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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[-] edinbruh@feddit.it 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

You can look for a second hand office pc with a newer socket, so you can comfortably upgrade the CPU without having to buy new motherboard and ram, but that would still leave you with an old GPU.

Maybe look for a second hand server/workstation on eBay. The CPU might not be the best for gaming, but you might upgrade that later, and you would get an upgraded gpu. Or you could just delay the GPU upgrade

this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026

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