Current Gaming rig under performing - needing suggestions for improvements

Hi Guys!

I'm new here and am a complete amateur when it comes to building a computer.

Anyway, below is a photo of my current rig components used for 1080p gaming which I purchased a couple of years ago when Battlefield 4 had just come out.



Nothing is overclocked on it as I have no experience of overclocking for fear of destroying something but I'm willing to learn from a seasoned veteran

Now that it's a couple of years old, it's starting to slow down and i'm really needing to lay off the graphics settings on most titles due to low FPS and sometimes need to drop down to 720p to compensate, so I really feel that it's in need of an upgrade. I'm a big Fallout fan and so i'm wanting to upgrade my PC in time for the imminent release of Fallout 4 in the next couple of weeks

The recommended system requirements for Fallout 4 are as follows:

Processor: Intel Core i7 4790 3.6 GHz/AMD FX-9590 4.7 GHz or equivalent
Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 780 3GB/AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB or equivalent

As you can imagine I paid quite a price for my rig at the time and so i'd quite like to use as many of the existing components I have and not just completely overhaul and start afresh.

So my question for you guys is as follows:

- If this was your rig, which components would you throw out and what would you replace them with? Or should I be overclocking this system rather than buying new components?

Any and all advice is MUCH appreciated!!

Many thanks guys,
DangDangDingy

What budget can you put toward your upgrades?

I'd recommend just doing some cleanup on the OS then seeing if you have improved performance.
- Run Malwarebytes from safe mode
- Clean up your GPU drivers with DDU and install clean copies of the latest versions from www.geforce.com/drivers
- Check your startup programs and see how much is running all the time in the background. Uninstall/disable any you don't need.

do what atm said then update the gpu to a gtx970, the 770 is a little dated, but still very good, I use some also.
a little minor clock of the cpu and you should be cooking with gas again.

Bumping your core speed to 4.0 should be plenty sufficient to catch up cpu wise. No reason at all to change that.

r9 390's are apparently ridiculously good at overclocking and are typically faster than gtx 970s for the same cost, food for thought.

since you do have the 4gb 770, if you can find another for CHEAP (under 200$, if not cheaper) 4gb 770 then SLI is an option for that rig as well. In a lot of cases, 770 sli will crush even a gtx 980. But the headaches of SLI may be not worth dealing with, i dunno...

I sli my 4 gig 770's and for some reason it's not near as much gain as I get with my 4 gig 760's is sli.
that being said, you are very right and the cost of the 770 is not so bad if you can find a good one on the used market.

caddi daddi said:

I sli my 4 gig 770's and for some reason it's not near as much gain as I get with my 4 gig 760's is sli.
that being said, you are very right and the cost of the 770 is not so bad if you can find a good one on the used market.

Click to expand...

Tough to find em in both good condition AND a fair price. People still seem to think these are 400$ graphics cards from what I've seen

If going used (which you'd have to be to be grabbing another 770), I'd say just sell the current one and pick up a 970 for $275ish. Probably around $100 out of pocket and you should be set at 1080P.

SLI 770s would certainly be more powerful than a 970, but only in games which scale well. Plus you'll have to deal with all the problems associated with dual card configs and, no offense to the OP, but he doesn't necessarily seem over-anxious to jump into "advanced settings".

I'm with ATM, however. OP's system has likely just built up some "cruft" over the last few years. I reinstall my OS about every 6 months. When using machines where the OS has been in place longer than that, they just don't seem to perform the way they should.

He'd also need a better power supply for SLI 770's.