Looking to upgrade my PC while knowing nothing about upgrading PC's.

[moneyhustard]

Hey guys, so I'm looking to upgrade my budget gaming PC that my friends basically built for me a few years ago. So, this being said I don't really know how to go about it. So I have a AMD Radeon R7 200 series, an AMD Athlon X4 760 Quad Core processor, 8 gigs of ram and an Corsair CX430 power supply all in a mini ITX case, which is kinda small. Im also planning on getting an SSD card if that matters. I would of course like to do it as cheaply as possible but also be able to play BF4 and battlegrounds on pretty good settings. Thanks guys!

 

[Froberg]

Your CPU is fairly old and not a good performer. It's from 2013, and yet my Core i7 2600k from 2011 still beats it down with ease.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+X4+760K+Quad+Core

With 8 gigs of ram and a CX Series power supply, a fairly small one at that, I really can't think of any upgrade path to recommend.

Personally, when I needed to do a system build in the past, when I didn't have much money, I would buy quality base components and upgrade when I could.
Essentially this means getting a quality power supply(PSU is VITAL!), a quality motherboard, memory and CPU. I, for one, am fine with skimping on the GPU if the base system is a good performer.
I built my current system in 2011, as I mentioned, and have upgraded the GPU twice now. Certainly beats getting something mid-range or mediocre with a few years interval.
I know this is not what you want to hear, but honestly I just can't see any worthwhile upgrades there. Pretty sure your CPU would bottleneck most anything.
SSD is a must-have. I recommend you get a small SSD to save money, only keep it for OS, and get a good one-platter hard-drive for your games n' such. I bought a WD Blue which actually outperformed a larger WD Black, due to it's single platter. Now I have gone all-SSD, but you can load games from a normal HDD just fine, might take a few second longer on the load screen, but you won't feel any difference in-game. http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/9072/AMD-Athlontm-X4-760K-Quad-Core-Processor

Suggestions;
Intel CPU, not AMD.
Quality PSU
Performance motherboard, don't skimp here.
RAM - any is fine, you can always switch them out if you want, but usually the price difference is negligible so do what feels best.
As for Graphics, usually AMD is better bang for your buck while on a budget. Otherwise, maybe a Geforce 1060. Try and get something with at least 6 gigs of memory if possible. This is where you can save the real money.
Small SSD for OS (128 gigs is still fine today) with a large single platter hard drive for games-storage.

Any concrete suggestions will require you give an outline of what kind of budget you have available.

 

[fry178]

without knowing what budget/games/resolution your playing, we can only guess...
i think the best upgrade would be a 1060/6gb (the 3gb one is useless, then rather get a amd 480/8gb).

as long as you're playing at higher resolution/ not using a 1080Ti or multi-gpu setup,
amd is faster and cheaper than intel.
at 1080p, recent bios updates improved perf, and cranking up the game/gpu driver settings will lower cpu dependency.

another reason to go with the faster 1060 (maybe 480/8gb), as lots of games start to go towards 3-4gb of vram use,
so to make the build a little more future proof, as it will even allow 1440p and still run cooler/silent using less power than the 480.

make sure to get a zotac amp/msi gaming/asus strix, as they have custom boards/cooling and allow to get the chip to boost to around 2Ghz (by raising temp/power limits)
look for open box/refurb unit at microcenter/amazon..


asrock has the best boards right now, using a bit better quality components (power/vrms) instead of just adding more phases (asus/msi).
if you dont need wifi, you can same a few bucks and get the fatality gaming..


kingston has the best quality ram, but ryzen prefer certain chips right now, so until another bios updates adds more kits, go with geil/gskill.


as the board supports nvme, i prefer a 960 evo, but for now you could get the cheaper crucial mx300 and use it later (when getting faster/larger ssd for OS) as data/game drive.


yeah, dont skimp on the psu. lots of hardware killed by dying power supplies.
evga has the best psus right now, maybe seasonic or corsair, mainly depending on price, as an open box/refurb platinum rated unit might be cheaper than a gold rated new one.


https://pcpartpicker.com/list/8mTgxY

see if you can get an open box/refurb/used one:
picker.com/product/6p8H99/evga-power-supply-220p20650x1