Question on necessity of CPU upgrade

[minedwiz]

I've been running an AMD FX-6300 with a Radeon HD 7870 since May 2013. I'm looking to upgrade the graphics card to a GTX 960. My question is whether or not I should first upgrade to an Intel-based system - most likely one of the Haswell refresh i5 or i7 chips (I would benefit from the hyperthreading of the i7 as a programmer - 6 threads v. 4 was one of the reasons I chose the 6300 in the first place over an i5 and a cheaper graphics card). I haven't had any CPU-related problems in either gaming or development yet (even less so in recent games like W3 and DA:I that are happy to multithread), but I do know that the 6300 was hardly the most beefy CPU in the world when I got it, and it's over three years old now.

 

[Rogue Leader]

If it plays the games you want to play as well as you'd like and runs the programs you want it to run the way you want to run them, why upgrade? Save your money and wait a year or two for one of the upcoming advances (ie Zen, Skylake, etc)

 

[minedwiz]

If it plays the games you want to play as well as you'd like and runs the programs you want it to run the way you want to run them, why upgrade? Save your money and wait a year or two for one of the upcoming advances (ie Zen, Skylake, etc)

It's true, and thanks for the swift reply. I mainly wanted to make sure I wasn't doing anything stupid.

 

[Rogue Leader]

If it plays the games you want to play as well as you'd like and runs the programs you want it to run the way you want to run them, why upgrade? Save your money and wait a year or two for one of the upcoming advances (ie Zen, Skylake, etc)

It's true, and thanks for the swift reply. I mainly wanted to make sure I wasn't doing anything stupid.

I'm in the same spot. Built my PC in mid 2011, my GPU was weak, so I upgraded it (ridiculously - 2 R9 280's in crossfire), it plays anything I throw at it, runs any program, encodes videos, compiles software, etc all as good as I want, so I keep thinking hmm maybe upgrade? But why, I just don't see the performance difference being worth $1000-$2000 out of pocket right now. Would rather wait till it completely sucks and can't play what I want to and then upgrade. By then my $2000 will get me way more than it will now.

Back in the 90's a 4 year old PC would be like SOOO SLOW with everything, these days its just not the case anymore.

 

[minedwiz]

If it plays the games you want to play as well as you'd like and runs the programs you want it to run the way you want to run them, why upgrade? Save your money and wait a year or two for one of the upcoming advances (ie Zen, Skylake, etc)

It's true, and thanks for the swift reply. I mainly wanted to make sure I wasn't doing anything stupid.

I'm in the same spot. Built my PC in mid 2011, my GPU was weak, so I upgraded it (ridiculously - 2 R9 280's in crossfire), it plays anything I throw at it, runs any program, encodes videos, compiles software, etc all as good as I want, so I keep thinking hmm maybe upgrade? But why, I just don't see the performance difference being worth $1000-$2000 out of pocket right now. Would rather wait till it completely sucks and can't play what I want to and then upgrade. By then my $2000 will get me way more than it will now.

Back in the 90's a 4 year old PC would be like SOOO SLOW with everything, these days its just not the case anymore.

That's true. I honestly thought I'd have to upgrade well before now. Especially when I saw my 7870 be listed as a minimum spec card on Witcher 3, but it's held up well. Still about time, though.

 

[atf_mart]

If anything upgrade to fx 8350 or r9 390 gpu, other than that it would be a waste of money, I made the mistake of "upgrading" to an i5 4570k, and while I got more frames in some games it was definitely not cost effective, specially when I got 20 extra frames that my monitor does not even use, eg 100 fps to 120 fps lol on a 60hz monitor, so save your money, upgrade your psu or get an ssd