LeagueTroll wrote: »

No point to get ssd on a z77 board, you can’t use pcie m2 ssd.

My suggestion, amd b550/450 ryzen 3600, ddr4 ram. The gtx 660 will bottle neck u in some games, eso will prolly be just fine.

Even a SATA SSD is an order of magnitude faster than a HDD and easily the best upgrade you can make for certain things such as boot and load times. They're also dirt cheap.

Other then that, OP, I would look into replacing your GPU. ESO doesn't benefit much from CPU, so unless you know you have a bottleneck there, it probably won't help. Water cooling won't help at all unless your CPU/GPU are throttling due to insufficient cooling.

daemonios wrote: »

ESO doesn't benefit much from CPU, so unless you know you have a bottleneck there, it probably won't help.

Agree on most things, but this isn't quite true. In ESO, CPU is often THE bottleneck you want to look at first. Granted, the GPU is not all that great here and I'm not familiar with that CPU. There's been so many generations of i3/5/7 that I just can't keep up witjout searching for a data sheet. But yeah, ESO does benefir from a decent CPU, up to a certain point. Generally speaking, it also benefit more from a high frequency than a high number of cores.

OP : My wife runs a rig with an i5 that is 5 years old, and it doesn't bottleneck her noticeably. You should probably be fine.

I'll also agree that a SSD, even without an M2, is a major improvement. Just because you can't use the fastestestestest technology available doesn't mean you won't notice a change. Rule of thumb, though : generally speaking,; the larger the SSD, the fastest. It's not always true, but generally you get more chips and thus more paralel reading / writing on larger disks. Get at least a 500 GB one for decent performance. A decent SSD in SATA is still a world of an improvement.
However...

worrallj wrote: »

It consistently shoots up to 100% during load screens and floats pretty high the rest of the time. Temperature gets scary high, 100+ degrees C.

Now that is a problem. It's not a problem of watercooling needed. It's a problem of really, really bad setup somewhere.

First things first. Check if your fan still works. If not, check if it's still plugged. If you're using stock Intel fan, you might want to get something decent instead.

If you smoke, or have pets, of both.... Vacuum clean the heck out of your rig. Make sure you do it very carefully, and preferable using an anti-static band. worst case scenario, keep one hand on a metallic part of the casing. But make sure every little bit of dust is taken care of in the vital areas. Cigarette smke is especially dangerous, as it can acumulate aunder the fans and make a compact, cardboard-like paste that can really f*ck sh*t up. I've seen fans broken and ejected from their place by that.

Check that you have proper input and output of air, too. Ideally, you should have as large as you can get away with a fan in front to breath some fresh air inside the rig, and one at the back, to exhaust hotter air. You don't need more, but if you can get more, why not. Make sure the air circuit is as open as you can, and no clutter will prevent it. Personnaly, I use 12 cm fans, not too noisy, but 2 fronts, 2 back, 1 on the CPU. 5x 12 cm fans total. Got a giant rig, though.

Did you build that thing yourself ? If so, did you have any experience prior to it ? An error beginenr often do is to apply a LARGE amount of thermal paste on the CPU. Never ever do that. Use decent grade thermal paste or grease, and apply as thin a layer as you can. You should almost be able to see through it. Else, it acts as a thermal isolation, keeping the heat inside...

Check your power supply, too. If you got a cheap-arse one (I could name a few brands that are to be aoided entirely, but anything below 30 bucks is trash, basically, and I'm being EXTREMELy generous here), replace it. A power supply is basically the first safety component of your rig. Get a sh*tty one, and current will spike. Spikes kill your hardware. Get a not entirely sh*tty one, and tension will fluctuate while still staying sinusoidal. That kills your hardware, just slower. A really, really sh*tty one will let dangerous outputs through instead of melting its fuse (assuming it even has one) and kill your hardware too, in case of power surge. A good one has stable current and voltages. Not necessarily at the exact value you'd expect (5.5v can be 5.4 or even 5.3v, for instance), but stable. Not "always changing between 5.1 and 5.9".

Check your settings, too. If you overvolted you CPU for whatever reason, don't, unless you need it to keep a stable overclock, and then, yeah, you need better cooling. If you're not overclocking, and your current is overclocked, remove that. Some motherboards have a "performance" mode that tries to apply some auto-overclock settings and also apply overvoltage to CPU to make sure it's stable. That sh*t will overheat your rig like crazy.

A CPU that overheats will see its longevity reduced, and 100+° C is extreme overheating. Doesn't mean yourswill break in a matter of days, it would still take months, maybe years, but it's not good. Also, overheating will often generate errors in the calculations, and thus instability. Usually, there are safety modes on motherboards that simply shut down the rig if extreme temperatures are reached. Now, it might just be the sensor going crazy. It happens. You read 100 °C and actually you merely have 70, but between the sensor, the motherboard and the program readinfg it something goes wrong. But better treat it as if it were truly overheating. Better safe than sorry !

For ESO you dont need to upgrade your pc; ESO can run at high fps on low end mazchiens if you turn down the graphics. But maybe you want better graphics and higher frames. Are those a priority for you? Because then yes, by all means, start spending. An SSD is not a bad idea, they are cheap now and gives great load speeds, not just for ESO, but generally for everything you put on them. Put your OS on it, it will run better, faster, smoother. File operations like copying files, memory operations in general wil get better (due to pagefile using the ssd -> the more ram used the higher the pagefile usage). Note that SSD wont give you better fps or graphics.

As to you problem of 100+ degrees celcius heat: those temps are dangerous for you hardware, you risk destroying it. Your temps are probably getting high due to one (or both) of two reasons:

1. build up of dust in you pc, and you haven't taken it apart to dust it out yet. Especially the fan is prone to get clogged up in dust. You can use a vaccum cleaner (be careful of too much suction) and/or pressurized air (usuallycans of propan, butan, isobutan <- flammable! cool your pc off first!). And keep the can level, dont tilt it or the liquid may come out in fluid form instead of as a gas, which will result it vaporising quickly from the surface it hits resulting in a rapid freezing effect with temps that could go well below zero which could, if you are unlucky, damage components (matter that gets freezed and heated rapidly contract/expand rapidly which could lead to damage).

2. cooling paste on cpu/gpu is crappy (manufacturers often use crappy paste and often use waaay to much of it). With those temps the paste may have dried up and cracked, resulting in air filling those cracks. Air is a terrific heat insulator which is very bad news for your cpu/gpu. If there are indeed cracks in the cooling paste, the temp sensors may not even reliably pick up on the actual temp of the cpu/gpu dies which really could lead to the death of them because the cpu and gpu downthrottle mechanisms wont kick in if the sensor dont know how hot they really are. It could very likely be a great idea to change the cooling paste. I suggest Arctic MX4, it has great consistency, heat conductivity and is not electrical conducive. Just buy their small injector with 4g. Remember to just use a tiny amount, with all cooling pastes it is extremely common for most people to apply too much. You also need special cleansing liquids to rinse the old paste away and to prepare the surface of the die and heatsink. Research how to do it or have a specialist do it for you.

Until you can do one or both of these things, I suggest you use a program called Throttlestop to lower the usage of you CPU (only for Intel cpu's) and a program such as MSI Afterburner to limit the max temp or underclock of your GPU. Some GPU's does not support max temp limits though, but most should support underclocking.

Don't ask me to build a Computer, but from what I've learned watching others do it on Youtube, you don't need liquid cooling, just really good fans. Good air circulation is enough even for decent hardware.

You can easily upgrade your RAM, I'd suggest 16GB, (two 8GB sticks) since 16 has pretty much become the new standard to have. 12GB bare minimum.

I have no idea about CPUs, my knowledge is basically, "Higher the number in the name, the better". Your GPU though could be upgraded to at least a GTX1080 if you don't have the money to go into the current gen cards.