Which part of my PC should I upgrade first

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
May 1, 2023
4 replies
560 views

I have been struggling to get this project to finish because of the necessary over-editing that I’m doing, and the project itself has grown to be so laggy and premier is crashing every now and then because of this.

The project relies on dynamic link cuz I have imported some things over from AE, but I’ve also been using a crap ton of plugins from Boris FX and Red Giant and much more.

My current rig:

GTX 1660ti
16GB of ram
Ryzen 5 3600x

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RjL190365

Legend

Your drives (disks) need upgrading. Not just one of them, but both of them. You see, your SSD is too small in capacity to handle much modern software these days, and your HDD is simply much too slow in random read/write performance that programs will lag (or at least take much longer than normal to start up).

After your disks, then RAM next.

And since your current GTX 1660 Ti is fairly well balanced with your now-two-generation-old 6-core/12-thread AMD 3rd-gen Ryzen CPU, I would wait for a whole platform upgrade (CPU, motherboard and DDR5 RAM) before you get a new GPU.

A

Adam296705282iftAuthor

Participant

I see, thank you for laying down such a clear response I now have an idea of how I'm gonna approach elevating my rig.

R

RjL190365

Legend

In other words, concentrate on the weakest link (storage, RAM, CPU, GPU) first. If your programs and operating system are on your HDD (as it is in your particular situation), then there is your performance bottleneck.

And the reason why I am suggesting holding off on the GPU upgrade until you get an entirely new CPU platform is that the Nvidia GPU prices are still somewhat on the pricey side. For the price that you originally paid for your GTX 1660 Ti you would have gotten only an RTX 3050 today, which is not an upgrade in performance from your 1660 Ti (but rather a downgrade).

And I cannot recommend a CPU upgrade for your system because the CPU performance would then be somewhat bottlenecked by your other current components. Plus, a higher-end CPU such as a Ryzen 9 5950X (which is on its way out of production) may require an even higher-wattage power supply unit than what your system currently has. Likewise with a GPU upgrade. Both of them put together require a much more powerful PSU than your current unit, further increasing the cost of such an upgrade while the tangible performance improvement may not be enough to justify the cost.