Upgrade your FM2 to FM2+ with a motherboard and add an M.2 slot.
Upgrade your FM2 to FM2+ with a motherboard and add an M.2 slot.
Hello everyone, I'm planning to refresh my 2013 AMD desktop without investing heavily. I still have most of the original components, so I'm focusing on reusing what I have. My setup includes an ASUS F2A85-V PRO FM2 AMD A85X (Hudson D4) board, an AMD A10-6800K Richland 4.1 GHz processor with 100W cooling and 16GB DDR3 RAM, and an ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card. I've disabled both graphics in BIOS, as I haven't seen any gains from turning them on. My A10 handles independently, which is great for performance. I recently watched a tech tips video about APUs and noticed they can boost performance at a lower cost. I originally got the processor first, then added the graphics later. The machine has served me well for ten years and I'm eager to give it a fresh update. It started with a traditional HDD, switched to an SSD a few years back, and now I'm considering another upgrade with the speed of M.2 SSDs. I've heard some FM2+ boards support standard FM2 chips (with the minus 2 pins) and others can use M.2 SSDs via adapters, which saves PCIe space. My main concern is finding a compatible FM2+ board with an M.2 slot instead of using an adapter, or getting recommendations for adapters that work well. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, G_MAN_LIVES
Dual graphics offers no advantage unless your scenario specifically gains from multiple GPUs, which mainly applies to heavy computation. Some games once allowed dual GPUs but with limitations such as identical models. Unless you're constantly moving large amounts of data, the gap between SATA SSD and NVMe is almost negligible. I’d also suggest your CPU isn’t outdated enough to see much improvement—consider investing in a new setup instead.
There is marginal improvement for directstorage enabled titles but there's only one so far and that is Forspoken. In that title, SATA SSD is 1-3 seconds slower than Nvme in per-level loading.
You'll invest more in upgrading a few components here than you would for an entry AM4 or LGA1700 build today, offering ten times better performance. Don't go ahead with this upgrade.
DirectStorage could offer benefits, but currently the performance gap isn't obvious. I own two SATA SSDs—one PCIe 3.0 and one PCIe 4.0 NVMe. I recently switched my home directory from a SATA SSD to the new PCIe 4.0 NVMe, achieving around 550 MB/s to about 7 GB/s in read speed. The impact on Steam game load times is almost negligible.