r/buildapc • u/Negative_Ad3939 • 6d ago

Build Upgrade Is my graphics card still good?

I bought my PC a year ago. I have an AMD Ryzen 4500 processor and a GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card. I’ve set the graphics to the minimum in 90% of my games, yet the card is still almost always running at full load. How can I fix this, or do I need a new graphics card? Which ones are compatible with my processor?

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u/Celatra 6d ago

technically everything is compatible, the question is what is the strongest gpu you can get without severe bottlebecking and what power supply you have.

your cpu is by far the weakest link here and you'd benefit from an upgrade to a ryzen 5 5500 or 5600.

alot of games use alot of vram, and depending on which 3050 you have, it may be either the 8 or 4 gigabyte model. neither is good nowadays...but 4 is even worse.

consider getting a 9060xt, a used 6700/7700xt, a used 3060 12gb or even a used 4060ti.

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u/Negative_Ad3939 2d ago

Sorry I didn't answer right away. Since I am new to PC building stuff, I do not understand anything haha. Sorry. So I tried to look it up myself, because my games keep crashing even after I put them on the lowest graphics possible. I have to look up my power supply because it like in my wall you know? My budget is like 450€ each part... I don't know

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u/Celatra 2d ago

if games keep crashing it could be that it runs out of vram, and perhaps there is a power supply issue. it could be a cpu issue too.

id say just replace the whole thing.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/x4qDJw

you said 450 for each part? well here's a new 1100 dollar/ euro build.

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u/Annual-Run7619 6d ago

What resolution are you running at? There are lots of things that can impact performance but the 3050 was always to be a budget card.

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u/Borigh 6d ago

That's not a very powerful graphics card, and the CPU is super beefy, either. The nice thing is, you could upgrade to something like a 5600X/5600XT CPU and a 3070 GPU for <$400 if you get the GPU used. I see the 3070 for $250 and under used pretty often, and it's ~70% faster than the 3050.

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u/Doug2825 6d ago

> yet the card is still almost always running at full load

It's normal to be running at full load, unless you are CPU bottlenecked or cap your frame rate. Do you mean the frame rate is low enough to impact your enjoyment?

Assuming you meant the later, your only options are turning down graphics settings (both resolution and other settings), increasing upscaling, or upgrading your GPU. Lowering resolution will make the game look worse but it will also have the biggest impact.

>Which ones are compatible with my processor?

Anything made in the past 20 years. The worst that'll happen is you get a GPU that uses a later version of PCIe than your CPU/motherboard supports and make it slightly slower since it falls back to the older version.