PC Upgrade

Hey there,

As the Bitcoin price is rising i feel confident to spend some money to upgrade my gaming PC. Probably i should spend the money buying the next dip instead but thats another story. I built my PC in 2018 and as you can imagine, many parts are not up to date anymore. It is still running fine but i guess it could perform better with some small upgrades.

Here is my current setup from 2018:

• MSI X470 gaming pro carbon am4 mainboard

• CPU AMD Ryszen 7 2700X

• GPU Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 590

• 2 x RAM G. SKILL RipJaws 16GB DDR4

• be quite! Pure power 600W power adapter

• be quite! Silent base 801 case

• Main hard drive: Samsung EVO 860 2.5" 500GB

I also have 3 x 500GB hybrid hard drive installed so plenty of space for my purposes.

It looks like this

Just from this, you might be able to guess where the bottle neck is. I used MSI afterburner to check the performance.

While the CPU usage is around 30℅ in average, my GPU is constantly on 100℅ while playing games like Rust, Counter strike or Apex legends.

Also the main hard drive is almost completely full from OS and other applications.

Hence, i decided to upgrade the GPU and hard drive first to improve the performance and abilities of my PC. It is also tempting to install a new CPU as the best that i can can get for my current main board with AMD4 socket is quite cheap. My choice would be the AMD ryzen 7 5700X. But i think for now my CPU is doing still alright.

So for now, i decided that my new GPU will be the AMD Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 7600 XT which should serve me quite well for my purposes in the next years.

Here some pictures of the new beauty

To upgrade my storage, i installed my new M.2 SSD which is a Samsung 970 EVO plus and fits right into my main board.

The installation of the SSD went smoothly. Just installed it to the M.2 slot on the main board and added the drive.

The installation of the new GPU was a bit more challenging.
I used the DDU tool to uninstall all graphic drivers. I inserted the new GPU but it wasn't working. I tried updating all drivers and different cables, i even ended up reinstalling Windows in desperation but the card still did not work. I researched and but could not find any solution at first. On the next day i talked to my colleague who has loads of experience with gaming PC's and asked him for help. The solution was rather simple. The new GPU has a 2 x 8 pin connection which both need to be connected to the power adapter. My old GPU only needed one 8 pin connection. This time, i connected the power correctly to my new graphics card and it was finally working. Sometimes this easy obvious things cost me a lot of time and nerves.

Anyhow, now everything is working fine and i can enjoy the improvement of my upgrade. Now i have a GPU usage between 70 to 80% while the CPU usage is around 30 to 50% and i am quite happy with it.

Have you ever build your own PC and run into issues? Please share with me. Also would like ti see your setup!

If you have any questions please let me know.

See you soon and have a good weekend!