Windows 10 on HDD to SSD, then motherboard/CPU/memory upgrade. Need review of steps.

wolfee

I bought my son a 3060ti for Christmas and after installing it, realized it's too much for his system. (Ryzen 7 1700, PCIe 3.0 motherboard, RTX 2060) After installing the new card, his games are stuttering and there is no increase in fps. So I'm thinking the steps I take should be: 1. Migrate Windows on HDD to SSD. Verify all is stable, keep the HDD 2TB for storage, rename the old Windows directory (clean it up later). 2. Replace the motherboard/CPU/memory. I was looking at the Motherboard/CPU combo below but want to verify the motherboard listed is PCIe 4.0. The specs in the package say it is PCIe 3.0 but the description of the motherboard says it is PCIe 4.0. Also, searching internet says it is PCIe 4.0. Just want to make sure. Any thoughts/suggestions appreciated. Thanks!

AMD Ryzen 7 5700X, ASUS B550-F ROG Strix Gaming, CPU / Motherboard Combo

PowerSpec_MikeW

@wolfee

Ryzen 7 5700X has 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes, the board supports PCIe 4.0. So you'll get 20 of those. That'll account for your GPU and an M.2 NVMe running at PCIe 4.0. Card is x16, NVMe drive is typically x4. The remaining chipset lanes for the B550 are PCIe 3.0.

PCIe 3.0 vs 4.0 isn't really going to impact you on games, you can see some comparative benchmarks with an RTX 3080 here: https://www.techspot.com/review/2104-pcie4-vs-pcie3-gpu-performance/

The Ryzen 7 1700 should still perform very well. There shouldn't be a significant bottleneck with that CPU on a 3060 Ti, but keep in mind that any bottleneck would be more apparent at 1080. If you're playing at higher resolutions, the load is going to lean away from the CPU and much heavier on the GPU

Good upgrade all around either way. I would definitely get an NVMe drive and clone the OS. Easy to do with the Samsung software using the software they provide. What memory do you have?

wolfee

There's currently 32GB on his existing board but the new one would be 3200 unless you think that's overdoing it. I've never used a M.2 drive before so I want to actually see the board so I understand. He went from a 2060 to the 3060ti and had to update the video driver but performance was clearly worse than the 2060. Nothing else was changed on the system so that's why I'm looking/thinking CPU bottleneck. Either way I'm heading to the Fairfax store now. The Card slot x16 is PCIe 4 correct? His current board is just 3.0. Have to take care of the HDD-to-SSD issue first but want to get everything I need, it's about an hour drive each way. Thanks for the info!

PowerSpec_MikeW

@wolfee

32GB 3200 is good. I would go with the M.2 NVMe drive, it's going to be considerably faster. Get a USB to M.2 enclosure to transfer your data, it'll just make it easier.

Card slot is x16 PCIe 4.0 with that board/CPU combination.

wolfee

Well I bought the crucial M.2 2TB NVMe drive, 32GB of 3200 memory, ryzen 7 5700x CPU, ROG Strix B-550-F Gaming motherboard and all is going well EXCEPT for the fact there is an extra 4-pin connector for the CPU power in addition to the 6-pin. I took a 4-pin connector from another modular PSU and connected it, but I think I'm going to remove it since it says PCIe on the connector. After searching this issue it looks like the 4-pin is only needed for extreme overclocking which my son is not going to do. If I really need the extra 4-pin connector please let me know!! Thanks!

Ian

https://community.microcenter.com/discussion/comment/46610#Comment_46610

You wouldn't need the extra 4-pin power connector with that processor, you'd be good to go without that.

wolfee

Thank you so much!! Wasn't sure.

wolfee

Everything is installed, at first the motherboard wouldn't recognize the 2nd stick of memory but after removing and reinstalling, it did. We tried the clone software from Crucial for the M.2 NVMe drive but "estimated time" was over 9 hours. Instead we did a Windows install onto the M.2 NVMe and had huge problems trying to get the drive formatted. It took forever, had to use a couple cmd.exe commands to get it to ntfs. We're able to boot up w/o any errors but for some reason the only way to boot onto the M.2 NVMe drive is to keep the original SATA drive that had (has) the OS on it and then choose to load windows from the M.2 NVMe drive. If I disconnect the original SATA drive, the BIOS sees the M.2 NVMe drive but we can't boot from it. There's a prompt to go to "setup" in the BIOS but the M.2 NVMe is not a bootable drive. Other than choosing which OS to boot up with, everything works great. Once logged into Windows, Disk Manager shows that the M.2 NVMe is a boot drive but we can't do it w/o the SATA drive if that makes any sense.

PowerSpec_MikeW

@wolfee

Sounds like the NVMe is missing a boot sector or some EFI boot data. Can you post a screenshot of both drives in Disk Management?