Want to upgrade my PC

R

Rahdirs

Recruit
Hi All
Iam new on the forum, also to building PC

Looking to upgrade my PC since few months now, I mostly do photo editing works on Lightroom and Photoshop CC2023 on Windows 11, my current set up is.
Core i5 9400F
Gigabyte H310M 2.0
16Gb 2133 Mhz Ram ( Single Stick )
GTX 1660 Super 6gb Inno3D
240 Gb Maxtor 2.5" SSD
2TB HDD WD
24" monitor Benq SW240
650w Gold XPG
i don't have a chance to add in a M.2 SSD on this H310 Mother board, accessing huge Raw files from HDD has been pain, also i think i had upgraded from my GT 710 to GTX 1660S card which didnt really make big difference, i know that both LR and PS doesn't take much use of Graphics Card.

So is it worth doing just motherboard and M.2 upgrade ( subject to 300 series availability ) or should i go with change both CPU, Motherboard and another 16GB Ram. my budget is 30-35K.
* The old 300 series boards are still same priced as recent Z motherboards.
 
Definitely get an SSD. Upgrading my laptop from an HDD to just a SATA SSD gave me much faster boot times and app load times. Even some faster NVMe SSDs are cheaper than SATA SSDs now (around INR 5800).
But a thing to note, M.2 SSDs use either the SATA connector or PCIe lanes and the faster ones are the PCIe ones. M.2 SATA SSDs are not compatible with PCIe slots and vice versa, be careful while buying. For some weird reason, both are of similar cost on Amazon India.
Another thing, your CPU and motherboard have only 16 PCIe lanes all of which are used by the GPU. Using a PCIe SSD with your CPU will cause them to share the PCIe lanes and potentially reduce the performance of the GPU (though not by much). You can either buy a motherboard with one PCIe x8 and two x4 where you use x8 for the GPU and x4 for your SSDs (I think this is the best since you don't use your GPU much) or go with a new CPU with 20 usable PCIe gen 4 lanes and a compatible motherboard.
 
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IMO get Crucial MX500 1TB SATA SSD. Might be enough for you.

Unless you are using PS & LR heavily, I doubt you are getting CPU bottlenecked. Might hit RAM limit earlier than CPU limit. Check this.

If you have made up your mind on upgrading, i5 12400 (17k) + B660M mobo (12k) + 16GB RAM 3600MHz (5k) might cost ~35k. Sadly I don't see Gigabyte B660M DS3H for 10k these days, about 12k now. MSI B660M A Pro is under 14k & a better mobo VRM wise.

If you are fine w/o iGPU, i5 12400F is usually 14k or so, under 12k on FK (but risky).
 
Agree with @OMEGA44-XT. Get a 1 TB SATA SSD. Read speeds are slower than NVMe, but won't make a huge real world difference for photo editing. I have used the same PC with both SATA amd MVMe SSDs and the difference is really small.

Apart from that, adding another 16 GB RAM stick might work well as these processes are RAM intensive. Your motherboard supports 2666 MHz RAM. Getting 2666 MHz would be better as 2133 will have poor resale value despite their long working lives. You should be able to find something in the market section here.
 
If it's just for photo editing and not for gaming, just try upgrading to a good sata SSD (preferably one with DRAM like mx500 samsung EVOs etc) and dual channel RAM (You can however hold on RAM until you test out an SSD)

Since you are on HDD the change will be mindblowing. If you are still not satisfied then you can think about upgrading the rest of the system. You investment on SSD would still be safe.
 
If you have some space left over on your boot SSD, you could also partition that away and try using it as cache for your HDD. I've heard you can do this with either Intel RST or Windows Storage Spaces, but they're apparently poorly documented and/or finicky, and I also don't know if they support using a partition on a drive rather than the whole drive. PrimoCache is a third party paid software for exactly this use case, and from what I can tell it does support using a partition as the cache, and they have a 30 day free trial, so you can test the solution for no cost. If it ends up being good for you, a license of the software (about $30) is significantly cheaper than any of the other options being discussed, while keeping your bulk storage and workflow unchanged.

Mind you, the easier option is still new hardware (as everyone has been suggesting), but this could potentially allow you to scale your storage more cost-effectively if you end up needing more storage on your workstation (though at that point, you should probably look into a dedicated NAS). Either way, costs nothing to try.
 
My suggestion would be similar, or to max out speed you can use 2 SSDs in RAID 0.
And while you are at it, you can add another 16 GB stick, which should help since these qre memory intensive programs. The CPU is good enough to handle the load.
Replacing HDD with SSD will provide good boost, and it speeds up things
 
You can go with following.
  • CPU - 12400F (from fk, its open box delivery, its sold for 12k on some occasions).
  • Mobo - ASUS Prime H610M-E D4 (7.5k).
  • RAM - 3200 Mhz (8gbx2) - (4.6k).
  • SSD - MX500 (7k).
Total - ~31k.
 
The cheapest and fastest option is to get something like this PCIe NVMe adapter that goes into a slot below your GPU. Then you'll be able to use any NVMe drive.

Your mobo might let you boot from it since it's a relatively recent generation. For my 3rd gen mobo I had to modify and flash a custom BIOS. At the very least you will be able to use it as a super fast secondary drive. It is plug & play.
 
Beast said:
Definitely get an SSD. Upgrading my laptop from an HDD to just a SATA SSD gave me much faster boot times and app load times. Even some faster NVMe SSDs are cheaper than SATA SSDs now (around INR 5800).
But a thing to note, M.2 SSDs use either the SATA connector or PCIe lanes and the faster ones are the PCIe ones. M.2 SATA SSDs are not compatible with PCIe slots and vice versa, be careful while buying. For some weird reason, both are of similar cost on Amazon India.
Another thing, your CPU and motherboard have only 16 PCIe lanes all of which are used by the GPU. Using a PCIe SSD with your CPU will cause them to share the PCIe lanes and potentially reduce the performance of the GPU (though not by much). You can either buy a motherboard with one PCIe x8 and two x4 where you use x8 for the GPU and x4 for your SSDs (I think this is the best since you don't use your GPU much) or go with a new CPU with 20 usable PCIe gen 4 lanes and a compatible motherboard.
Click to expand...
Apologies for late reaction, thank you for valid points, this motherboard has no M.2 slot, and if upgrading to new motherboard, yes i'm trying to find one with M.2 support.
OMEGA44-XT said:
IMO get Crucial MX500 1TB SATA SSD. Might be enough for you.

Unless you are using PS & LR heavily, I doubt you are getting CPU bottlenecked. Might hit RAM limit earlier than CPU limit. Check this.

If you have made up your mind on upgrading, i5 12400 (17k) + B660M mobo (12k) + 16GB RAM 3600MHz (5k) might cost ~35k. Sadly I don't see Gigabyte B660M DS3H for 10k these days, about 12k now. MSI B660M A Pro is under 14k & a better mobo VRM wise.

If you are fine w/o iGPU, i5 12400F is usually 14k or so, under 12k on FK (but risky).
Click to expand...
Yes, wud upgrade to a 1TB SSD. dont really know about CPU bottlenecked with my PS LR usage, i use LR almost all the time. plz advice me a combination with 12600K as need iGPU where i wud need to extend my budget very little further.
dvader said:
If it's just for photo editing and not for gaming, just try upgrading to a good sata SSD (preferably one with DRAM like mx500 samsung EVOs etc) and dual channel RAM (You can however hold on RAM until you test out an SSD)

Since you are on HDD the change will be mindblowing. If you are still not satisfied then you can think about upgrading the rest of the system. You investment on SSD would still be safe.
Click to expand...
yes absolutely only photo editing and no gaming. Also the HDDs are pretty old and almost 80% full
zindabad said:
My suggestion would be similar, or to max out speed you can use 2 SSDs in RAID 0.
And while you are at it, you can add another 16 GB stick, which should help since these qre memory intensive programs. The CPU is good enough to handle the load.
Replacing HDD with SSD will provide good boost, and it speeds up things
Click to expand...
hv been hearing about RAID 0, will need no know more on that
n1r0 said:
The cheapest and fastest option is to get something like this PCIe NVMe adapter that goes into a slot below your GPU. Then you'll be able to use any NVMe drive.

Your mobo might let you boot from it since it's a relatively recent generation. For my 3rd gen mobo I had to modify and flash a custom BIOS. At the very least you will be able to use it as a super fast secondary drive. It is plug & play.
Click to expand...
My pci e is already taken with GPU will a PCIe x1, NMVe adapter give me the same speed ?
Thanks a lot for the info provided, first of all which one to try with first another 16gb 2400 ghz RAM or a 1TB SSD ??
 
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Rahdirs said:
My pci e is already taken with GPU will a PCIe x1, NMVe adapter give me the same speed ?
Thanks a lot for the info provided, first of all which one to try with first another 16gb 2400 ghz RAM or a 1TB SSD ??
Click to expand...
You can't install an x4 device into an x1 slot.

Have you tried loading the RAWs from your 240GB SSD? If you are happy with the load times there, all you need is to get a big SATA SSD and you are set. This will also be the cheapest option.

If you are still not happy, you are craving more processing hp and you will want to upgrade to a newer platform, which will also have NVMe slots. Adding RAM alone won't make a noticeable difference for photo editing, but will help for video

Here's what you cam expect by upgrading:
  • SATA SSD = import speed, especially RAW
  • CPU = overall faster processing, more noticeable in batch export
  • RAM = no noticeable difference
  • CPU + mobo + NVMe = more snappy performance
 
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Rahdirs said:
Apologies for late reaction, thank you for valid points, this motherboard has no M.2 slot, and if upgrading to new motherboard, yes i'm trying to find one with M.2 support.

Yes, wud upgrade to a 1TB SSD. dont really know about CPU bottlenecked with my PS LR usage, i use LR almost all the time. plz advice me a combination with 12600K as need iGPU where i wud need to extend my budget very little further.

yes absolutely only photo editing and no gaming. Also the HDDs are pretty old and almost 80% full

hv been hearing about RAID 0, will need no know more on that

My pci e is already taken with GPU will a PCIe x1, NMVe adapter give me the same speed ?
Thanks a lot for the info provided, first of all which one to try with first another 16gb 2400 ghz RAM or a 1TB SSD ??
Click to expand...
You will have to double your 35k budget to get an i5 13600K based upgrade:
https://pcpricetracker.in/b/s/e5ab5c1a-eaaf-4d88-bf14-4c4d88ebb0ff
 
Rahdirs said:
Apologies for late reaction, thank you for valid points, this motherboard has no M.2 slot, and if upgrading to new motherboard, yes i'm trying to find one with M.2 support.

Yes, wud upgrade to a 1TB SSD. dont really know about CPU bottlenecked with my PS LR usage, i use LR almost all the time. plz advice me a combination with 12600K as need iGPU where i wud need to extend my budget very little further.

yes absolutely only photo editing and no gaming. Also the HDDs are pretty old and almost 80% full

hv been hearing about RAID 0, will need no know more on that

My pci e is already taken with GPU will a PCIe x1, NMVe adapter give me the same speed ?
Thanks a lot for the info provided, first of all which one to try with first another 16gb 2400 ghz RAM or a 1TB SSD ??
Click to expand...
Since you already have 16GB memory, a 1TB SSD would be a better investment.
You can put an NVMe drive in an x1 slot using an adapter, but that's pointless, since your bandwidth is cut to 0.5 Gbps, which is the same as the sequential speeds as SATA drives.

If you're about to upgrade your platform, then you could get an NVMe SSD instead of a SATA one.
A 13400 or 13500 will get the job done, since both arr powerful and sufficient enough for your workload.
 
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n1r0 said:
You can't install an x4 device into an x1 slot.

Have you tried loading the RAWs from your 240GB SSD? If you are happy with the load times there, all you need is to get a big SATA SSD and you are set. This will also be the cheapest option.

If you are still not happy, you are craving more processing hp and you will want to upgrade to a newer platform, which will also have NVMe slots. Adding RAM alone won't make a noticeable difference for photo editing, but will help for video

Here's what you cam expect by upgrading:
  • SATA SSD = import speed, especially RAW
  • CPU = overall faster processing, more noticeable in batch export
  • RAM = no noticeable difference
  • CPU + mobo + NVMe = more snappy performance
Click to expand...
Correct ! i have a spare 512 SSD will try to copy my LR catalogue to it and see if it works.
 

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DestGod said:
Since you already have 16GB memory, a 1TB SSD would be a better investment.
You can put an NVMe drive in an x1 slot using an adapter, but that's pointless, since your bandwidth is cut to 0.5 Gbps, which is the same as the sequential speeds as SATA drives.

If you're about to upgrade your platform, then you could get an NVMe SSD instead of a SATA one.
A 13400 or 13500 will get the job done, since both arr powerful and sufficient enough for your workload.
Click to expand...
Ok, is it ok 12600k than 13400 and 13500. also why is SSD price almost same as NVMe when NVMe give much faster speeds.
 
Rahdirs said:
Ok, is it ok 12600k than 13400 and 13500. also why is SSD price almost same as NVMe when NVMe give much faster speeds.
Click to expand...
12600K and 13400 are roughly the same in terms of performance, while the 13500 is better than the 12600K, and is only slightly behind the (~5-10%) 13600K.

SSD prices plummeted over the last couple of years, maybe because flash memory has become very cheap to manufacture. NVMe SSDs also replaced SATA as the mainstream storage solution, so that could be a reason for price similarity as well.

For 13400-
i5 13400F- 19.5k
Gigabyte B760 DS3H-12.2K
Crucial p3 1TB SSD-5.6k

I'd suggest sticking with your 16GB stick for now. It will be a performance bottleneck, but you can upgrade to a 3200/3600 Mhz 16GB stick later for about 4k. A cooler is another investment as well, which you could save for later and take precautions like power limit, so that the included stock cooler can handle it. Deepcool AK400 for 2.3k is sufficient to cool it.
 
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Rahdirs said:
Correct ! i have a spare 512 SSD will try to copy my LR catalogue to it and see if it works.
Click to expand...
Adobe has a guide somewhere that suggests how to make best use of multiple drives for best performance, look it up. It's something like SSD for RAW source, another SSD for scratch, and even HDD is ok for jpg final output

And if you're ever buying new SSD make sure you're buying one with DRAM, as you will need the added lifetime write rating for professional work
DestGod said:
Gigabyte B760 DS3H-12.2K
Click to expand...
Isn't that a bit pricey for DDR4? You can get a good AM4 board for lesser than that, any competitive options from AMD in that range?
 
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n1r0 said:
Isn't that a bit pricey for DDR4? You can get a good AM4 board for lesser than that, any competitive options from AMD in that range?
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, that's the norm of pricing for motherboards today. From AM4, there's the MSI B550 PRO VDH for 10.5k. The CPU close to the 13400 in terms of performance is the Ryzen 7 5700X, which costs 21k think. It does not come with a cooler as well, so theres that to add in the costs.
 
@OP
Yes you can use an NVME ssd in x1 slot. I have this exact setup in one of my PC; had a x1 slot available added a 1TB M.2 NVME SSD. You will need a PCI to m.2 adapter, I baught this

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And just to give you some details, NVME SSDs use PCIe lanes for communication (M.2 is just a connector) so you can use a x4 SSD in x1 slot, your speed will be 1/4th that's all. Gen 2.0x1 should give you speeds comparable (PCIe 2.0 single lane maxes out at 500 MB/s) to SATA ssd. Try this before making big investments.

EDIT: Didn't read other comments, this has already been answered.
 
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