cpu and gpu for 4K

[vingtsang]

Hello,
I Have an old pc with a gigabyte ga-880ga-ud3h mobo. My cpu and gpu are completely outdated. I mainly do desktop work and watch videos on youtube or watch predowloaded content. I sometimes play non competitive leagues of legends. That's about it. I would like to know if there is a combination of am3+ cpu and any gpu that would enable me to do what those things on a 4k monitor or am I just better off buying into a new intel PC. Thank you!

 

[Aeacus]

At current date, you'll fare much better with Intel CPU than AMD CPU.
Currently, AMD's best CPU for gaming, FX-8350 (released in 2012) is slightly worse than the Intel's latest Skylake family i3-6100 (released in 2015) that is considered entry-level/ low-end CPU at current date.
comparison: http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-FX-8350-vs-Intel-Core-i3-6100/1489vs3511
And some further reading: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-cpus,3986.html

For 4K gaming, the best GPU would be Nvidia Titan X Pascal.
Further reading: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gpus,4380.html

If you want to go with AMD CPU, i suggest you wait for 2 to 3 months until the AMD releases their ZEN architecture CPUs. At about the same time, Nvidia is releasing it's GTX 1080 Ti that supposedly performs about the same as Titan X Pascal while costing considerably less.

 

[0451]

What's your budget and do you care about max settings at 4 k? When do you plan on purchasing and how long can you wait?

 

[vingtsang]

Thank you for your answers, I decided to go with an intel setup, I found some good deals for the black friday weekend. I bought an Intel i5-6600k and a ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 motherboard with 16 GB of ram. I think I'll wait a bit for the GPU, since I'm not planning on using max settings, I think I'll wait for the gtx 1070 to get a little cheaper. I'm just looking to get a middle of the road build.

 

[Aeacus]

For medium-end gaming PC you're looking at i5-6500, H or B-series MoBo and GTX 1060 3GB which does high/ultra settings at 1080p.
What you currently have is a high-end gaming/ OC PC. Add GTX 1070 and you can do high/ultra at 1440p and medium/high at 4K.
Note, you can't do SLI on ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 Gaming K4 MoBo since the MoBo doesn't support SLI.

 

[vingtsang]

I don't need SLi because I'm not planning on having either more than one gpu or a dual chip gpu but thanks for the heads up. Maybe I went a little overboard for my needs then. I have another question though, what kind of impact will it have if use my 6 year old hard drive instead of using a SSD.

 

[Aeacus]

There is quite a big difference both in read and write speeds. Most systems use SSD as a system disk (OS) and HDD as a storage.

Here's a good and short video for you to see about SSD vs HDD speeds,
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j84eEjP-RL4