Gaming PC update needed.

[Mr Salty Surf]

Hi all, Its been a while since I've upgraded my pc and its a bit sluggish and quiet noisy. Mainly cpu fan which is standard one that came with the processor.

The rig currently consists of mainly:
[AMD FX-8120 3.1 GHz 8-Core Processor]
[Biostar TA990FXE ATX AM3+ Motherboard]
[Corsair Vengeance 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR3-1866
[Asus GeForce GTX 1060 3GB 3 GB Phoenix Fan
[Corsair HX 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply]
[Microsoft Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit]
An old style HDD which needs to be a lot bigger
Display runs at 1920x1080 60khz

I'm definitely replacing the cpu cooler and HDD but I wanted to know if there is anything else which stands out as being old hat if you like. Dont realy want to start again if I can stretch this rig out a few more years.

Budget is under £500. Thanks for any help. 👍

 

[Crowe]

I'd say that you'd benefit most from a decent SSD, and possibly consider an updated video card with a little more memory - I had a 1060 3B for a while, and saw a small improvement on moving to a 6GB card when I had an option. But only once the prices of cards comes down a lot!! Possibly a 1660.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Hi and welcome!

IMO your CPU is now quite old so a full platform upgrade might be in order and is easily doable within your budget. I'm not sure if I would want to put a faster GPU on your platform, and it does depend a lot on what you are playing. But those older 81xx FX series were not the best.

If you didnt want to do that and the system is doing everything you want it to, it is defintely worth putting an SSD in there with a fresh Windows install and seeing how that feels for you. You would have to use a SATA model rather than an NVME one but it would make things much snappier for sure.

You could do both easily within your budget

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor (£192.48 @ Ebuyer)
Motherboard: Asus TUF B450-PLUS GAMING ATX AM4 Motherboard (£83.47 @ Ebuyer)
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory (£70.60 @ Ebuyer)
Storage: Crucial MX500 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£102.47 @ Ebuyer)
Total: £449.02
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-02-08 10:09 GMT+0000

Also those older model Corsair HX PSU's were pretty good, I had one myself and I believe had a 10 year warranty? Just to note that although its hardly been sweating running your hardware it might be getting a bit long in the tooth and therefore worth replacing soonish too. I dont like to go beyond warranty on PSU's personally, if they go they can take everything with.

 

[Mr Salty Surf]

Thanks for your comments guys. I honestly hadn't realised how much things had moved along. I think I'm going to go down the road of a new platform.
At least then I know I'm at a decent start point. Maybe a new graphics card and psu in a year or 2.
I play things like battlefield, battlefront and CoD but the wife and kids play sims 4. I also do a little bit of CAD but thats not important.

Thanks for the suggested parts above. Thats a realy helpful thing to have. 👍

 

[Mr Salty Surf]

For a new platform set up im assuming that a NVME M2 SSD would be the best option? There doesn't seem to be much in price difference.

Also I find the standard coolers with the CPU realy noisy. Is it worth investing in a larger aftermarket cooler?

 

[Jean R built]

if the price difference doesn't stop you to buy it go with NVME, and a good CPU cooler helps a lot in temps and noise levels and it doesn't have to cost a lot to be good.

Personally on mine and my brother's PCs we put the Arctic eSports ONE, they have an excellent price/quality ratio and are really quiet.

If you are using a standard CPU cooler and swap it for a decent larger one, it will seem like the PC is turned off even when on.

There are a lot of good coolers from different makers, and one good thing is that you can find benchmarks to get an Idea if the one you want to buy is good.