£400 ish upgrade

[Slimbellio]

So while installing some fairly demanding games, I realised my wife's computer is still using a 2500k and 8gb ram. For around £350-£400 what would be the best route for mobo/cpu/ram upgrade? Not bought components for a while, so don't even know whether to go amd or intel!

Thanks in advance.

[BigIan88]

The 2500K is still a decent CPU, is it overclocked at all? What is her system used for primarily?

[Slimbellio]

Agreed, it has been great! I have overclocked it fairly gently. It's used primarily for gaming - anything from pubg, GTA5, Star Citizen, Skyrim (alot of visual mods). The RAM was what I was looking at upgrading, but I can't bring myself to pay £150 for 16gb of DDR3. I'm thinking about the i5 8400 as price/performance looks pretty astonishing!

[BigIan88]

you only need an additional 8GB, that wouldn't cost you £150 mate.

I'd throw some more memory at it, put an SSD in there if it hasnt got one already and then look at GPU's. The CPU is still very capable of running current games.

[Slimbellio]

Would the ram have to be the same as the first 8? Or just the speeds and timings? The current 8gb has a stupidly large cooler on the top that would prove impossible to fit under the cpu cooler into the other 2 DIMMs. Definitely not upgrading GPU in the current climate.... 970 still seems to do the trick.

[BigIan88]

Nope, it doesn't need to match exactly. As long as its DDR3, they will run at the speed of the slowest sticks in there and you can always adjust the timings and frequency if you wanted to (not that it makes much difference). You could slide the larger modules furthest away from the CPU cooler and put any new (hopefully low profile) sticks closest to the CPU socket. Failing that, you could always invest in a AIO cooler at which point the clearance no longer matters

[Slimbellio]

Wow that's great news. Yeah at the moment, the Redline Muskin Ridgeback is sitting as far away from the cooler as possible, will get some low profile ones to slip in beside underneath the cooler. Thanks a bunch.

[cruciate]

My 2600K got a massive subjective boost from jumping from 8GB to 16GB.
Games seemed to stutter less and load faster. FRAPS showed the actual FPS didn't change, but the games just ran better.
I suspect the GPU was still pumping out frames, but the CPU was busy dumping memory from the RAM and reloading stuff, and it added a perceptible lag.
I was looking at upgrading my CPU and Mobo, but 18 months on I'm really happy I threw less than £100 on an extra 8GB. And I didn't match mine for timings, just went with the same speed. But reading around it wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't speed matched. As Big Ian says the Mobo's are clever enough to automatically get everything running the same.

[lee32uk]

You can download msi afterburner and check what the cpu, gpu and ram usage is in game. If you are getting 100% cpu usage for example then the i5 is holding things back. Also certain mods can affect the cpu quite a lot. I find that when playing cities skylines with lots of mods enabled it really hits the cpu hard (i5 3570K here) and the game really slows down. You might be able to get away with just adding extra ram as mentioned above, but you might as well double check first.

[DoubleTop]

did I miss somewhere what GPU is currently in the machine and if SSD?

[Slimbellio]

It is SSD and the GPU is a gtx 970. The ram increase helped a lot with most games. Certainly be OK for the next year or so. Thanks all.

[ToonarmY]

I am currently looking at upgrading also.

I have an I5 2500k @ 4.6ghz. I have had it since 2011 with 16gb of RAM and only this year playing PUBG and BF1 have I started to notice fps is struggling.

I am looking to upgrade my CPU, MOBO and RAM for this reason. The CPU is bottlenecking my GTX 1060 in games