So a while ago I managed to damage one of my GPUs fans (wifi card fell out of the PCI slot and hit the fan). Although still usable (and probably fixable), it struggles with a few of the games I play. I mostly play games like cities skylines and transport fever 2, and from what I can tell, I think I’m being bottlenecked primarily by a lack of 3D performance and dedicated GPU memory (both of those reach 100% in task manager)
I tried to ask the people at centrecom, but they told me I wouldn’t notice any performance increases with an upgrade as my CPU and mobo aren’t fast enough to notice a difference. But they never actually asked me what CPU or mobo I have, so I can’t tell if that’s actually the case or if they’re just trying to get me to upgrade the rest of my components too. I’m new at all of this and my PC is a pre-built, so I don’t entirely know what I’m doing in any case.
I currently have a Zotac GTX 1650 (4GB) but want to upgrade to an MSI RTX 3060 (12GB). I have an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (6 Core) CPU and an MSI B450M PRO-VDH MAX motherboard. I checked compatibility with PCPartPicker and it seems everything will be compatible, and I do plan on upgrading CPUs and possibly motherboards eventually anyway, so upgrading GPUs won’t necessarily be a waste of money, even if the rest of my PCs components can’t make full use of the additional power, right?
Also, how do I go about checking space constraints? Is it just a case of taking a tape measure to the area around my GPU?
As I said I’m completely new at this and am not entirely sure I know what I’m doing… So any help is much appreciated!
Laughable. Those people at the store are just trying to get more money out of you.
Your Ryzen 3600 should be more than up to the task of being paired with a 3060. That being said, CPU heavy games will still be impacted, and simulation games like Cities Skylines tend to be CPU heavy, but if your current bottleneck is the GPU (and I have no doubt it is) then you’ll still see an improvement.
The CPU bottleneck would emerge later on, if ever, when there is more going on in the game. For example, a huge city. Which means if you reach a point where your game starts lagging, while my ideal, you could simply start over or maybe look for mods that help with it.
And yes, you can reuse components if compatible, and a 3060 will work with stuff for a while yet, so you’ll be fine. You should double check that your PSU (power supply) is up for the task though.
As for case constraints - if you can find the model of your case, it should just max GPU size.
Thank you so much! Yeah, centrecom doesn’t have the best of reputations, but I haven’t had any bad experiences with them besides overly pushy sales people.
Thanks for the tip about searching up my case. It took a bit of searching to figure out what sort of case I have, but it looks like it’ll accommodate the new GPU just fine. Also good advice about the PSU, I’m not 100% on the wattage of it, but being a pre-built from a similar chain, I imagine they probably opted for the cheapest PSU that would reliably run everything, so I’ll have a look at its capacity and possibly order a new one.
In cities skylines I do usually hit 100% CPU usage, but transport fever 2 hovers around 80% CPU usage, 95% ram usage, and 100% GPU ram and 3D usage (about 60% general GPU usage). But eventually I do plan on upgrading CPUs anyway, but if a CPU bottleneck won’t necessarily be a negative thing, I might hold off for a while
Different graphical settings also move the bottleneck around. With a powerful GPU you can use higher quality modes and higher texture resolution because they don’t really affect the CPU.
With your current system I’d absolutely do the GPU upgrade, and then later if you decide your CPU isn’t powerful enough you can just get a new system with no GPU and move it over. No need to do everything at once, and that Ryzen 3600 still has some life left in it. The GPU really doesn’t. 4GB VRAM means a lot of games will overflow into system RAM which has a big performance impact.
Additionally, it looks like that board supports the Ryzen 5800X3D with a BIOS update so you might consider that instead of replacing everything. If you’re running out of system RAM and have RAM slots free, adding RAM is also an option.
That’s a good point. I did a bit more research last night, and I think a lot of my CPU performance issues are caused by overheating and throttling. The system didn’t include much cooling so it idles quite hot (around 60° with just windows running), and has only been minimally improved (5° or so) by reapplying thermal paste. I might see if I can work out how to upgrade CPU coolers and add in some additional (or maybe better) case fans
High temperatures at the CPU cores doesn’t necessarily mean a cooling problem, unless it’s actually getting to 90+ under load and throttling.
Take the side off your case and point a desk fan in there, if that doesn’t help then more case fans won’t.