$200 cpu or gpu upgrade

[vipperstrike]

I have
g3258 @ 4.2 ghz had a bad chip took 1.6 vcore to get it stable and boot and runs 60c with a antec freezer i11
radeon hd 6950 1 gb
evga 500w
8 gb of ram (2x2gb 1x4gb)
500 gb hdd internal, 500 gb external

According to PassMark my cpu benched at 4,632 and gpu benched at 3,462, I can't decide what to upgrade first. I know I'm getting held back on both but will only have enough for 1 option right now. I was going to get a I7 4790k and wait on a 970 or 300 series for benchmarks to see if it was hype, but my car needed some tires and had to spend the money so now cpu don't feel as important in comparison. My budget is $200 and be within 2 weeks on next paycheck

 

[TechyInAZ]

Defiantly your GPU. Your OCed CPU should be fine for now.

Buy the GTX 960.

 

[J_Villasenor]

We have similar builds, man.
Except that your GPU is weaker, so do get a GPU.

Just worried that the GTX 960 might get bottlenecked though. As far as I know the GTX 770 is the safe spot for the G3258 OCed.

 

[Bossyfins]

A 280x would be a nice upgrade to what you have now, but I am worried by your PSU

 

[vipperstrike]

I checked the 280x on outervisions psu calculator with no dvd drive, 1 hdd, 5 usb and 3 120mm fans (external portable hdd be considered as usb right) 10% cap aging I get 443w minimum 493w recommended. With no cap aging 403w minimum 453 w recommended. Everything else I tried went over 500w recomended. I guess it be ok short term but I would defently have to upgrade the psu in a month max to a 600w psu so I could not worry about a psu problem looking at mine in comparison a gtx 960 is 62% better and 280x is 78% better to me a gtx 960 would be better

 

[gerr]

The Nvidia GTX 900 series tend to have lower power requirements than the AMD R9 series.

 

[vipperstrike]

The only reason I looked into that 280x is my motherboard supports crossfire but not sli. The only other viable option where I don't have to get a new psu is a 270x but alone it's hardly an upgrade but a new psu and crossfire it would beat a 960 later but that's about $300 and I don't think that it could stack up to a single 970 even if the 270x is 4gb I could be wrong though, but then I have to wait on crossfire driver fixes.