Upgrading My G3-710 Tower - Help Greatly Appreciated

SabinFigaro

Salutations, nerd herd!

TL;DR: just skip to nitty-gritty

Hope you're all doing well with your circumstances these days. Thanks for taking the time to help or even check in.

Just to pre-face, I really try to not be lazy but when it comes to PC hardware, I'm a bit clueless. I try my hardest to learn just what I need in order to figure out what upgrade works, but I just never do it because there are so many variables that I never feel confident enough to follow through. I don't have anyone else to ask, and if this doesn't work out I'll just have to ship/carry the tower to a pro somewhere.

So I bought an PREDATOR G3-710 Gaming PC from Curry's like 2 years ago. I did enough basic research, it looked good and I was pretty hyped. Though it seems that while I can run most games pretty well, the PC is really struggling when it comes to the CPU. It could also use an upgrade from DDR4 8GB -> 16GB (or 24GB if I find a good 2x8GB deal? Might just give one stick away to someone cause 24 GB sounds overkill).

Now, why do I want to upgrade? I'll try to not blow your mind with my unique idea™, but I'm going to give this streaming/video editing shtick a swing before it gets too overcrowded, y'know

I might as well add that this is the first tower PC  I bought for like 10 years, I wanted to downgrade the ***** OS AFAIR and I didn't realise how bad the warez scene (so to say) had become. I f'd myself enough that the computer didn't load explorer.exe, instead it just loaded cmd and I had to write explorer.exe. Reformatting/reinstalling windows was such an obtuse, failing mess because of what I had done that it caused me to not deal with it until like 2 months ago. I feel like I can never really know if this has maybe damaged something, and I'm just 90% the PC is clean now.

The nitty-gritty:

AFAIU is relevant (please ask if you need more, and thanks for your time), specs:

PSU: ps-7501-5
Mboard: Predator G3-710

CPU: Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7400 CPU @ 3.00GHz, 3000 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)

RAM: crucial ddr4 2400 8gb

bonus info 
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070
OS: Windows 10 Home 64-bit
Cooling seems pretty good? I feel like a pleb writing "IceTunnel thermal system"

My questions:

So I want to be able to smoothly play modern games on high (not necessarily ULTRA) quality while also streaming/recording from my computer using OBS (ok sorry it's SLOBS). I also want to open up the PC's possibilities for video compiling and other workhorse activity like that. From what I gather, I direly need a new CPU and more RAM.

1) What upgrades do you recommend I get?

I will try to check out deals regularly. If several suggestions are offered, I'm first humbled by your generosity, then I can also check out more offers, and maybe understand myself what I'm looking for.

2) Can my current-, or maybe future suggested hardware, be reasonably overclocked?

From what I gather, "lol no only K processors can overclock" regarding the CPU at least. Haven't even looked into the GPU. This is also new territory for me so I'm taking baby steps.


This might be the first time I go out asking for help like this since being in a cool IRC channel as a kid, so just want to really convey that I 100% appreciate all your knowledge, any time invested and also spent.
Wishing y'all a great day!

leesmith

Im basically in the same boat, bought the same PC around the same time. ive never built a pc and im quite new to them and the pc gaming scene so I bought it as a base to see if I would truly migrate to PC and I basically have. if you've figured out whats appropriate and will work with the motherboard Id love to know cause i'm basically clueless (noob af), but know the cpu and ram are the main bits that need upgrading or at least the ram cause my cpu is being killed off, im debating just upping to 16gb 2 x 8gb 3000mhz sticks but a lot of the info goes in one ear and out the other and I havnt a clue whats going to work lmao

billsey

@leesmith you normally would start a new thread with your question instead of camping out on an old one ... but, the first improvement you should think of is a SSD instead of HDD, the rest all can be measured for what gain you get. Memory only really helps if you either don't have dual channel running (you'd have to be on one stick to not be doing dual channel) and your normal ram usage. If you typically are running using 6GB of ram, bumping the machine from 16GB to 32GB is a no-gain. CPU and GPU upgrades are typically gated by the pocketbook. They both give some improvement (GPU more than CPU) but can be costly. Note that many GPU upgrades also require PSU upgrades, so factor that cost in as well.

Now, if you really do have the same computer as the OP, the jump from an i5 to an i7 might be worth looking at if the SSD and memory are dealt with. The 7th gen i5 has one thread per core, the 7th gen i7 has two threads per core. Not a big improvement with gaming but it can be fairly big when doing more mundane tasks. If you have the same GTX 1070 and your pocketbook is deep then you can go as high as you want with the GPU, the 3060 seems to be more reasonable than some of the other 30 series. The base model and the ti require 550W and 600W respectively, and you likely have either a 300W or 500W supply. So plan on that 650W or higher to allow for some breathing room.