I could use a little advice on upgrading my machine without spending too much money (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by Glifted@lemmy.world to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.ml

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So I've been using this machine for a little over 10 years now and making upgrades as nessesary. I don't care much for graphic quality so it's mostly been fine. However, my FPS on certain games has started to become pretty frustrating so I'm trying to come up with inexpensive options to upgrade.

In particular I'm trying to play Nuclear Option online and am having a lot of trouble late in the match. I'm guessing this is due to the high amount of smoke effects but I'm not an expert in any way.

I'm getting 10~20 FPS regardless of graphic settings. I've also checked on my GPU and it maxes out at around 50% utilization so I'm guessing the processor is my limitation

The best CPU my motherboard can take is a i7-4790k (please correct me if I'm wrong) and I think I can get one for $100ish but I'm not sure if that would make enough of a difference. It also seems like DDR3 era board/CPU combos are a little more expensive but fairly affordable on ebay. However, I'm not really sure what would be a good value and worth the investment performance-wise.

Any advice you could give is appreciated. Thanks

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[-] Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 6 points 1 month ago

Is that a 4th gen i5?

That may be your problem:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7600K CPU or similar

The game lists this as the minimum. It looks like a rock and a hard place though as far as your situation goes.

[-] Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 3 points 1 month ago

Yeah the minimim recommened cpu doesnt even have the same socket as your motherboard so I'd just grab that 100 dollar cpu and hope for the best.

[-] Glifted@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Will that socket into my motherboard? I thought I was capped at the i7-4790k

[-] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

No, the 6000 series and higher use DDR4 RAM

But I think the 4790k would be faster than the 7600k in most games (except for very old single threaded games which run fine on both anyways)

4000 series can do AVX2 (same as the 7600k), so it has all the commonly required modern instructions

[-] Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 1 points 1 month ago

That one might work. It still would be bad but definitely more playable.

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago

There are actually some rare mainboards for 6000/7000 series that still use DDR3.

[-] mybuttnolie@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 month ago

forget about the older intels, they are trash. i had 6600k and 9600k, they both had performance issues in all games more demanding than BTD6. probably because of L3 cache, which proton needs quite a lot.

this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026

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