Best upgrade from a AMD Phenom II X4 955BE

[zodiac949]

Hi all,

I'm curious about doing some upgrades for gaming. I want to increase my frames per second with some cost effective upgrades. My current specs:

AMD Phenom II X4 955BE @ 3.2GHz
Corsair H50 cooler
ASrock 970DE3/U3S3 motherboard (AM3+)
8GB G.Skill 1600MHz
Kingston HyperX 160GB
Seagate 7200RPM 500GB
1000W power supply
Galaxy GTX 560Ti 1GB

I'm wondering if making the jump to an AMD FX 8350 will give me any jumps in my frame rates. I could go out and buy a new video card, but I fear I'd be bottlenecking it with my 955BE.

Thanks in advance,

zodiac949

 

[gskill support]

Motherboard and CPU, then GPU are your limiting factors. So you'll want to upgrade those for a significant boost. Changing to FX CPU you will need a better motherboard, and if you change both of those, you may as well move to an Intel i5 and a decent Z97 mobo and that will be a major upgrade.

 

[clutchc]

Your old Phenom II X4 955BE can keep up with faster gfx cards than the GTX 560 Ti. Are you up for OC'ing the Phenom II? If so, you can get quite a bit more life from it with a gfx card upgrade. I have a Ph II X4 965BE @ 4.0 GHz that keeps up with a R9-280 and can play any game at 1080p at max/near max in-game settings.

Having said all that, yes... upgrading to a FX-8350 would be a wise move since you have a good AM3+ board. But it won't make much difference in gaming until you upgrade the gfx card too.

 

[clutchc]

I just realized I may have given you a bum steer. The Asrock board you have may not be suitable for the FX-8350. It is not on the board's CPU support list.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/970DE3U3S3/?cat=CPU
...which is a bit unusual, since other 125W processors are and other FX processor are.

 

[zodiac949]

I just realized I may have given you a bum steer. The Asrock board you have may not be suitable for the FX-8350. It is not on the board's CPU support list.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/970DE3U3S3/?cat=CPU
...which is a bit unusual, since other 125W processors are and other FX processor are.

The board itself has a few things printed on it. "AM3+ 140W CPU" and "Support 8-core CPU".

I appreciate the insight though. I'll look into it some more. I probably will have to replace the motherboard at some point.

 

[clutchc]

I'm sure the board can handle the FX-8350. It's just with no BIOS support, the machine may not recognize the processor.