It's time to upgrade my system, CPU first?

[Kimorished]

My current PC specs:

• 
  ■ AMD Phenom II X6 1090T @ 3.5Ghz
  ■ Asrock 970 Extreme3 mobo
  ■ Sapphire Radeon 7870 XT
  ■ Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3-1600
  ■ OCZ ModxStream Pro 600W PSU

My horrible set of hard drives:

• 
  ■ Samsung HD161HJ
  ■ Samsung HD250HJ
  ■ Samsung HD322GJ
  ■ Western Digital WD10EARS (yes, the 5000rpm one)

I'm mainly using this PC as my work/gaming PC.
For the work part, I'm mostly using Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop and the rest of the Adobe package. It runs fine as is, though I'm not entirely happy with how long some of the processing takes (running that off CPU).

For gaming, I'd like to play most AAA games on at least 45FPS or higher. It was doing a fine job at that a few years ago, though now it's age really shines through in games like AC:Unity.

Now I guess the CPU would be the most logical step to upgrade first.
This month, I have about 150 euro's to spend, so that would be my budget for now.
If it's wise to wait another month, I'd have 300 euro's and so on.

After upgrading the CPU, what would be my next step? I'd love an SSD though it's not really useful to me apart from booting up faster and starting up programs faster and that's not on the top of my list either.

Is my GPU still fine? It's pretty rare nowadays, they weren't produced in huge numbers and it still beats a GTX 760 when running at 1200/1500mhz. Pretty amazing, considering it's a half year older than the 760 and costs 100 euro's less.

 

[CTurbo]

ssds are much more than you think. Adding a ssd to that build would be like a breath of fresh air. Your entire system would feel faster.

In a build like yours, I think the best thing to do is try to sell the whole thing and start over from scratch. You cpu may be 5 years old, but it's not bad. Unfortunately for you, your cpu is still a little stronger than most of the FX cpus. I guess a FX8350 would be a minor upgrade, but I wouldn't bother with it.

 

[Matt Dobe]

I would say CPU first. An 8320 would be a nice cheap upgrade as your mobo supports it. Could overclock it quite easily to match the 8350. Would see a nice increase in rendering times.

Your 7870 is still a decent card so there is no reason to really upgrade it for a while. If you really want top quality 60fps in all games then I recommend investing in a GTX 970 or a r9 290.

 

[Kimorished]

ssds are much more than you think. Adding a ssd to that build would be like a breath of fresh air. Your entire system would feel faster.

In a build like yours, I think the best thing to do is try to sell the whole thing and start over from scratch. You cpu may be 5 years old, but it's not bad. Unfortunately for you, your cpu is still a little stronger than most of the FX cpus. I guess a FX8350 would be a minor upgrade, but I wouldn't bother with it.

But that wouldn't help with the FPS issues, I'm getting 20 average on AC:Unity while a system with a R9 280 averages 30.
And looking at AMD's plans, they're not going to release something like a Steamroller/Excavator FX line anytime soon. So the only option would be Intel and their prices are sky high.

 

[Matt Dobe]

An 8350 would give you about 20% more performance in some games. Mainly because of the higher core clock speed.

Even your GPU is going to limit you in games like AC:Unity as its a poorly optimised port. You would need a 280x at least or 970 to get nice frames at demanding settings. I'm pretty sure the game prefers nvidia gpus too -.-.

 

[maddogfargo]

I'd personally OC the 1090T and upgrade the GPU first.

I've had the 1090T @ 4.0GHz run multithreaded games like Crysis3 very well. It is capable of pushing dual HD 7950's in crossfire to their max potential.

I would definitely upgrade the CPU next though. As others have mentioned, more and more modern games are benefitting from higher core speed and core count on the FX 8 series.

 

[mlga91]

Another GPU like a R9 290 or a 970 will help, that would be first, upgrading to a 8320 will not help too much at all, a better upgrade would be a xeon 1231 v3 or a i5 4570, but that 1090T is still a quite capable CPU, upgrade your GPU and see how well your CPU handles it.

 

[Kimorished]

I was browsing the second hand market and I can get a 7970 really cheap.
So I'm getting that, might crossfire it with the 7870 XT but that's probably only a marginal increase.

So next up is the CPU. Is there even any CPU in my price range that is a lot better? The 1090T was around this price range too in 2010 when I got it, surely there's a better one now for that price?

 

[CTurbo]

An overclocked 1090t would perform similarly to the 8350 in games. The 8350 would obviously have faster render times. The 7970 would be a better upgrade.

Intel's are not that expensive. You could get an i5 4590 for $189 and put it on a $70 H97 motherboard and it would be a HUGE improvement for you. The Xeon e3-1231v3 is $240 if you want i7 performance for rendering and you can put it in that same $70 H97. I don't even recommend overclock Intel. It's just not necessary.