I have an Intel i7-4770 CPU (from 2013) and I don’t think I have ever been CPU-bound so I would rather not spend money on upgrading it. However, I want to upgrade my graphics card to a Radeon RX 7600. My motherboard supports PCIE 3.0 which the RX 7600 is fine with.
Is there anything I should look out for? I’m worried that I’m missing something that will prevent me from running a 2023 video card on hardware ten years older than that.
(In case anyone is curious, my current video card is a GeForce GTX 960. It has been good enough for Diablo 2 Resurrected but I don’t think it will be able to handle Baldur’s Gate 3.)
As I understand it, the socket on the CPU changes every few years. Intel is on a socket called LGA1700 now which will support 14th gen but after that it will be a different socket. So any motherboard that has LGA1700 can be used for now but later new motherboards will be released for the new socket. Similarly in AMD, the current socket is AM5 which they’ve said they will support for another year or something, after that the new CPUs will be on a new socket.
The above matters for choosing a motherboard that will be supported later by new CPUs. For GPUs the socket doesn’t matter, but the higher the PCIe I suppose that’s better.
I’m a beginner at this though, and may be wrong, but you could search more along these lines. Hope this helps!