If you've been putting off purchasing a PC upgrade, now's a great time to make the jump because there are a lot of great CPU and motherboard bundles on offer at the usual retailers. However, I've noticed that while these offers are pretty good, it actually pays to shop around and buy the parts separately.
So with that in mind, here's an AMD CPU, motherboard, and RAM combination that's a great upgrade for any PC gamer and the whole lot comes in at just over $380.
First up is the CPU and it's a Ryzen 5 7600X. With six cores, 12 threads, and a boost clock of 5.6 GHz, it's plenty fast enough for today's games and although some games will prefer more cores than this, the overall performance is not going to leave you wanting. Sure, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is the best gaming CPU you buy at the moment but it's more than double the price of the 7600X.
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A great CPU needs a great motherboard to support it and the ASRock B650M PG Lighting is a pocket-sized powerhouse. I've been using ASRock's motherboards for a while now—the company has made huge strides forward in improving every aspect of its motherboards and this one is no expectation.
It will happily run any Zen 4 Ryzen processor, all the way up to the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, and I strongly suspect that ASRock will add the forthcoming 9000-series via a BIOS update.
Among the usual features one expects from a modern board, you get one PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot for super fast SSDs, plus a further two PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots (though one of them is only half speed). If three NVMe SSDs aren't enough storage for you, then you've also got four SATA III ports.
As for connectivity, you've got a small mountain of USB ports and headers, 2.5G LAN, and integrated WiFi.
The last thing you'll need for an AMD Zen 4 upgrade is some DDR5 RAM, unless you already happen to be using some in an Intel system for some reason. In terms of speed, DDR5-6000 is the sweet spot for Ryzen 7000 processors and although some combinations of CPUs and motherboards can be picky about CAS timings, this Team Group kit is verified by ASRock to work just fine.
So why spend more money on anything faster or something with RGB, when this tidy-looking kit will give you bags of performance and a whopping 32 GB of system memory? No game will be hitting that limit any time, that's for sure.
Oh and one last thing—this particular Ryzen chip doesn't come with a cooler so you might need to pick one up in the sales too. The Ryzen 5 7600X doesn't generate that much heat, so you won't need some hulking beast of a liquid cooler.
Any of the best coolers will work just fine but I highly recommend the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 ($38.90 on Amazon).
