Is my PC upgradable? Need some advice

[CodeRedR51]

Also is it enabled for video decoding? Do you have latest graphics drivers? What version of Windows are you using? On Device manager and display adaptors, do you have one or two GPUs showing. If Intel graphics is showing, it is best to disable onboard graphics in the BIOS and see if that improves things.

1) Not sure
2) Yes
3) Windows 10 64bit
4) only one

 

[Saidur_Ali]

1) Best to double check in GPU acceleration settings to see if it is ticked. https://filmora.wondershare.com/video-editing-tips/how-to-enhance-video-editing-performance.html 4) I'm assuming it is the RX 580?

Have you tried different video editing software, something like DaVinci Resolve and see how that performs with the same footage?

 

[CodeRedR51]

1) Best to double check in GPU acceleration settings to see if it is ticked. https://filmora.wondershare.com/video-editing-tips/how-to-enhance-video-editing-performance.html 4) I'm assuming it is the RX 580?

Have you tried different video editing software, something like DaVinci Resolve and see how that performs with the same footage?

Unless it's free, not buying more software just to see if it runs better. Already paid for Filmora so will be using it.

 

[Saidur_Ali]

Unless it's free, not buying more software just to see if it runs better. Already paid for Filmora so will be using it.

It is free to use.

On Windows 10 in task manager under performance, you can see CPU utilisation and also GPU utilisation such as video decode so you can work out where the bottleneck is occurring during playback. Could even be a codec issue.

 

[CodeRedR51]

It is free to use.

On Windows 10 in task manager under performance, you can see CPU utilisation and also GPU utilisation such as video decode so you can work out where the bottleneck is occurring during playback. Could even be a codec issue.

I was watching those last night while playing ATS because I was getting massive frame drops in-game. GPU was showing high 90's usage which confused me because that game isn't exactly graphically intense.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

I was watching those last night while playing ATS because I was getting massive frame drops in-game. GPU was showing high 90's usage which confused me because that game isn't exactly graphically intense.

That's because you're most likely running at an uncapped frame rate so it uses all of your GPU to produce as many frames as possible. In that game I usually lock it at a much lower FPS so that it doesn't cause the fans to spin so loudly

Also I 100% agree with the recommendation to look at task manager the next time you try editing 4K to make sure it's your CPU that's the bottleneck

 

[CodeRedR51]

That's because you're most likely running at an uncapped frame rate so it uses all of your GPU to produce as many frames as possible. In that game I usually lock it at a much lower FPS so that it doesn't cause the fans to spin so loudly

I have it locked at 59Hz.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

I have it locked at 59Hz.

Oh, I forgot, you're using a 4K TV. Your RX 580 will definitely struggle gaming at 4K. You'd probably need to lower your game's resolution to play at a playable frame rate. The RTX 2060 in the 2nd PC you posted also won't do that well at 4K, depending on the game. It might be fine for ATS as it's not that intensive, but for more demanding triple A games it'll definitely struggle, albeit still better than the RX 580

 

[CodeRedR51]

You'd probably need to lower your game's resolution to play at a playable frame rate.

It's set at 1920x1080. Pretty sure that's 1080p?

 

[ProjectWHaT]

It's set at 1920x1080. Pretty sure that's 1080p?

Yes, that's correct. And it's still at high usage while being locked at 60 fps? Are you sure you're not looking at your TV's refresh rate? Because that would say something like "1920 x 1080 @ 59 hz" which is different from a frame rate lock. I think ETS2/ATS doesn't have a FPS cap in the engine. What I do is just use v-sync to cap the frame rate, which isn't optimal as it adds a lot of input delay

 

[Saidur_Ali]

I was watching those last night while playing ATS because I was getting massive frame drops in-game. GPU was showing high 90's usage which confused me because that game isn't exactly graphically intense.

What kind of RAM have you got? If you use something like CPU-Z and go check memory, it should tell you if you are running in dual channel or not. Under SPD, it should show memory for each slot. Ideally, all memory should be matching part number.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Going to bump this up again.

Tried to buy one of those computers on Newegg and it ended up being a big mess of the order not being placed and them charging my account anyway (three times in fact) so that put me off from doing anything at the moment. Did some messing around with the GPU settings which didn't seem to help the 1440p video editing, which I learned shouldn't really be a bottleneck anyway. CPU is where you need power for editing. SO, I loaded up a video project I am working on and let it play at 1/2 resolution while I watched the Performance tab in the Task Manager. At one point I noticed that the C-drive usage jumped to 100% while playing a clip that I had increased the speed on to make it look like a timelapse. On other clips, C-drive usage drops into the single digits but then CPU jumped into the 80's. Then while I was typing this I tried again and C-drive stayed in the single digits the whole time, CPU usage only in the 40% range. Playback seemed to be fine in the editor. I don't understand why it works fine some times and other times it's unusable.

Either way, my next question is: If you were to build the best budget gaming/editing PC for under $1k USD, what route would you go? I can probably re-use my case. I have 16GB DDR3 but I assume a DDR4 upgrade will be necessary. Disc drive doesn't matter much to me, never use it. USB ports work, not sure if they need upgraded. Ditto on the ethernet card. Would be nice if I could get away with buying a new motherboard, CPU, GPU, RAM and re-use everything else.

Edit: Was messing around tonight and basically solved half my issues. I am using a 60" 4k TV as my primary monitor and a 1080p 32" TV as my secondary monitor. Don't really care about the secondary monitor as I only really use it to browse the internet. Everything else is done on the big TV. Which, unfortunately, was locked at 1080p resolution. A little google searching led me to the AMD Radeon software settings where I could force it into 4k resolution. BAM, everything runs a bit smoother. Editing software still has issues with changing video clip speeds, but all else seems OK as long as I run it in 1/2 resolution in the preview window.

I was able to play ATS for a bit tonight and after some tweaking of settings here and there was able to get it to run a pretty consistent 60fps with much improved visuals. Radeon software shows ~100% GPU usage, ~40% CPU usage and temps in the mid to high 70's as I'm playing. I'm happy with that.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

Tried to buy one of those computers on Newegg and it ended up being a big mess of the order not being placed and them charging my account anyway (three times in fact) so that put me off from doing anything at the moment.

Oof! I'm sorry to hear that

At one point I noticed that the C-drive usage jumped to 100% while playing a clip that I had increased the speed on to make it look like a timelapse.

Is your C drive a hard drive or SSD? This is an IO bottleneck. When you had the clip running at a higher speed, it needed to read the file faster than the speed of your storage. I believe most professionals use a SSD scratch disk while working and then when everything's done they move them to a slower hard drive. I'm not sure, I don't personally do that much video editing.

On other clips, C-drive usage drops into the single digits but then CPU jumped into the 80's. Then while I was typing this I tried again and C-drive stayed in the single digits the whole time, CPU usage only in the 40% range. Playback seemed to be fine in the editor.

Perhaps it's the first time you were scrubbing through that clip so it needed to process and encode or whatever. Afterwards, it'll be easier since it's already cached.

If you were to build the best budget gaming/editing PC for under $1k USD

I believe the suggestions I had made earlier should still be a good start. You'd be able to re-use your case, power supply, and storage (although I would highly recommend getting an NVMe SSD if your main storage device is a hard drive). You would need to get a new motherboard and RAM to go along with a new CPU as the CPU uses a different socket and chipset and RAM is now using the DDR4 standard and what you have would be incompatible generations old.

I guess "getting a new PC" would be relative since you can most likely keep the current case and power supply at the very least. Again, back to the joke I had made lol

Depending on the game, gaming with a 4K TV at native resolution would be kinda tough so you'd definitely need to sacrifice a bit there, i.e. running games at 1440p or even 1080p.

If you're looking to only "upgrade" what you have, then I'd focus on the CPU first. As said before, that'll cascade into also needing a new motherboard and RAM. I don't think any of the CPUs compatible with your old motherboard would be worthwhile at this point since having more cores will help a lot.

Also, a lot of new hardware was just announced so buying at this exact moment is a bit awkward since you could buy last year's stuff or wait a little (and fight the huge demand) to get the new hardware that perform a good amount better, which hasn't happened in a while.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600, used Ryzen 7 3800x, or wait a bit for the Ryzen 5 5600x
($180-300)
Get whichever is the cheapest.
You can overclock the 3600 to perform as good as the more expensive 3600x and 3600xt without spending more.
The 3800x would be more useful for editing since it has more cores and more threads.
The new 5600x performs much better in games than CPUs that cost way more, but you'll need to wait like a month for it to be available. You can look at some of the benchmarks online to see if you think it's worth the wait.

Motherboard: Any good B450 or B550 motherboard
($70-170)
Shouldn't matter too much what you get, just get what you need (i.e. do you need a lot of USB ports? Built-in WiFi? Does your case have front USB 3.0 or Type C? RGB lights????).
If you choose to wait and get the 5600x CPU, then you'd want to get a B550 board. Otherwise, a B450 would save some money but may not be as high quality.

RAM: 16GB or 32GB of DDR4 RAM
($100-150)
You'd want to get 2 sticks or more totalling that amount. A single stick will run slower. Additionally, to optimize performance, you'd want the RAM to be at least running at 3200 mhz as those Ryzen CPUs like fast memory.
If you plan do a lot of multitasking, such as rendering and browsing the internet or playing games and having a lot of windows open, then getting 32GB would be better in the long term. I currently have 32GB and the only time I have surpassed 16GB is when I have over 100 tabs open and a virtual machine open for programming. I personally don't edit videos that much so I don't know what the worst case scenario for that would be, but 16GB should be enough.

That should be like the bare minimum of an upgrade to get going. Based on however much you want to put into it, you can scale this to get a better CPU. Or if you want to game at native 4K, you'd need to upgrade your graphics card. The new RTX 3070 is $500, but probably won't be in stock for a while due to high demand. The alternative AMD RX 6700XT would be good too when it becomes available soon. But what you have, the RX580, should be definitely good enough for 1080p gaming for a little longer (if the RX 580 is the 8GB version and not the 4GB, it's all very confusing).

If your budget for an upgrade is $1000 and you are able to reuse your case and power supply, you could get a much more powerful CPU and/or even upgrade your GPU.

Although do note with the super high demand due to the holiday seasons and low supply due to Covid, prices for parts are not what they usually are and some more sought after things probably will not be in stock until next year

 

[kikie]

 

[CodeRedR51]

Their system uses a Ryzen 5 3600, 16 GB at 3600, B450 motherboard, and a GTX 1650.

Question on the GTX 1650. Newegg only has one in stock:

Thoughts on that? 4GB seems a bit low.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

Question on the GTX 1650. Newegg only has one in stock:

View attachment 985770

Thoughts on that? 4GB seems a bit low.

Your system has a RX 580 which is better than the GTX 1650. Unless you can get a new RTX 20 or 30 series card at MSRP or cheaper, I don't think there's that many graphics cards that are better than the RX 580. I only recently learned AMD's old product stack and have a better understanding of it.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Your system has a RX 580 which is better than the GTX 1650. Unless you can get a new RTX 20 or 30 series card at MSRP or cheaper, I don't think there's that many graphics cards that are better than the RX 580. I only recently learned AMD's old product stack and have a better understanding of it.

How does this look to you?

https://www.newegg.com/abs-ala222/p/N82E16883360019

 

[ProjectWHaT]

How does this look to you?

https://www.newegg.com/abs-ala222/p/N82E16883360019

Looks pretty good

 

[CodeRedR51]

Looks pretty good

Purchased.

 

[Dave A]

How does this look to you?

https://www.newegg.com/abs-ala222/p/N82E16883360019

It should be capable enough, can't comment on the price being from the UK, prices can be quite different here.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

I think price is okay considering how absolutely nothing is in stock right now and if they are, they're overpriced due to scalpers or tariffs

 

[CodeRedR51]

It shipped today, so we'll see. Just hoping it can run ATS smoothly. My current computer I have set at 1080p and most settings on medium and I still get framerate jitters while turning, and big frame drops when I come into cities.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

I get some frame drops entering cities when running ETS2 with the Promods map mod. That may be a storage bottleneck as well. Running the game on an SSD or a faster hard drive would help with that. It's a similar problem with Cyberpunk 2077 on last gen consoles. I'm surprised the RX 580 isn't running ATS well otherwise

 

[CodeRedR51]

It doesn't look bad, just runs bad. Tried everything. Just started to get upset because it seemed like every time I fired up the game to play I found myself adjusting the settings to get it running better. Every single time.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Ok, got the new computer. First impressions:

• Quality looks good
• Much faster than my other computer
• Reviews said it was noisy but seems fine to me
• My Windows product key isn't working so I have to contact customer service...

After updating the graphics drivers I set out to get ATS all set up, then immediately cranked up the settings and went for a drive. Overall it runs great. My biggest gripe with my old system is that when turning corners it was "jittery" and hard on the eyes. With this one, super smooth. I tried doing some recording for possible future YouTube videos and noticed some frame rate slowdown. However, when playing back the video the slowdown wasn't noticeable at all in the video. Which I thought was interesting. I did get a $100 gift card from NewEgg for the purchase, wondering if I should use it towards something that I can upgrade. Maybe better RAM? Any ideas?

 

[ProjectWHaT]

Have you tried editing 4K video yet? According to the Newegg page it says you have 16 GB at 3000 Mhz which should be adequate. Unless you do experience problems, you could get another set of 16 GB at 3000 Mhz so you have 32 GB. It would be best if you match the same exact brand of RAM that's already installed.

If the RAM is sufficient for now, you could also get more storage, especially if you plan to do a lot of content creation. At the same time, you could part out your old system. Taking a quick peek at Ebay, I think your old RX 580 is worth around $200?

Also, I'm still not sure why you had poor performance in ATS. Here are my settings in ATS running at 1080p. I was getting around 100 fps while driving running on my PC that has a Ryzen 3600 and a Nvidia GTX 1060 6 GB. You should turn on the FPS counter so you can see quantitatively how well it is running. I don't have an AMD GPU so I don't know how to do it in the drivers, but Steam should have an FPS overlay too.

 

[CodeRedR51]

Have you tried editing 4K video yet?

I have not. I did try to edit that video I recorded from ATS to see how it behaved and seemed fine, but that was only 1080p.

Unless you do experience problems, you could get another set of 16 GB at 3000 Mhz so you have 32 GB.

I think there are only 2 slots for RAM on this system?

If the RAM is sufficient for now, you could also get more storage, especially if you plan to do a lot of content creation. At the same time, you could part out your old system. Taking a quick peek at Ebay, I think your old RX 580 is worth around $200?

I do have a 1TB external drive that I am currently using. I did think about parting out the old system, so I will look into that.

Also, I'm still not sure why you had poor performance in ATS. Here are my settings in ATS running at 1080p. I was getting around 100 fps while driving running on my PC that has a Ryzen 3600 and a Nvidia GTX 1060 6 GB. You should turn on the FPS counter so you can see quantitatively how well it is running. I don't have an AMD GPU so I don't know how to do it in the drivers, but Steam should have an FPS overlay too.

The TV I am using is 1080p and 60Hz. I have the refresh rate set to 60Hz. Should I leave it on default? Can it show more than 60fps without issue? I have been keeping an eye on the FPS with the AMD Radeon software. The FPS slowdown I was seeing was into the 40's from 60 with V-Sync on.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

I think there are only 2 slots for RAM on this system?

Ah yeah you're right.

I do have a 1TB external drive that I am currently using. I did think about parting out the old system, so I will look into that.

If you're not having RAM problems when editing then getting some fast internal drives would help

Should I leave it on default?

Since the TV isn't a high refresh rate TV, it shouldn't matter

Can it show more than 60fps without issue?

There won't be any issues running at higher than 60 fps.
To be extremely technical and detailed: your GPU will output a whenever it is done rendering as quickly as possible. Your TV will display the most recent frame outputted by your GPU. This means, if you let your GPU run freely, then the TV will display the most recent frame rendered by your GPU. This'll give a smoother experience with less input lag as the image you see is the most recent one.

The FPS slowdown I was seeing was into the 40's from 60 with V-Sync on.

Are the slow downs only when entering cities? This'll most likely be caused by slow storage since it needs to load assets from your drive to the GPU. Additionally, you could turn off V-sync to let the GPU run freely without limiting FPS to 60. It'll feel smoother but there may be screen tearing

 

[CodeRedR51]

If you're not having RAM problems when editing then getting some fast internal drives would help

Usually when I edit I do it on the internal drive, then transfer everything to the external when I am finished.

Are the slow downs only when entering cities?

Sometimes. My biggest concern is that, while making hard turns at intersections etc, something seems to have a hard time keeping up. I am using the internal game settings so that my view turns as I turn. Can't remember what setting that is in gameplay. Basically as you turn the wheel, the camera view turns as well.

 

[ProjectWHaT]

Sometimes. My biggest concern is that, while making hard turns at intersections etc, something seems to have a hard time keeping up. I am using the internal game settings so that my view turns as I turn. Can't remember what setting that is in gameplay. Basically as you turn the wheel, the camera view turns as well.

I don't use that specific option, but I've never had problems with free look. Perhaps try testing free look and see if there's similar issues? I play with a controller so i have the left stick for steering and the right stick for free look and then another button to reset the view