Published 8 minutes ago

Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies.

2025 has been a hard year for PC gaming. DDR5 memory prices are aiming for the stars, the broader market feels almost hostile to builders and enthusiasts, and a full platform jump to AMD’s AM5 platform has slipped further out of reach for many. Standing in the way is a painful trifecta of costs that includes a new motherboard, memory kit, and a new CPU, all at a time when none of them feel particularly well-priced.

Fortunately, that doesn’t mean AM4 users are stuck standing still. What most users don’t realize is that AM4 continues to be one of the most resilient and upgrade-friendly platforms the PC space has ever seen. Here are four upgrades that won’t cost you a fortune, deliver excellent price-to-performance today, and, most importantly, bring you a gaming experience that rivals any next-gen setup in town.

A Zen 3 CPU

If you’re on Zen or Zen 2

Credit: Brian Wong via Flickr

If you’re still running an older Zen or Zen 2 processor, upgrading to a high-end Zen 3 chip like the Ryzen 7 5700X, 5700X3D, or 5800X3D can feel like a total transformation in your game experience. While the older AMD architectures often struggle with 1% lows that come as immersion-breaking frame dips when running a demanding title, the new Zen 3 chips with their unified L3 cache solves this problem by dramatically reducing latency between cores.

As someone who has played AAA titles on both the 3600X and 5700X, what makes this a particularly enticing upgrade is that you can effectively feel this transition in your games as they become more consistently fluid, micro-stutters become virtually non-existent even with RTX 20-series cards, and other issues like frame drops triggered by high-geometry environments are no longer a deterrent to immersive gameplay.

If you want to take it even further, the X3D chips on the AM4 platforms offer precisely that. With a massive 96MB of 3D V-Cache, CPU-heavy games like *Microsoft Flight Simulator, *MMOs, and open-world titles like *Grand Theft Auto 5 *stand to benefit greatly at 1080p and 1440p resolutions. Just as importantly, Zen 3 finally allows modern GPUs to stretch their legs. If you’re running a newer GPU, this upgrade unlocks greater GPU utilization, making it one of the most cost-effective upgrades to your gaming rig on the platform.

Older AM4 boards, such as the B450 or X470, may require a BIOS update to recognize the Zen 3 architecture.

A newer GPU

Budget variants are finally worth your money again

At a time when most PC builders wince at GPU prices, the budget-friendly options of 2025 offer a rare (and much-needed) moment of relief in the price-to-performance conversation. If your AM4 rig is running an aging card like a GTX 1060 or even an early 20-series GPU, upgrading your graphics card can elevate your gaming experience without warranting a platform overhaul.

There are two especially compelling reasons why an upgrade can benefit those using NVIDIA’s Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs right now. First, NVIDIA has begun winding down full driver support for these architectures, marking the end of regular Game Ready driver updates. This means that these cards will increasingly miss out on optimizations and compatibility improvements tailored to new releases. The second reason is that newer cards complement AM4 chips built on Zen 3 architecture, which are noticeably better for gaming.

While there are many viable options to choose from on both Team Red and Team Green, I would argue that no other GPU beats the Arc B580 in its value proposition in the budget segment. Arc GPUs have brought a refreshing combination of generous pricing, VRAM allocation, and strong raster performance, coupled with excellent support for modern APIs like DirectX 12 and Vulkan, and Intel’s continuous advancements through driver optimization have earned them a valuable percentage of market share in the GPU market.

Intel Arc B580 + Ryzen 7 5700X	Preset (@1080p)	Average FPS	Forza Horizon 5	GTA 5 Enhanced	Red Dead Redemption 2	Cyberpunk 2077
High - Medium RT	163
High - High RT	122
High	101
High - Medium RT	63

Intel Arc B580

9*/10*

Shader Units 2,560

Ray Accelerators/Cores 20

The Intel Arc B580 is one of the launch GPUs for Intel’s second-gen graphics card family. Rocking a new architecture, generational performance improvements, and the same budget-friendly price, this is the GPU to buy for affordable 1440p gaming.

Faster NVMe storage

If you don’t get it now, AI data centers certainly will

One of the most obvious ways you can refresh your AM4 rig for high-performance gaming is upgrading to faster NVMe storage, unless you’re on PCIe 4.0 already. If you’re running your games through a SATA SSD or an early PCIe 3.0 drive, upgrading to PCIe 4.0 with a dedicated DRAM can be one of the upgrades that enhances your gaming and overall desktop experience.

While this won’t move the needle on your frame rate counter, it is worth noting that most modern titles have begun to increasingly rely on fast storage for asset streaming, shader compilation, and general traversal, and this holds especially true if you’re big on games that are built around engines like Unreal Engine 5.

A quality PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive can offer you quality-of-life improvements as faster DirectStorage-style asset delivery, quicker game launches, and smoother level transitions contribute to a snappier, more responsive gaming experience. Crucially (pun heavily intended), this is also another upgrade that you can carry forward. Since Micron decided earlier this month that consumer gaming isn’t "strategic" enough compared to feeding AI data centers, you may want to snag a high-end drive while there still is a retail market for NVMe storage.

Related

Try undervolting your CPU

It’s like an upgrade, except it costs nothing

Undervolting your chip to "unlock more performance" seems almost paradoxical, antithetical, and nonsensical all at once. But as someone who has extensively experimented with both overclocking and undervolting, it makes perfect sense once the benchmarks have run.

The fact is that modern CPUs are often voltage-padded at the factory to account for silicon variance, which means many chips can run cooler and more efficiently than stock settings suggest. For gamers, undervolting correctly can actually lower the heat floor, unlock additional thermal headroom, and allow your chip to sustain its boost clock frequency for longer. AM4 systems, particularly the ones with Ryzen 5000 series chips, undervolt exceptionally well, yielding between a 3–5% increase in single-core performance and up to 5-10% in multicore performance.

Unlike overclocking, undervolting doesn’t pose a risk to your components, can be done through the Ryzen Master utility, and reversed through a simple CMOS reset if no longer required. Although if you achieve a stable undervolt, you’d likely never want to go back to stock settings.

It’s possible to upgrade without starting over

The RAM shortage, major hardware vendors retreating from the consumer retail space, relentless demand from the AI sector, and broader economic inflation have indeed made an AM5 platform jump feel almost unthinkable, but that doesn’t mean you’re locked out of modern gaming experiences. Strategic upgrades can still change how your AM4 system feels in games, sans the financial shock of starting from scratch. Most of these upgrades can be carried forward to AM5 when prices eventually normalize, which is what makes strategic optimization the smartest path to upgrade.