Really need advice on upgrade route

T

Trent242

Senior Member
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
987
Reaction score
47
Location
South Africa
Hi!
My current pc is a machine I built in 2018:
32Gb Ram (4x8Gb Corsair Vengeance 3200MHz DDR4)
Ryzen 7 2700X with Air Cooler
MSI X470 Gaming M7 AC Motherboard (AM4)
XFX Radeon RX 580 GTS Black Edition
2 x 2 TB Nvme drives
2 x SSD Drives (1 x 2TB, 1 x 1Tb)
Corsair HX850 PSU
(I bought all components from Amazon US)

The PC is being used 90% for work (Adobe Photoshop, Office, After Effects), and about 10% for gaming.

I need to upgrade, BUT I want to disrupt my workflow as little as possible. I have a lot of hard drives in this PC, set up just right. My templates and files are all set up in the way I know, can easily find them. When I upgrade the hard drives will not be changed. These drives were all installed in the last 12 months, as replacement for HDD drives I had since 2018. Everything successfully moved with DiskGenius.
I still run Windows 10.

I ideally want to move to an Intel CPU, new motherboard, RAM and GPU. But with RAM prices being what it is, doing this would just be too costly. And reinstalling everything for such and upgrade is daunting.
Would I be dumb to do this upgrade: Keep everything as is, and just replace the CPU, graphics card and air cooler. The components I will get if I take this route are AMD Ryzen™ 9 5900XT (AM4), GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Gaming OC 8G Graphics Card, ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III Pro 360. These components, plus a Philips sidescroll mouse, will cost me about R19500, also from Amazon US).

I really want to avoid re-installing the OS. My software and everything is set up just perfectly. What are your thoughts? And then also... would it be safe to do the upgrade from Win 10 to Win 11 (upgrade, not fresh install of Win 11).
 
Looking at what you're already thinking since moving to DDR5 is expensive as balls, I'd go for the AMD Ryzen 9 5900XT with a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB or RTX 5060 Ti 16GB (depending on the budget) and a DeepCool LE360 V2 ARGB 360mm AIO cooler. I just got the same cooler myself.

I was going to suggest maybe looking at an X3D CPU, but that's for gaming. The XT will do wonders for you. Just remember to update the BIOS first
 
Last edited:
Trent242 said:
Hi!
My current pc is a machine I built in 2018:
32Gb Ram (4x8Gb Corsair Vengeance 3200MHz DDR4)
Ryzen 7 2700X with Air Cooler
MSI X470 Gaming M7 AC Motherboard (AM4)
XFX Radeon RX 580 GTS Black Edition
2 x 2 TB Nvme drives
2 x SSD Drives (1 x 2TB, 1 x 1Tb)
Corsair HX850 PSU
(I bought all components from Amazon US)

The PC is being used 90% for work (Adobe Photoshop, Office, After Effects), and about 10% for gaming.

I need to upgrade, BUT I want to disrupt my workflow as little as possible. I have a lot of hard drives in this PC, set up just right. My templates and files are all set up in the way I know, can easily find them. When I upgrade the hard drives will not be changed. These drives were all installed in the last 12 months, as replacement for HDD drives I had since 2018. Everything successfully moved with DiskGenius.
I still run Windows 10.

I ideally want to move to an Intel CPU, new motherboard, RAM and GPU. But with RAM prices being what it is, doing this would just be too costly. And reinstalling everything for such and upgrade is daunting.
Would I be dumb to do this upgrade: Keep everything as is, and just replace the CPU, graphics card and air cooler. The components I will get if I take this route are AMD Ryzen™ 9 5900XT (AM4), GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 5060 Ti Gaming OC 8G Graphics Card, ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III Pro 360. These components, plus a Philips sidescroll mouse, will cost me about R19500, also from Amazon US).

I really want to avoid re-installing the OS. My software and everything is set up just perfectly. What are your thoughts? And then also... would it be safe to do the upgrade from Win 10 to Win 11 (upgrade, not fresh install of Win 11).
Click to expand...

Do the CPU on its own first. Save up a bit more and get yourself a 16gig 5060 or 9060. You'll thank yourself later.

Regarding windows, that's up to luck. You might get lucky with doing a driver uninstall and reinstall for the GPU like I did when I switched from AMD to Nvidia. You might not.

If you don't, probably a good idea to configure your pc so you you regularly wipe your OS drive without it being a huge pain.
 
You said you prefer Intel. They support DDR4 RAM up to 14th generation CPUs if you pick the correct motherboard. This could save you a bundle on RAM if you are happy with it being a bit slower. Going for DDR5 is no longer a future proofing exercise (through moving it to the next build) since the DDR6 JEDEC spec is being finalized and we should start seeing it from next year.
 
Trent242 said:
Would I be dumb to do this upgrade: Keep everything as is, and just replace the CPU, graphics card and air cooler.
Click to expand...

This would be the most efficient option with practically no disruption, especially on the cpu side. The only possible issue is that you need to do a bios update for your motherboard to use the 5000 series cpu, so keep your current cpu for the bios update first before taking it out.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X