Question regarding PC Upgrades

[Bausshackah]

Hey people, so I saved up some money and decided to spend it on upgrading my pc. Question is, should I buy a new graphics card or something else? I want to make my pc better so I can play some of the newer games, as a matter of fact I wanted to order radeon r9 280x or the nvidia geforce 970 gtx, but deciding which graphics card I should buy is the last thing I worry about. What concerns me is if I am doing the right thing by spending like 250 euros on graphics card, my pc has 6 GB ram, AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.00 ghz proccessor, geforce 520 GT. So my question is, if I for example buy radeon r9 280x am I goin to be able to play let's say GTA 5 on ultra without lagging, only new graphics card that is. Or is it better to buy a completely new 200 euro worth gaming motherboard with onboard graphics card, I can't seem to decide I hope that you can help. Thanks.

 

[cosmoji]

onboard graphics will certainly not handle that. for that kind of gaming you must have a discrete graphics card. without researching it, i dont know if you're going to be bottlenecking a new gpu's performance, but i can offer you these three nuggets of advice.

1) you will pretty much always benefit more from a gpu upgrade than any other component when it comes to gaming performance. by far.

2) you can always take the new gpu in to a new system if you need to upgrade the rest of the components as well, or if you decide to upgrade them anyway at a later date.

3) your real question here is if your current cpu/mobo can handle modern gaming. you should be looking up if it meets the requirements of the games you are looking for. if not, you will need a whole new system. not just the gpu.

try starting with this
http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri
to decide if you want to upgrade the whole system, or just the gpu.

 

[Calvin7]

AMD Athlon II X4 640 - Score 3355
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+II+X4+640

AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core - Score 8971
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-8350+Eight-Core

GTA 5 PC system requirements
Recommended Specs
•Processor: AMD X8 FX-8350 @ 4GHZ (8 CPUs)

AMD Athlon II X4 640 doesn't come close to the recommended hardware to play that game, although it does meet minimum requirements.

 

[Poozle]

Here is my question, how much money have you saved up?
Is your memory DDR3?
Do you have a hard drive connected by Sata?
Could you re use your old power supply and case? You may not ahve a good enough power supply if this was a prebuilt system for either of those graphics cards or any of the new ones. please reply fast. I can probably help you pick out some new components for an entire new build.
Here are some other answers,
A CPU can bottleneck your GPU (doesnt matter which GPU if its a new one.) and no matter how nice of one you get, it will be capped around a certain Frame rate. My reccomendation would be Get a new CPU, GPU, Motherboard, Power supply. You may be able to re use some of the RAM, the case, your hard drive and Windows. This could save you some money. Where do you live? Have you tried PCPartPicker? they are a great website that finds the lowest prices on computer parts near you and ensures that they are all compatible.
Do you know if your computer case is M-ATX, or ATX size?
Are you willing to wait until January or maybe as late as March for a new GPU? a new line of GPUs are coming out offering up to 10 times the performance (realistically about 2.5X the performance but that is still INSANE!)
Here is a link to about a 400$ USD build not including Hard drive, Windows, or case. You do get a GTX 960 which I would Rather have over a 970. you also get a dual core Intel i3 Which you could get a quad core for about 50$ more. I would take the quad core over the 970 any day. Here are my computer specs. I build desktops for fun an d have made about 25 over 2 years. Hope this helps.