What fps are you getting in LFS & what screen resolution are you playing at?
Trying to work out if youre CPU or GPU bound.
It seems like a terrible time buying new or pre-owned PC hardware at the moment.
Hardware –
AMD CPU’s is only affected by spectre; Intel CPU’s is affected by both meltdown & spectre.
Intel & AMD is currently facing lawsuits. As of now June 2018 there is no CPU on the market that is immune to both meltdown & spectre without some performance penalties.
I have a feeling that in the next few years, there will be a lot of companies upgrading their PC’s, to get away from the vulnerable & slowed CPU’s, which could mean there will be a lot of second-hand computer parts on the market.
DRAM is currently 3 times their normal price at the moment; Samsung, Micron & Hynix is getting sued for “fixing prices”.
GPU is expensive at the moment because of crypto-currency mining & from the high DRAM cost, but the price has fallen back a little since the crypto market has crash.
CPU AMD – Avoid the older AMD CPU’s; they have very poor single core performance which is important for gaming. The current “2017 Ryzen” line-up is very good though, but you will need new “DDR4 memory”, which costs as much as a new CPU at the moment.
CPU Intel – Core i5 (mainstream) or Core i7 (performance) line-up, Quad-Core from the “Sandy Bridge” generation or newer, make sure the CPU runs on the DDR3 RAM that you currently have.
Sandy Bridge (32nm) - 2011
Ivy Bridge (22nm) - 2012
Haswell (22nm) - 2013
Broadwell (only support “low voltage” DDR3 so avoid this CPU generation)
Skylake (only support “low voltage” DDR3 so avoid this CPU generation)
Kaby Lake (only support “low voltage” DDR3 so avoid this CPU generation)
i5 -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i5_microprocessors
i7 –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microprocessors
Motherboard – Something that has “solid capacitors”
AS Rock, Asus are good motherboard brands, Gigabyte great in the past not sure about now, avoid MSI; from what I’ve read.
Make sure the motherboard has the same “socket” as the CPU that you’re buying.
If you have a decent Power Supply Unit & case cooling, maybe you should try overlocking your current CPU? remember its the high voltage and temperature that kills, not the clock rate.