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Peyton asked: “I’m building a computer. I’ve already put some good stuff in it, but all my games are running slow on it. What would you suggest I do, or add?”
A gaming computer’s performance is a mix of processor, memory, hard drive speed, and graphics processor.
Mark’s Into Gaming feature this week was discussing his own brand new custom built gaming computer and he had lots of information on its components plus a couple photos of its tempered glass case.
Before we could tell you what’s causing the slow performance, we’d really need to know what “good stuff” you’ve already put in it. As a rule of thumb, for value-priced gaming components, right now we’re recommending a 6th generation Intel i5 or i7 processor. You can spot these by the model number following the processor type, for example i5-6400 or i7-6700K. If that second number starts with a 6, you’re good to go.
we’d really need to know what “good stuff” you’ve already put in it
We would also recommend, for value priced gaming, either an AMD RX 480 video card or an NVIDIA GTX 1060. Yes, there are better, faster cards, but we’re talking a value build here.
16GB of memory is a good amount, whether you have DDR3 or DDR4 memory doesn’t matter as much as the elitists say it does, but DDR4 can run at higher speeds than DDR3. That’s really the big difference between them, the maximum potential speed, plus the DDR4 chips will have a bit lower latency.
And make sure you get an SSD for your system drive and games. You’ll want a data drive also, so you don’t use all that expensive, high speed SSD storage for pictures of the cat. If you combine an SSD with 16GB of RAM, a modern video card, and a 6th generation i5 or i7, you’ll have plenty of gaming performance.