Advice on future PC upgrade please.

ClarenceWorley

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Hi,
This is my current gaming system:
500 GB SATA-II HDD 7200 RPM 8MB
Corsair 8GB XMS3 PC3-10666 1333MHz ( 2x4GB )
Corsair 600W (CMPSU-600CX) PSU - Low Noise
Edimax Wireless LAN 300Mbps (PCI-E)
Sharkoon T9 Gaming Case
Asus M5A78L-M/USB3 (AMD 760G) - VGA
AMD FX 4100 (4 x 3.6 GHz)
Samsung 22x DVD Re-Writer/Reader /- RW- Black - (SATA)
2GB XFX Radeon HD 7850 DD Black Edition, 5000MHz GDDR5, 28nm, GPU 975MHz, 1024 Cores, DL DVI/HDMI/mDP
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 5.1 (PCI)
Its just over a year old and to be fair it plays everything I chuck at it fine, but as we all know upgrades are inevitable. (and addictive ;-)) I would appreciate some suggestions on what will want to be upgraded, possible replacements and in what order to keep it up to pace for games for the next year or two.
I will probably will have a budget of £500'ish over the coming year.
Thanks in advance.
 
Not much probably, a 7850 in the first place suggest you don't consider is essentially to have absolutely everything at maximum and it'll certainly play everything released in the next two years at decent settings.

Various options you could consider are:

1. An SSD. Doesn't have that much benefit for gaming (load speeds can be a bit faster) but it's nice to have if you use your computer for other things.

2. A more powerful processor. The FX-4100 is fairly modest when it comes to gaming, if you play any CPU-heavy and multi-threaded games (which are rare beasts) then a real quad core would give you a fair bit more performance. The rumours day socket AM3+ is a dead end and won't even get steamroller based FXs so I'd budget for a motherboard upgrade whether you end up buying AMD or Intel in a couple of years time.

3. If you still buy games on disks (rather than through Gamersgate, Desura etc.) then you may end up needing a blu-ray drive at some point.

4. The installation of an ethernet cable. Serious gaming systems should be a wireless free zone ;)

Personally if I was in your situation I'd go for some high quality peripherals. If I had a 7850 then I'd go for a Topre Realforce over a GTX 760 any day.
 
Thanks for the info and taking the time to reply. Will take all you have said on board. :thumbsup:
 
Decent advice above by Endlesswaves.

If i was you i would look at upgrading asap, while you can get some value back from parts, what time frame would you have the money to upgrade? I would go with a new motherboard/memory/quad core cpu and gpu. At the moment with prices on amd cards, you would be able to sell the 7850, also memory prices are decent so if you can sell that. With your old mobo/cpu see if you can get anything for it, if not use it for something else? office system etc. Keep the case, hdd, psu, disk drive and wireless/sound cards, Look at getting something like a 120gb/250gb samsung evo for the main boot drive as above it makes such a difference in general use, and use the other drive for media/music etc. Spend the bulk of the money then on the major parts cpu/memory/mobo/gpu, you can pick up a 2nd hand z77 i5 bundle for cheap, run that with a decent cooler at 4.2Ghz+ and spend the rest towards a graphics card.
 
Cheers for that. Time frame wise I could do it anytime really I just procrastinate to much ;) Hence saying over the next year was just to give me time to decide on what to do. Cpu wise I must confess to being an AMD guy but hey if the Intel's have more to offer I could go down that root. I have heard that an Intel cpu and a AMD gpu don't mix to well so I'd have to go Nvidia too I suppose.
 
I always procrastinate with builds, as well as most things come to think of it :D

With the system you have now, it's not worth upgrading anything as far as price/performance, if you got say a new graphics card it would just be bottle necked. The motherboard chipset is sata 2 , and i don't think it supports the trim command (could be wrong), so getting an ssd for now, would just put added use on it/you wouldn't get as good performance.

If if i was you as i said i would look at upgrading now, so you can salvage some value, unless you want to hold out (but by then you will get pretty much nothing). Amd gpu's work the same on Intel motherboards, you just have to check things like if the official bios revision supports crossfire/sli if you want that as an option down the line (you can buy a decent card and then 1/2 years later pick up another second hand for a cheap price to boost the system).

I personally prefer Intel chips, due to Intel's fabrication quality (have seen a fair few amd chips die, not that it really matters though as both Intel/amd's warranties are spot on). Also at the moment due to the power draw of amd chips, go with an i5, with the best price/performance card (amd or nvidia) at the price range you want to spend.
 
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