Need some advice on upgrading

[Jgro1413]

Hello everyone!

So Currently my pc build is as follows:
-AMD Athlon X4 860K Kaveri Quad-Core 3.7 GHz
- 8 Gigs of Ram
-Rosewill 500-Watt Power Supply
-XFX R7 360 2 Gigs GPU

I'm looking to get smoother fps and jsut better overall gaming quality so I can record in-game on Ark Survival Evolved and I was wondering which components I should upgrade first in order to achieve this. I was going to upgrade the processor to an AMD 8 core but then I would have to upgrade my mobo and psu as well so that would be alot of money. So my options at the moment are upgrade my GPU to something like the r9 380 4 gigs or upgrade my Mobo, Psu, and CPU while keeping the same GPU. Which do you guys think would be a better option for me? I appreciate the opinions, thanks.

 

[badboyrog2]

try to sell your actual rig and go intel setup

 

[S8ANisF8AL]

try to sell your actual rig and go intel setup

Unless I'm missing something he may be right...to an extent. You don't HAVE to go intel as you can get decent result for everything you want to do with a good AMD CPU. The big kicker in what you said you wanted to do was record your gameplay. I'm sure if you want to record it then you're going to want to upload the video to youtube or the like, which means you're going to be doing some video editing.

If it wasn't for that you could get away with a minor CPU upgrade, but note that not upgrading the CPU and putting in a GPU that's stronger than the one you have could bottleneck the performance of the new GPU.

My suggestion is to work with what you have now while you save up money for a complete system overhaul. You're going to get smoother gameplay (which factors into your recording quality), and with the right CPU at the helm, video editing won't be a pain.

 

[Redneck5439]

If you can hold off on your upgrade I would also suggest waiting. As was said just upgrading your GPU is more than likely going to result in a bottleneck and although you could go with a budget AMD or Intel motherboard processor and psu now it may be better to wait just a little bit longer. End of next year Zen and Kaby Lake are set to debut. For Intel its not such a big deal, they roll out new processors all the time, but for AMD it is a huge deal. Zen should bring AMD back into the high end world of gaming and computing and if it actually lives up to expectations it may drive down the price of all current AMD 8 core and older Haswell / Broadwell Intel processors. In the end you will either be able to get a much better deal on an existing processor or you could even step up to Zen or Kaby Lake and really have a cutting edge system.

If you just can't wait and have to upgrade sooner than that I would suggest looking at budget minded AMD 970 boards and FX 6300, or FX 8320 processors. There are also some good deals on budget Intel boards and Haswell i5 processors. It wouldn't hurt to check out the sales on newegg or even better visit your local MicroCenter (if there is one near you) and see what deals (or combo deals) they are having. I bought my FX 8370 when it first released at a MicroCenter for $150 when everywhere else they wanted $200 for the same thing. Really if you can though your best bet is to wait and see what the release of Zen does to the processor market as a whole. If AMD Zen can truly challenge Intel it may drive all the older processors down in price by a good deal.