Some good upgrades for my system?

[ElectricWizard]

Say I were to come into a bit of money, and would like to upgrade my system. What would be the components I should purchase?

Here is my current setup:

AMD A10-5800K 3.8GHz Quad-Core
ASRock FM2A75 Pro4 ATX FM2
Mushkin Blackline 16GB DDR3-1600
Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM
Sapphire Radeon HD 7750 1GB
Corsair 500W ATX12V

I mainly use my computer for distributed computing (which I find to be very important), playing media files downloaded via torrenting, and mining bitcoin. Any help would be appreciated!

 

[FreezeRay]

Your system is pretty respectable as of right now, to be honest. Unless you plan on doing some light to moderate gaming, you are honestly pretty set. If you do decide to upgrade to a newer card, say an R7 or R9 series, you will need a new PSU because 500W won't cut it. Depending upon the required power, you would need 750-1000W to power everything. If you do decide to upgrade your graphics card/PSU, use http://images10.newegg.com/BizIntell/tool/psucalc/index.html?name=Power-Supply-Wattage-Calculator to determine your total wattage, that will help you select the right PSU power.

 

[camohanna]

500w from Corsair is plenty for a mid-range card. With his cpu, i would only recommend getting a R9 270X / GTX 760 at the maximum before the cpu bottlenecks.

Sounds like you mainly do cpu intensive tasks. Depending on the money you have to spend, you could upgrade to an i5/i7 + SSD

 

[madmatt30]

If bitcoin mining is important then a r9 280/285/280x is the sensible choice - a cx500 WILL run these cards without a problem

 

[ElectricWizard]

500w from Corsair is plenty for a mid-range card. With his cpu, i would only recommend getting a R9 270X / GTX 760 at the maximum before the cpu bottlenecks.

Sounds like you mainly do cpu intensive tasks. Depending on the money you have to spend, you could upgrade to an i5/i7 + SSD

If I were to upgrade to an i5 or i7, I would need a new motherboard, correct?