have an entirely new PC minus the case and GPU that you can send in anyway.

Don't look for upgrades you don't need, save your money and when the time comes just go the whole hog. You could then sell on your current rig and get at least some money back from it to subsidise the shiny goodness.

Ahh good question, currently i'm only playing FinalFantasy XIV and a few other games on steam, and all run perfectly fine resolution/frame rate wise. However i will be looking to purchase a fair few more modern games soon (hence the thought of all this 'upgrading') and i have no knowledge as to weather my system would handle the up and comings.

Now you mention it i never thought about my monitors (i have 2) both fairly bog standard (don't know the specs off hand at work right now) so maybe they are something i could look into.

No my rig has no issue keeping up with anything i currently play on max or near max settings the only issue i have come across is a rattling from the PSU lol which i'm taking to get looked at and hopefully sorted.

Thanks

The_Scotster said:

What you have should be running rather sweet I would imagine? The CPU/RAM combo shouldn't be holding you back with the 1070 in gaming at all so if you are happy with what you are seeing framerate wise I wouldn't worry about it.

I would estimate that you could even get away with a 2080 depending on the resolution you are looking to run, if further upgrading the GPU was something on the horizon. Have you overclocked?

All that being said, I was in a similar situation a month back. There was no point in me upgrading, it was a new system that was required, otherwise it would be like triggers brush.

By the time you buy a new Motherboard, CPU, Cooler and RAM..... the surrounding parts start to raise eyebrows..... new PSU? (Highly recommended), new Storage? (Modern M2 storage is just gravy). By this point you have an entirely new PC minus the case and GPU that you can send in anyway.

Don't look for upgrades you don't need, save your money and when the time comes just go the whole hog. You could then sell on your current rig and get at least some money back from it to subsidise the shiny goodness.

Click to expand...

You are correct i'm loving my rig at the moment, and i understand what you are saying, i looked into the prices of a few parts like CPU etc and yea it would basically cost a new PC's worth of parts. So maybe i will just hold off for now and look into a new PC at a later date. I may also look into some new monitors like 'Steaky360' brought up as mine are very standard.

As far as overclocking goes, my knowledge is practically non existent, its not something i have looked into likely because of how little i know.

thank you for the advice.


P.S. i do have one other slightly random question for you guys an anyone else, seeing what i have, if i was to think of selling where on earth do i go price wise?

Selling a PC is effectively gifting it to be honest. You are better to sell it to someone that you know will benefit from it for a couple of 100 quid. That way they will get a known good, far better, system than they would if they bought new and you will subsidise some cash your way.

If selling on the bay of e's and the likes it's best to strip the thing down to parts and sell the components. 9 times out of 10 you are as well binning the case so that's where you would look to send it in for a PCS custom build.

Overclocking your system can be fairly straight forward, or crazy complex. In your shoes with no experience I would recommend touching nothing other than the CPU clock frequency. Bumping it up to 4.5ghz wouldn't do any harm at all and you may even manage it on the current voltages, without touching anything else. If it crashed then drop to 4.4ghz and try again. You could eek a bit more performance out of it though. Right up to 5ghz is possible on your chip if you know your way around it.

I thought as much when it comes to selling, makes sense.

As far as overclocking goes maybe its something i will look into over this weekend, thanks very much for your advice been very helpful.

Arron AcE said:

I thought as much when it comes to selling, makes sense.

As far as overclocking goes maybe its something i will look into over this weekend, thanks very much for your advice been very helpful.

Click to expand...

When you have a chance start up a thread with a pic of your BIOS screen and I'll tell you what to change. The cooler you have is excellent for the chip so there will definitely be some scope to eek out some performance gains.

The_Scotster said:

When you have a chance start up a thread with a pic of your BIOS screen and I'll tell you what to change. The cooler you have is excellent for the chip so there will definitely be some scope to eek out some performance gains.

Click to expand...

Before i set up a thread, i have just been looking at my BIOS an wondering what you would need to see? just the main screen or other areas to?

Arron AcE said:

Before i set up a thread, i have just been looking at my BIOS an wondering what you would need to see? just the main screen or other areas to?

Click to expand...

I believe you will have a UEFI bios with the ASUS. It's usually an advanced menu. With your particular board it should look something like this...



AI Tweaker is the the overclocking settings. If you show me your current settings I'll give you some things to tweak and try out. It may already be overclocked

Also, do you have 3DMark? Could you run Firestrike before you start? Just to get a baseline overall score and CPU score.

The_Scotster said:

I believe you will have a UEFI bios with the ASUS. It's usually an advanced menu. With your particular board it should look something like this...


AI Tweaker is the the overclocking settings. If you show me your current settings I'll give you some things to tweak and try out. It may already be overclocked

Click to expand...

Sorry for the late reply, been very busy at work, then when i got round to this i had to use my camera as none of the USB slots would save screenshots (kept saying i needed to have a USB with available space to save screenshot even though i did)

then after doing that decided to try and play 'Apex legends' and it killed my PC lol. so here finally i have the images for you if you can still help?

Image 1https://ibb.co/nskcSgP
Image 2https://ibb.co/b1zJNCM
Image 3https://ibb.co/cw0gxYp

The_Scotster said:

Also, do you have 3DMark? Could you run Firestrike before you start? Just to get a baseline overall score and CPU score.

Click to expand...

Took me a while to work out how to do this but i believe this is correct? if not apologies.

Score - https://ibb.co/cDFQFyp




*edit sorry tuns out i was being dumb here is the firestrike benchmark, i will leave the other up just in case it is in anyway helpful

Results - https://ibb.co/WppbVJs
Comparison Image 1 -https://ibb.co/XCSPYkL
Comparison Image 2 -https://ibb.co/LJ18kTL



this was not 'firestrike' as that was not available free (unless i'm being dumb) hope this is ok.

First thing to try is an XMP Profile

Set the AI Overclock Tuner to XMP
XMP to whatever your RAM is, you should see 1600mhz in here.
Asus Multicore - Auto (Doesn't matter)
CPU strap 100
There should be another few items left at auto/default
CPU Core Ratio - Sync All Cores
Set the Core Ratio to 43 (4.3Ghz)
Fully Manual Mode should be disabled
CPU Core Voltage should be adaptive
Core Voltage Offset leave auto
Additional Turbo Voltage set to 1.2V
Leave the rest auto.
Save, Reboot. Run firestrike again and see what information you get from it. If it's all favourable, see if you can run the firestrike torture test (Runs 20 times in a row and monitors temps etc).

If you get a BSOD lower the Core Ratio to 42. I wouldn't be comfortable suggesting you use more voltage. 1.2V isn't high by any means but it's not my system.

The H100 is more than enough to handle this but try and make sure it's not on a quiet setting. It needs to be on "Normal" mode at least.

wow!

Thanks very much for the advice, once i am home from work i will go through what you have written and give it a go.

No worries, look forward to the results.

BTW, if everything goes smoothly you could try adjusting the core ratio until it's unstable. If 43 is stable, try 44 etc..... until you get instability....then pull it back.

This is effectively seeing where you fall in the silicone lottery

Arron AcE said:

Hey guys,

Ordered myself a custom built PC some 5 years ago now, still going strong with no major issues (touch wood) i have of course upgraded it along the way with natural things like a new graphics card (8gb GTX1070 MSI GAMING x) and some new RAM (2x 8gb DDR3 VenganceLP 1600mhz).

My query however, is what is next?

I have very limited knowledge about upgrading PC's and the components, and that of what i do know is mainly from google searches and reading endless amounts of forums etc. Which often leads to me having to google more things that i don't understand.

After reading numerous posts, and looking up multiple different gaming setups etc. It seems that the next upgrades for my PC would be the motherboard and mainly the CPU. I just have no idea what to go with or even if its actually necessary or i will just be wasting coin.

This is my current setup;

Case	CM STORM TROOPER-GAMING ENTHUSIAST
Processor (CPU)	Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-4770k (3.5GHz) 8MB Cache
Motherboard	ASUS® Z87M-PLUS: m-ATX, USB3.0, SATA 6.0, XFIRE

Click to expand...

Hi,

So that's what you want to upgarde ? I see no problem here even if it's 5 years old. The i7 4th generation is enough for most of games (I think).
Have you find any difficulties with a game ? Ifnot, upgrade your screen(s), setup (desk, keyboard, etc.).

If you insist, don't upgrade the motherboard only, go for both. Changing just the motherboard will not give you a lot and may be the processor will not be supported (changed a burnt motherboard and I had to pass from i3 to i5)