Could upgrading your RAM improve your system's speed and efficiency?
Could upgrading your RAM improve your system's speed and efficiency?
This old machine once handled CS:GO smoothly at high frames and even supported The Witcher 3 and PUBG in the late 2010s. Recently, it’s been struggling to reach even 60fps on the simplest settings for Team Fortress 2. Valorant runs steady at 60fps but drops to the low 30s, CS:GO offers 50-60 or wingman modes and struggles with Skyrim. It has the RAM you mentioned, a GTX 1050 model, and an i3 4170 processor. While it’s not the newest setup, performance isn’t great—should it be this poor?
It displays RAM information for slots #1 and #3, even though my MOBO only includes two slots. It's a GIGABYTE H81M-S3PH with the newest BIOS.
It seems your processor is quite basic—only two cores (four threads) and just 2 GB of RAM on the graphics card. That limits performance, especially if you're not a serious gamer. You might want to check video overlays while gaming to see if the bottleneck is your CPU or GPU.
I recognized the i3 as the main issue in most situations. Using an overlay helped keep it at 100% while the GPU ran at 50%, but I hoped to find a way to boost performance further before upgrading. Valorant demands an i5-4460 with a GTX 1050 TI for 144+ FPS, yet my current setup works fine for competitive games. The challenge with upgrading lies in the lack of details about my motherboard online. I’m considering purchasing an Xeon E3-1270 V3 from AliExpress, but I’m unsure if the board will support it.