CPU vs. GPU: Which should you upgrade first?

Whether you upgrade your PC’s CPU or GPU first really depends. For example, currently on my workbench is an old HP Pavilion TG-01 gaming PC that I purchased during COVID. Deciding whether to upgrade the CPU vs. GPU first in order to save money is the main goal, as I already added 16GB of DDR4 RAM that I had on hand. The first thing anyone doing an upgrade needs to consider is what you are going to use the machine for.

If you’re gaming, I would recommend a GPU upgrade. If you’re just upgrading a work computer, the CPU is a great choice after a RAM upgrade. Just understand that whether you have an Intel-based board or an AMD-based board, the motherboard you have will dictate the upgrade path for it. You can’t just buy the most powerful processor on the market and think it will work, because your motherboard might not support it.

The PC I’m working on was equipped with a Ryzen 5 3500, a solid 3.6GHz 6-core processor. The high-end CPU I could put on the motherboard would be a Ryzen 7 3700X, but a faster CPU won’t improve gaming performance much beyond the refresh rate if you already have the best possible graphics card.

This TG-01 came with a GTX 1650 Super, the former king of mid-range graphics cards and on par with the Xbox Series S in terms of performance. Released in 2019, this card helped many games survive the COVID era, and these particular HP gaming PCs were often purchased by scalpers in order to sell the GPU alone. Indeed, Walmart was selling these models for less than $500 refurbished in 2021, making the parts inside more expensive if purchased individually rather than in pre-built form.

And while you can still play older, lighter titles on the GTX 1650 Super, the 4GB of RAM is really going to limit you. The lack of ray tracing support also means that you simply can’t play certain games, even if the card could theoretically run them, like “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.” A better processor wouldn’t solve this problem, but upgrading to a Radeon RX 6600 XT would. I bought an RX 6600

Before the upgrade, running modern titles wasn’t much fun. I was limited to 1080p gaming, with most games hitting the VRAM limit quickly. Even older titles like “Red Dead Redemption 2” struggled to reach 60 FPS at high settings. The game was playable just fine on medium settings, but it serves to show that if a 2019 game pushed the 1650 Super, anything modern would only run on low settings at best. If I had to keep this machine, I would have used it to replace a laptop I keep in my garage to run my small home business.

In this use case, the only thing I would have done would have been to upgrade the RAM. The next step would have been to upgrade the processor at some point, as I sometimes use this computer to edit small YouTube videos as well. And since video editing software relies heavily on the CPU for decoding, rendering, and codec support, a CPU upgrade would make the most sense. So in the end it really all depends on your specific needs and possibly what deals you can get.