Advice needed on phased PC upgrade

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1

Need a quick once-over if this looks an OK strategy for my PC upgrade plan: I have an Optiplex 7010 PC with the following specs and approx Passmark scores

  1. i7-3370 3.4Ghz - 6400
  2. Palit GTX 1660 StormX 6GB PCIe 3.0 - 12,000
  3. 16GB DDR3 128000U - I don’t know the scores
  4. Corsair CX650M PSU

I don’t tend to play much in the summer months which is why I don’t want to spend $£$£$ on GPU just yet, but would like to get 3070ti eventually or when a really good offer on one comes by.

Currently getting 15-30fps on low on 1080p I would like to improve PC in stages to get to High/Ultra at 1080/1440, possibly 4K with compromised settings. I also do photography as a hobby/vacations with 24mb+ RAW images and videos on Filmora - nothing heavy, just a casual photographer. I’m thinking at this stage, I should upgrade the CPU/MB/RAM as a priority as the CPU is the least performing and holding back the GPU? What settings should I expect to increase msfs by if I were to consider the following upgrade in “Phase 1” of my plan? Is there any gotchas or anything else that needs to be considered

Phase 1

  1. i5-12600K + cooler
  2. Z series MB with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 capabilities

Keep my GPU, memory, PSU and SSD’s as they are at the moment. Can these boards accept DDR3 memory?

Phase 2

  1. DDR5 RAM
  2. GPU
  3. Nvme disks

To keep costs down further, would DDR4 and PCIe 4.0 be a better choice/match at this stage? I see DDR5 at a decent price right now, but the boards are pricier still.

Thanks all

2

There are two variants DDR4 and DDR5 and they are not interchangeable. Maybe you can fashion your DDR3 ram into a plant pot or something

3

Ah Ok - I assume PIN assignments are different. OK then, I’ll add DDR 5 to Phase 1 then.

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