Want to upgrade my PC budget $400-$500

Geo_A

First thing first, I have no knowledge in computer parts and building.

I want to upgrade my Prebuilt PC from nzxt, Currently I have a Z390-A PRO motherboard with a i5 9400f cpu, 2 8gb teamgroup-ud4-3200 ddr4 ram, and a nvidia gtx1660 ti also a power of supply of 500w I believe. In most big games I seem to be running my cpu and gpu over 90% power. I do want to upgrade my cpu first my ram second and finally my gpu but I don't really know how to find parts that go with my system. Can anyone help me figure out what I can purchase and what not?

TSTDavey

Hello @Geo_A and thanks for posting on the Microcenter Community Forum. To be honest the i5-9400 and GTX 1660 are not bad components for processing and graphics. If its using over 90% of usage or if your temps are high, something on your computer is bottlenecking your system. Bottlenecks can be caused by hidden pprograms that are impacting your system like a virus or malware. Sometimes motherboard drivers and bios are out of date with Windows updates, which can cause bottlenecking or performance issues.

But if you are wanting to invest in upgrading those components for the Z390-A Pro motherboard. Take a look at the I5-9600K or the I9-9900K. The Z390 can only support Intel chips that are LGA 1151 socket processors. And for the Graphic Card, the GTX 1660 is still a good card, but look at the RTX 2060 or 2070 GPUs. The AMD RX 5700, 5800 are good cards as well.

Both the new processor and GPU will run you over $500. Both may run you around $1,000. I9 cpu is about $300-$500. The RTX 2000 Cards in todays world will run you about $400-$700 due to the GPU shortage currently going on.

We hope this answers your question. Let us know if it does not.