crimsonstag84 said:Hmm... personally, I'd just grab another 4GB of used DDR3$33 and maybe a GTX 1050 Ti (or better) for the GPU, then see if that does the trick. No need to reinstall Windows or tear out the motherboard and PSU. That should carry me through until February, then I can swap the whole platform once AMD Zen and Intel Kaby Lake hit the market.
Robert Rodriguez2 said:You could reuse the CPU, but you're going to have to swap it out pretty soon anyway. It's an 8-year-old architecture.
If you move up to the next generation of Intel processors, you could probably reuse the RAM and just add another 4GB.
That’s why I asked about the power supply—if it’s a decent unit, you might be able to keep it.
Look, the CPU and even the GPU don't necessarily need replacing; something else is clearly wrong here.
These are the system requirements (Hearts of Iron IV is my most recent and heaviest one; everything before it is way easier on hardware)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/236850/Basically, this rig already hits the "recommended" specs.
Based on my experience with Electronic Arts games, I'd definitely recommend adding another 4GB of RAM and making sure the game is installed on an SSD.
And what the guys are saying about temperatures? They're right. That could easily be the root cause—the CPU throttling because the cooling isn't doing its job.
Bottom line: there's really no point in replacing more than 20% of this build for Electronic Arts games, which aren't actually that heavy on the CPU or GPU. The lack of RAM and a slow drive are what's killing you.
These aren't games where you're fighting for a stable frame rate due to graphics; the bottleneck is map rendering. You could run them on a junk system, but as the map gets complex, everything slows down. Besides, you play these games using the pause button, so a brief FPS drop doesn't matter. What matters is that the data loads properly without stuttering, which has nothing to do with your GPU.
BTW, Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron are, in my opinion, the pinnacle of strategy games. They're a killer way to learn history (I still remember about 100 European provinces by heart from middle school).
crimsonstag84: What's this talk about Kaby Lake or Zen? There's no need for all that overkill when a modern i3 handles these games without breaking a sweat.