Upgrade CPU or gpu?

[kweiming]

If you want to upgrade from that go 7970, prices are nice if you can find some cheap ones. Or jump all the way to a GTX 780

saw some 7970s around the £200 mark on hotdealsuk yesterday and the GTX 780 for around £340-£360 on the same website.

[crossy]

I thought that the 6300 was a fairly decent gaming performer, so in the same situation I'd plump for a new graphics card. There's new AMD processors out next year, so it wouldn't make sense to upgrade to one of today's models and yet leave an "old" gpu in there.

If you want to stay AMD loyal then there's some good deals on the "old" 79xx series cards now that the R series are out.

Although it's not a gaming-specific update, I'd thoroughly recommend adding a SSD to host your OS to your "must have" list.

[Dooms]

Although it's not a gaming-specific update, I'd thoroughly recommend adding a SSD to host your OS to your "must have" list.

and while an SSD won't really effect your FPS it does increase the speed of load times in games SOOOOOO much that I would never install my games on a mech drive again.

[crossy]

and while an SSD won't really effect your FPS it does increase the speed of load times in games SOOOOOO much that I would never install my games on a mech drive again.

Undoubtedly true, downside though is that most games are pretty large these days, so unless you're very fastidious about moving "last years" titles to backup then you're looking at a fairly large, AND EXPENSIVE, SSD.

Speaking from experience here - my current "apps" partition is just slightly too small for the (evil?) trio of Rocksmith2014, BF4 and CoD:Ghosts. A 500MB Samsung EVO SSD would fit the bill ideally, but that's heading towards £300, so I'm going to "make do" with a 300GB Velociraptor I got from a PC that was being scrapped. Can't help wondering if one of those SSHD's that Hexus had for prizes recently would have been a good halfway house - if I'm reading the white papers correctly then they probably would.

Then again, finding someway to move all these effin' updaters that have slotted into the on-boot onto on-demand would be very helpful.

[Dooms]

Yeah I agree. I'm on a 500gb Samsung and with just Win8, couple apps, BF4, GuildWars 2 and 5 games from steam I'm already down to 200gb. I find myself deleting and re-adding games from steam very often (400 games in my library) which I guess isn't a problem for me when I'm on a 120mb line but if I was back on 8mb like before it just wouldn't be doable.

[crossy]

Yeah I agree. I'm on a 500gb Samsung and with just Win8, couple apps, BF4, GuildWars 2 and 5 games from steam I'm already down to 200gb. I find myself deleting and re-adding games from steam very often (400 games in my library) which I guess isn't a problem for me when I'm on a 120mb line but if I was back on 8mb like before it just wouldn't be doable.

I'm in the same problem vis-a-vis Steam (although a shedload less than 400!). I thought Steam had a backup/restore feature - if this is the case then wouldn't it be possible to backup and remove a downloaded title and then restore it later if/when you want it? At least this way you'd be spared the drudge of having to redownload it although, as you rightly say, with a 120Mb/s line (me too!) it's not really a big deal - 4GB in about 20-25 minutes.

I've got stuff like SR2, Rocksmith2012 that I'd still like to have available "on the shelf", but I could really do with the app space. I've got plenty of these HDD crates so I was thinking of backing my old games off to one of these. Actually friend of mine (jokingly?) suggested that since 32GB MicroSD cards are less than £15 that you could probably back off to one of these and then slip it in a drawer somewhere.

I guess the point I'm trying to make - obliquely - is that a lot of folks focus on "CPU or GPU" and forget that there's other things in their "gaming experience". E.g. I upgraded my memory from 1600 to 1866 and that made a noticable difference.

[capa06]

4.5 gHz is already far more than enough for normal daily use. The bottleneck of the system mainly lies with GPU or hard disk.

[crossy]

4.5 gHz is already far more than enough for normal daily use. The bottleneck of the system mainly lies with GPU or hard disk.

Depends what spudsy87 (the OP) is doing with their system - e.g. if they're ripping MP4/MP3's then GPU performance isn't going to be an issue unless they're using gpu-accelerated recodes.

Even then, there's situations where Intel's better floating point performance trumps AMD's faster/more cores integer delivery.

Given spudsy87's talking about a graphics card update then it's probably a safe bet that we're talking about a gaming system. In that case, the hard disk performance isn't necessarily a big deal. After all, the difference between some 4200rpm drive and the latest SSD is only going to be a matter of seconds for the level-loading benchmark. That stated, of course the difference is going to be night and day on that initial application launch, and if you're firing off a lot of progs simultaneously then there's an effect there. Plus, if that slow disk is also hosting your OS then you're looking at longer boot up times of course.

As far as I'm concerned, I see no need to change the conventional upgrade hirearchy:
1. Memory (it's easy to swap DIMM's for larger/faster ones - few, if any, OS changes needed);
2. Graphics card (only drivers need changed usually);
3. Storage (this means having to transfer potentially a lot of data);
4. Motherboard (can be problematic - this is what I'm trying to do at the moment);
5. Processor (usually done with the motherboard);

Normally 4&5 are joined - with few occasions where you CAN change one and not the other. However, if you're on a relatively good AM3+ board then you can go from elderly 1075T to the latest 8350, which is a big plus point for AMD in my book. Intel on the other hand you've got the morass of 2011, 1155, 1156 and now 1150.

spudsy87: I'm following in your footsteps - just got a Saber R2.0 to replace my busted-*ss M4A89. But I'm only hosting a PhenomII 1090T. Be interesting to see how my new board performs.

Going to stand by my original opinion though. If you've got a 4.5GHZ OC on the processor and decent speed RAM then if the system is still not performing then (unless there's a driver issue) then it's safe to point fingers at the GPU.

[Butuz]

Upgrade the GPU for sure and if you can afford an SSD for the boot/games drive do that also.

Butuz

[kweiming]

Upgrade the GPU for sure and if you can afford an SSD for the boot/games drive do that also.

Butuz

Yes! I agree with this too an SSD made a significant speed difference for my PC

[speaker5]

Upgrade the gpu, get an AMD one for better price to performance and hopefully some good optimisations for the future.

[spudsy87]

Hi guys I ended up getting a treat and got one of the new bf4 edition r290x cards but I'm having issues as of today with my system not posting. It's posted in the mobo section.

[kweiming]

Hi guys I ended up getting a treat and got one of the new bf4 edition r290x cards but I'm having issues as of today with my system not posting. It's posted in the mobo section.

What are your specs?

[Dog]

An ssd is a sound investment like the guys here have said. Windows and programs load up really fast, roughly 8 second boot up time. I'm looking to upgrade my gpu, what happened with your r290x?

[CrispiusBaconus]

If you upgrade the CPU, go for either an i5 4670k or a fx8320/8350

[Bonebreaker777]

FX 6200 @ 4.5Ghz vs any CPU today will prove to be a rudimentary upgrade.
How's you GPU/system?