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PC upgrade vs replacement
Asked in ~comp thread, figured it should be its own post.
Thinking about whether I want to do some upgrades to my 10 year old PC or buy new. I could bump RAM to 16 without breaking the bank since its DDR4, and maybe splurge on a new processor, but I'm not sure if I'd just want to go with a new machine at that point, thoughts?
AMD Ryzen 3 1300
8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR4
MSI B350M PRO-VD PLUS
4GB ATI Radeon RX 480
Edit: To follow up some questions about what I'm using this computer for, not a whole lot at the moment. I was thinking of making it into a media server or a Steam OS console now that it's available to download, but it's more of a whim and a project itch to keep my mind off of personal and global events.
Man, I wish I had taken the time to respond to this question last night when there were only a few comments, but I had a social engagement planned and had to put the phone down.
First, I suppose I should give my bona fides. I'm a professional PC technician for a custom PC builder and upgrade reseller. We sell our own custom gaming rigs, though the bulk of our business is actually selling upgraded commercial laptops on storefronts like Amazon, Best Buy and New Egg. I'm a diagnostician and repair guy, not a custom-build tech, but that just means the custom guys all come to me when they have a problem. All that's to say, I think I can help.
I'm going to give advice almost entirely on upgrading your system building on your current motherboard, and with one notable exception, I'll be eschewing specific recommendations in favor of general advice about how to go about selecting upgrades. My focus has always been on keeping hardware running for as long as humanly possible for ethical and philosophical reasons, and honestly, you already have a fine platform for building a very capable machine. Besides, upgrading is just more fun, I think.
First of all, make use of this link: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/B350M-PRO-VD-PLUS/support#cpu. That's the CPU compatibility list for your motherboard. The B350M chipset is almost uniquely upgradable, which was a big selling point for a related chipset, the X570, back in 2019-2020 when it was released. AMD promised that those specific chipsets would be upgradable to at least the fifth Ryzen generation, provided you perform BIOS updates (that's super important--do that before you attempt any upgrades).
Upshot is that your mobo is compatible with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which is a much beloved CPU for gaming enthusiasts, and held the "best-in-socket for gaming" title for years. The asking price for that CPU is anywhere between $350-$450 USD, but I should say that the last time I went looking for one, I found a lot of listings that were bullshit. Some storefronts will advertise having that CPU in stock for a low price, but when you go to make the purchase, they're suddenly out of stock with a "don't worry! We've got a completely different CPU with a similar name that's not at all what you're looking for priced just $100 more than the 5800X3D!" That kind of thing. Be aware that that proc has been highly sought after in the past, and might still be difficult to get your hands on at a decent price.
You can also use that same compatibility link I provided above to find known-compatible RAM modules. That doesn't mean that no other RAM kits will work, just that the manufacturer has specifically tested those modules for compatibility. I suggest at least doubling the RAM capacity, pretty much no matter what you intend to do with it. Microsoft has long held the completely unfounded belief that 4GB is minimum spec for Windows, which is inaccurate to the point of being an honest-to-God symptom of mental illness. I would put the bare minimum at 8GB, and really 16GB for any purpose other than simple web browsing and Youtube. If you intend to use this machine as a gaming PC or a media server, I would suggest 32GB as a minimum. Returns start to diminish after that, but 64GB is probably about as much as will meaningfully affect performance for the uses you're likely to put your system to. It's true that DDR4 has caught some pricing splash damage from the AI Bubble, but it's still not as bad as the DDR5pocalypse. You can find used kits for acceptable prices, and memory is one of those things you don't really need to purchase new IMO, provided it actually works.
As for speeds and timings, go for the highest speed that's listed as compatible with the mobo and CPU that you care to pay for, and look up the CL timing that is benchmarked the best for your chosen CPU and chipset by enthusiasts. It's not as important a spec as they think it is, but they've likely benchmarked that spec a billion times further than is necessary, and their numbers in this case can be trusted to some degree.
Someone else here suggested checking BIOS for XMP settings, which, while in the ballpark of good advice, could lead you on a wild goose chase. XMP is Intel's name for RAM overclocking presets configured directly in the UEFI/BIOS, so that if a memory module is XMP compatible, all it takes is flipping a toggle to activate reliable, stable memory overclocking. AMD, however, has different names for the same concept. Currently they call it EXPO for DDR5, but the terminology for your motherboard is likely "DOCP." You should see the toggle for it on the UEFI landing page. If the toggle cannot be flipped, then your memory is not DOCP capable. I strongly recommend that any RAM kits you purchase be XMP/DOCP capable, but realistically, you probably won't find any that aren't XMP/DOCP-ready unless you opt for "we've got memory upgrades at home" kinds of budget brands.
Abrupt change of subject: something that often catches inexperienced enthusiasts out is the importance of a proper power supply, and indeed, you didn't provide basic specs for your PSU. That's fine, because almost certainly you'll want to purchase a new one if you intend to do any meaningful upgrades. (Side note: a PSU is something you should ALWAYS buy new. Don't buy used here, for reasons I'll go into here in a bit.)
When you go choosing components, the PSU should be the last thing you consider because all your other choices will determine what you need. Once you've settled on the other upgrade components you'll want to use an online TDP calculator to determine your minimum power needs (I used to use PCPartPicker's calculator, but that site has gone downhill in recent years, so take that what they say with a massive grain of salt). Take the total TDP the calculator figures for your system and then add around 15-20% on top of that to determine the minimum wattage you need. That's because it's believed that PSUs degrade in output and efficiency over time, and you want some overhead to cushion the degradation. That's also why I recommend always buying new rather than used PSUs. (Aside: I have some doubts about the common wisdom regarding PSU degradation, as I think it might be in part a holdover from a couple decades back when capacitors were much less reliable. It's still a good idea to budget above your expected needs, however, as insufficient power delivery can present strange, difficult to diagnose symptoms, and ain't nobody got time for that.) If you do a gaming upgrade, I expect you'll be wanting at least 650W, but probably more like 750W-850W or more, depending on the video card you choose.
In regards to video cards: I'm probably burying the lede here, but I just got word from one of the manufacturers yesterday that our costs for video cards are set to increase 30% within a month, and they expect to do the same thing again in either Q4 '26 or Q1 '27. (I'mma just bold that there for visibility.) Our cost at wholesale for RTX 5090s (the current bleeding edge GPU) is set to reach about $4500 USD per unit in short order, and will likely never go down again. So, if you do decide to do a video card upgrade, do it NOW. Nothing is for certain, but I expect that even if the AI bubble pops 5 minutes from now, GPU and memory pricing is likely to be affected by it for years upon years to come--and the longer the madness continues, the worse that'll be.
About the only other piece of info I can give regarding video cards is to confirm that in the overwhelming majority of cases, PCIe 5 capable cards WILL run perfectly fine in a PCIe 4 slot, as the system will just default speeds to the slowest link in the chain. This is important if you're considering your video card as an investment. If there's some revolution in PC hardware in the near future that somehow makes PC building a viable hobby for mere mortals again, you will almost certainly be able to bring your PCIe 5 video card over to a new build. A good analogy for someone familiar with console gaming would be to consider your video card purchasing to be something like how console purchasing has worked for decades: expect to buy a new card about every four or five years, and try to do upgrades early to minimize depreciation on your old card/console. Sell off the old card/console while the demand is there to defray some of the cost of the upgrade. The timing can be tricky, but it can significantly extend the utility of your investment if you manage to time it right.
I'm not very confident in giving more specific advice about video cards than that. Video cards are a whole complicated tangle of preferences, brand loyalties, and ill-understood benchmark comparisons. PC enthusiasts and the journalists catering to them are ruinously susceptible to marketing hype, "new model with big number good, old model with small number bad!"-type thinking, and an unexamined predilection for e-peen measuring contests predicated almost entirely upon hypothetical performance metrics. Beware entering the Kingdom of Video Cards, for here be dragons.
If you're really desperate for a recommendation though, I think the AMD Radeon RX 9070XT is probably the best bang for your buck right now, and can still be had for around $700 if you go looking. Video cards can be bought used, but are more fragile than memory by a long shot, so buyer beware when buying used.
Ultimately, with some modest upgrades to your system, you could have a capable gaming PC that will play current-gen games just fine for years to come. Everything beyond that is dependent on how pretty you want your games to be, and your tolerance for minor graphical shortcomings like occasional screen tearing, microstutters, framerates lower than your IQ, and slightly fuzzy shadows, and even then most of those problems are solvable with some tinkering in game settings. Do you need the kind of frames that pro-level FPS gamers require to compete? Do you have a display capable of actually outputting them? I'm not sure I could pick the highest-rated build out of a line-up based on video output alone, and I work with this shit for a living. Let's just say that I'm deeply skeptical of the pronouncements by enthusiasts about what is the essential minimum spec for this sort of thing.
I'm happy to give further advice or expand on any of the ramblings I've given here, provided I can take the time.
Good catch about XMP and Intel. The PCIe 3.0 thing I mentioned came from a digital foundry video about the 9060 XT and RTX 5060 (relevant section linked).
Oh, yes. The PCIe 3 slot would be a problem. I missed that that motherboard doesn't have PCIe 4.0. That limits options considerably.
I still think it's worth upgrading, but maybe I'd aim more into the media server idea than gaming.
What are you trying to do that you cant do on your current machine? (This is what drives my own upgrades)
I'd recommend a replacement with those specs, but it does really depend on what you're using it for. Though keep in mind that it's probably the most expensive time in the last decade to build a PC with DRAM prices so stupidly high.
Personally I'd recommend future-proofing with DDR5 if you can afford it, but it ends up being a rabbithole of upgrades for any architecture change. I ended up Ship-of-Theseusing my rig last year when I was having CPU bottleneck issues (music production) and decided on a replacement, but I figured there was no point in getting an older spec for a build I'd hope to be using in a decade, so I got an AM5 processor. But that meant I needed a new compatible motherboard, which meant new DDR5 RAM, new fans, a new cooler, new PSU, all of which needed a larger case, and at the end I just thought 'screw it' and got a new graphics card for the whole thing. I was fortunate in my timing since I built the thing only a few months before the data centre boom hit; it would literally cost me triple the amount of money to build that machine today.
Whatever you decide to go for, 16GB of RAM is the bare minimum these days and that upgrade should be your top priority. For quick and (relatively) cheap performance boosts you could also consider a new SSD (emphasis on relatively since SSD prices are insane now) and maybe installing Linux if it fits your use case. Even just reinstalling Windows from scratch helps a ton if you've not done it since building.
I was recently upgrading my PC from i5-4690 to something modern. Since it was sadly DDR3, I didn't have the luxury of retaining my 16GB of RAM (which is still sufficient for me; I use linux and I know what I need).
It was dilemma between AM4 and AM5.
If I bought a high-end-enough CPU like Ryzen 5600 or higher, I believe I'm not upgrading for the next 8-10 years. This was the main driveforce behind AM4, together with lower price, of course.
AM5 is more expensive but it still has future, as has DDR5. The same principle applies here - if I bought 7600 or faster, I would be able to live with it for 8-10 years.
I chose AM5 as the price difference for me was 20€ (totla price around 450€).
I bought CPU, motherboard and single stick of 16GB DDR5 (Ouch! And it was almost half the budget! Ouch once more!). I bought new PSU earlier in the year, Seasonic Focus GX-850, for around 150€. This totals at arpund 600€ and I have no GPU yet (I use very old Radeon R9 270X for now).
I also got 256GB NVME SSD (system) from a friend for free - we sometimes exchange surplus hardware or do something for each other, and I has my 500GB SATA SSD also present (games). My home directory is on my NAS, no worries there.
I 3D printed my PC "case" so I consider that kinda free and I reused my CPU cooler (free).
Nowadays I'm looking towards 9070 XT, but that is easily another 600+€ and I also want to buy Steam Frame which will very likely be 1000€.
This is such a bad time for buying hardware! But alas, we have to or we stick with old stuff.
I genuinely think the greatest financial decision I've made this decade has been buying my new computer last year rather than this year! At the time (March '25) I was even considering waiting a few months for Black Friday sales, but I didn't trust prices to stay down with the way things were trending even then, and I'm so glad I went with my gut. As someone who lives mostly off of freelance work, it's very possible that I straight up couldn't have gotten as much work done on my old rig that I can on the new one.
On a rather pessimistic note, I do wonder if this is maybe just how the market is going to be in the future. Maybe the prices will continue to be inaccessible for the average consumer, and people will end up with essentially low-powered terminals that get everything done through cloud services. Half of all enterprise software is browser apps at this point, and Cloud Gaming is being massively pushed, with the promise that you can play whatever intensive games you want for a simple subscription cost. Maybe consumer electronics will all just be replaced by renting a chunk of datacenter off of your neighborhood techno-oligarch. The next stage in 'you'll own nothing and be happy'.
This won't work with me. I will always (in the next 10 years at least) be hosting my own services and using my.own hardware to do stuff. I'm not coping with "give us all you have and be happy that we can use it for whatever we want" mentality.
While I kinda hate I have to spend basically almost 1300€ on my new PC, I think I will use it for a long time as-is, no upgrades (apart from another 16GB of RAM when I deem it price-alright. I never had high-end GPU for example, I always had Nvidias x50 class and I has 3 of them in last say 14 years.
I believe the 9070 XT with Ryzen 7600 will be sufficient for me for 10 years, this makes the PC basically a 10€ a month expenditure, which is negligible. You can't buy that many useful.things for 10€ nowadays, it's simply a pack of cigarettes or two beers or some snack - all kinda one-time items. And when I look at it like that, I'm at ease knowing I didn't actually spend that much on it. If I upgraxed my PC every few years it will be different, of course. But seeing my old PC still.running strong for everyday tasls, I really believe the current one will make it many years into the future.
When I bought my i5 750 (first Core i5 generation, 4C/4T) back in 2011 and made bold claim it would be good for ten years, I got laughed at. Those people don't know that that CPU actually made it through 10+ years with me and if my motherboard didn't fail, I would be rocking it for a year or two more. Then I got i5-4690 for 40€ including motherboard which prolonged the time before I jumped on the real upgrade.
To sum it up - the times are rough for buying hardware, but if you don't need to upgrade that much, it's not that expensive when you consider how much you pay for it monthly through the useful time of the hardware.
Maybe I should jump on the 9070 XT now.
They're browser apps but they're not running in the cloud. Google docs runs on your computer, just in the javascript virtual machine of your browser. It's not being streamed from a server.
Cloud gaming is basically dead. Nvidia has been silently neglecting GeForce Now for years now. The standalone services like Amazon Luna or Shadow are either dead or dying.
You are pulling a mighty "technically" argument here. Certainly for the first part. They are not local apps in any traditional sense. If Google pulls the plug, you are SOL with your documents.
And while their examples maybe aren't technically the best examples, there is no denying that a lot of the application landscape has moved towards either fully cloud or at the very least being very cloud dependent. Which is the actual meat of the potatoes that would have been worth a response imho.
The context is whether or not hardware is going to be so expensive that people can't run anything locally and have to stream everything from servers. Corporate cloud apps are not that. It's not technically, it's just the case.
They store files on servers, which is the cloud part, but the code is executing locally. It's not like you're going to be in a situation where your computer is too slow to run Microsoft Word locally so you have to run Microsoft Word (cloud). The latter takes a stronger computer, if anything, since it has overhead from the javascript runtime.
Cloud gaming is pretty terrible right now, I agree, but long-term it probably won't be, what with datacenters popping up everywhere and AI technology getting better and better. I think long-term it could end up being a viable product, and as soon as it happens I think it's likely it'll get pushed really heavily. Even ignoring the possibility of malicious intent of the technofascist variety, what with the monopolisation and control of resources being taken from the people (what's that famous Dune quote about people letting computers do all the thinking for them?), it might just make financial sense, sorta similar to how Amazon was able to prosper for so long just because it was often simply the cheapest and best option for the average consumer, being well-established in a field (global e-commerce) where the barrier for entry is really high.
Maybe I'm wrong, and it'll quietly die out. I'm not an economist, perhaps the idea isn't actually feasible in the long run. But gaming as a whole is becoming a pretty expensive hobby in a way it hasn't been for decades, in both the console and PC markets, and it's affecting the industry in major ways. Ideally the response (IMO) would be a focus on optimising games for less powerful hardware and a shift away from the billion-dollar AAA blockbusters. But it's also possible the industry will just... Not do that, because optimising at the low level can be expensive without a huge financial incentive. People don't like 500GB Call of Duty titles, but they still sell, and I doubt shrinking it to 300GB or whatever would affect the sales figures too much. But that strategy has only been popular because consumer hardware, generally, has had resources to spare - Same basic reason modern webpages tend to be dozens of megabytes in size while displaying basically nothing. I'm curious to see what will happen when those types of games hit a userbase that simply... Doesn't have those abundant resources. Maybe the answer will be smaller games, or maybe it won't be, and AI datacenters will come to fix all the problems, for a small fee. I don't know, honestly.
That "probably" is doing a lot of work. The issue is that a) the speed of light is a thing b) it's not particularly economical, in that there aren't any economy of scale effects c) demand is spikey making the economics worse d) internet infrastructure is poor and not improving very quickly + things like starlink are inherently bad at cloud gaming.
AI technology has nothing to do with anything lol. It can improve all it wants, it's not really relevant.
Moreover, the reason consumer hardware is increasing has nothing to do with a deliberate plot to push people onto cloud gaming. Not only is cloud gaming dying, there's no push to revive it, so if this is a deliberate plot, it's a pretty bad one, when there's nothing to push people towards. It's just a matter of supply and demand. Ultimately, currently, gaming demand is dwarfed by a larger market. Happens.
Even with those specs, another 8GB is probably gonna do you wonders, especially on windows. Though a general upgrade would do you well across the board, assuming you're doing things more intensive than like indie/retro gaming and YouTube. If that's your use, I probably wouldn't bother beyond the 8GB DDR4 tbh.
I've never entirely replaced a PC. Instead, I usually alternate between upgrading motherboard+RAM+CPU and GPU. Helps me not break the bank all at once and I eventually ship of Theseus my way into a "new" computer and upgrades for my server/friends.
Edit: I see your motherboard has an AM4 slot, you can get an OK upgrade there with something like the ryzen 5 5500 for <100 and not needing to upgrade the motherboard + buy DDR5 -- nothing stellar or future proof, but maybe a frugal midpoint in this economy.
Recommendation would vary based on what you do with your current machine to be honest. I think most straightforward thing you can do is double the RAM since 16GB is pretty standard nowadays and would give you more breathing room. If you needed a tiny bump in power you could go to a 2000 series Ryzen too to keep your upgrade costs low.
Little confused by the wording here. If you're worried about "breaking the bank" upgrade is probably your only option.
That said if you have the budget to upgrade, it's an awkward time. On the one hand things have never been more expensive, on the other it's very possible they won't go down anytime soon (or hell maybe ever).
My wife upgraded earlier this year on the logic she didn't want to have to wait out another 5+ years if things only get worse in that time. Not sure where you fall on that scale. Given it's a 10 year old machine I'm sure you're already hitting issues which is spawning this question, and I kinda doubt 16 GB of ram will make a significant difference in what ever issue you're facing?
Thank you all for the insight. To follow up some questions about what I'm using this computer for, not a whole lot at the moment. I was thinking of making it into a media server or a Steam OS console now that it's available to download, but it's more of a whim and a project itch to keep my mind off of personal and global events.
If this is just be a media server/HTPC or running SteamOS, I'd just go the upgrade route. You can easily get a cheap AM4 Ryzen 5 off eBay. DDR4 is definitely seeing some of the price rises that DDR5 is seeing because there are many people who are also pursuing the upgrade path instead of replacement path these days. But it's not at the same price level as DDR5. And if you're just looking to get 8GB more, to get to a 16GB base, that shouldn't break the bank.
I don't really keep up with GPUs, so not sure what the best bet is with that.
If you do go for a replacement, there are some cheap computers out there. I recently bought this prebuilt SFF PC during the Amazon Prime Days sale. It was like $80-90 cheaper when I got it, but I think $650 still isn't a bad price. I tossed Bazzite on it and I have it hooked up to my living room TV for light Steam gaming and streaming Crunchyroll or shows/movies I've downloaded. Running great.
If it’s for a hobby, and you’ve got the cash and you wanna spend it here, do a new build dude I love new builds they feel so good
I think your motherboard can support up to a Ryzen 3950X, and with an extra 8GB of RAM you'd have a very capable media server with plenty of power for media transcription. I don't recall how good the 3000 series is for gaming but I'm sure you could look up some benchmarks for the games you want and if that generation of CPU would be enough.
The good thing about a GPU upgrade is it's independent of the rest of your system, so you could do the cheap CPU/RAM upgrade and splurge on a GPU, then if you decide to build a new system in a couple of years it's only the CPU/MOBO/RAM to worry about.
Maybe an upgrade would last long enough that you could wait for AM6 and scoop a good AM5 system on the cheap.
OP's board is compatible with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. The AM4 socket is stupidly upgradable, provided the chipset is of the Bxxx or Xxxx lines. I see no reason OP couldn't upgrade that motherboard to last at least another 4 or 5 years as a capable gaming PC, possibly longer.
Ah, you're right, but it will require a BIOS update to add the compatibility.
Easily done.
The bigger issue is something @bonsai_angel noticed that I did not: that B350M board only has PCIe 3.0 slots. That's a much bigger handicap to upgrading for gaming than the CPU would be. That board is probably better suited either for a period-accurate gaming system (circa 2019) or a media server, though what type of media server is open for debate.
Either way, there's fun to be had in upgrading it, but I wouldn't blame @moocow1452 for going with a completely new build despite my personal philosophy, if a gaming system is the goal.
I upgraded a pcie 3.0 system with a 9060 xt 16gb and it works beautifully. Something about it using all the pcie lanes, where cards like the rtx 5060 only use half, and expect higher bandwidth to compensate.
Interesting! That's just not the kind of thing I'm ever likely to test in my work. I'm much more likely to go the other way around–running PCIe 3 cards in 5 slots–though even that has become less common in recent months.
On top of which, I'm usually only concerned with stability rather than performance. I know what to expect from various cards in the benchmarks we've settled on, but mostly I'm watching for whether the damn things work at all. If I'm going to set up a test bench for a GPU it'll be because we suspect fraud (there's been a plague of people lifting 5090 GPUs and VRAM off of cards and returning them as "defective") or because a new card is causing POST errors or something.
My guess is that the number of lanes being used shouldn't matter (edit for clarity: I mean as long as the full x16 lanes are utilized; if 5060s only use 8 lanes, this is the first I've ever heard of it). A 3.0 x16 slot only has 16 lanes no matter what generation card is slotted. I would've expected the card's output to bottleneck because it can process a lot faster than the bus can move data, but again, that's just not a thing I'd be likely to test. A 5.0 GPU might just downclock as a 4.0 GPU would, in which case I'd expect it would perform at least as well in a 3.0 slot as most 4.0 cards would, though you'd still hit a performance ceiling below that of a 4.0 card in a 4.0 slot, just by virtue of the bus speed.
Anyway, fascinating stuff! That's one of the things I really like about working with PC hardware: there's always something more to learn!
The other video I linked to only commented briefly on the 5060, so if you want the full explanation with benchmarks, watch this section here. In one test, the 5060 on pcie 3.0 drops down to performance levels just below a 3060, and then shoots right back up to ~120 fps. Does not seem like a good experience. And yea apparently it uses an 8x interface.
I've been wondering why there seems to be no demand for the 5060, and this makes it clear. Used to be -- BACK IN MY DAY (insert cliche prospector voice here) -- that the x060 models were good budget fallbacks for when pricing went wonky, but nobody seems to want what NVIDIA is offering anymore, excepting them that can float a used car's-worth of equity in a fancy triangle drawing machine. I've gotten a lot of good use out of a 12GB 3060, despite never once reaching anything like full VRAM utilization, but with the cut down bus interface, I don't much see the point to the upgrade. If anything, this underscores for me why NVIDIA is a dead-end in the consumer market.
Upgrade or replace with used builds would do you just fine. The specs you have there were pretty low-end at the time, so you'll see a significant boost with pretty much any upgrade. Any DDR4 Ryzen CPU 2600 or better. Any AMD GPU 6600 or better.
Looking at my local craigslist, I see someone in Philadelphia selling this for $600. Yank your ram, put it in there, and you'll see a massive performance boost.
Hi @moocow1452 While i don't know the system requirements of SteamOS, have you considered first setting it up only as a media server (using, say, jellyfin or something like that), and then running it for some few months? That way, as you actually use it for something, you will begin to definitely see what thing(s) should be upgraded....Or, can decide that the whole thing should be replaced...and hopefully in some months maybe things calm down overall for the prices of both upgrade components and whole new PCs. It may sound like i'm suggesting you to wait, but its actually use/test things while you wait. ;-)
...Of course, if you run it with a lean linux distribution and only as a headless media server...maybe it does not need to be upgraded or replaced at all! Maybe it could give you value for what it is - a minimal media server....Then, later on you get a new/used/different computer for some other purposes...That would be the best of both worlds! :-)
With the age and specs of the computer it's probably worth looking more at a new(er) computer.
I don't recommend buying new. With the DRAM crap going on due to AI it's a terrible time to buy new. Similar constraints on new video cards.
I recommend going to eBay, searching by category for PC desktops, and alternate between 'sort by newly listed' and 'sort by ending soonest' with more time on ending soonest.
Link: https://www.ebay.com/b/PC-Desktops-All-In-One-Computers/179/bn_661752
After that? BE PATIENT. Let things go that look like reasonable deals and just... wait for a while watching it. You'll start to get a sense of what things are going for. Also click on 'sold items' to see what things have actually sold for.
The desktop computer secondary market is VERY large, and while you are not likely to get a deal on a CURRENT generation machine, you are likely to get an amazing price on something 3 generations old or a pretty good deal on something 2 generations old, either of which would in general be a fairly large step up from the hardware you are on currently.
...Kind of hesitant to toot my own horn here, but I suppose it might be relevant. I do sell stuff, and while mostly I do lab electronics I get computers sometimes too. I've got a recent-gen Dell micro pc that's been sitting on my shelf for maybe a year now. I think it has a 10th or 11th gen Intel i7 and 16 gigs of DDR4. It had a broken power button which I mostly fixed (the power LED doesn't light up anymore but the button works now).
Could let that go semi-cheap if you wanted, but if you spend time (and it is literally you spending a precious resource - do value your time) watching eBay statistics are very much on your side for getting a fair step up in hardware for a good deal - probably a better deal than I could offer. You can straight-up trade time for money doing that by just waiting and watching.
Your ryzen 3 1300 only has 4 cores and 4 threads (no hyper-threading). You could easily get a cpu with 8 cores 16 threads, while keeping your same motherboard. Also check what speed your ram is running at. If it's 2133mhz then check if your ram supports 3200mhz and enable the xmp profile in your uefi/bios to run it at full speed. Or when you buy new ram, make sure it says XMP 3200. (edit: Apparently the xmp name applies only to intel, and amd calls it something else. That would be an important thing to look into.)
I don't know what you use your computer for. If it's games, you can also get a huge upgrade from a variety of newer video cards, but be careful with that old PCIE 3.0 slot. The nvidia 5060 suffers from the lower bandwidth, while the radeon 9060xt does just fine. You still only need 16gb of ram for the big new games, but vram on these cards should be more like 12gb. And running ddr4 ram at 3200mhz really does help.
You will probably have to upgrade your bios to get support for newer CPUs. Just start scrolling through this list on wikipedia and stop at Zen 3 (or earlier).
Whenever a friend comes to me about a slowing pc, I just upgrade them to a combo SSD + ram upgrade + lightweight linux distro (I really like bunsenlab, but linux mint xfce edition is easier for users intimidated by linux).
It has so far worked 100% of the time to make them happily keep their rig for at least 2 more years, which seams worth it for 60 bucks and 2 hours, and the rig ends up handed down later instead of trashed.