500$ USD Upgrade/New Build?

[ashen sphinx]

What’s your PSU?

Your best bet is probably an upgrade

If you can find an i7 9700 for cheap it would be a pretty decent upgrade, but that’s unlikely

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/qggvDZ

The only thing you’ll reuse is case and storage

I guess you can reuse RAM too, depending on how fast your 8gb RAM is. Gonna need to add another 8gb though.

[ashen sphinx]

You can do better if budget allows

Unlikely to get anything much better for this budget

Maybe a 6600xt?

Or go used

Or even intel arc, if you’re okay with some potential… quirks.

Pretty major quirks

I wouldnt recommend it unless you wanna tinker and experiment with it

If you want something that just works, AMD or NV only

But, in the games that it does well in, it’ll be around 6650xt perf

Pretty much yeah

There’s gonna be a lot of teething issues, given that it’s intel’s first consumer GPU

[cyan mason]

id go with this but a used 6750xt if you are comfortbul with used

if not then what jpeg suggested is best prob

[cyan mason]

only thing with arc is you can only play some games not all

because it only supports directx 11 and 12

[ashen sphinx]

3600 leads now cause of the extra threads

6 threads really isnt great for new games

https://youtu.be/SegyDnX5dOo?si=a26zcaXyKbKH9OE_

[ashen sphinx]

Cs2 is dx9 and it can definitely play that

It emulates older DX versions

So it isnt great and they need to optimize title by title

So older games workn’t