Upgrade AMD A4-7300 APU

[XxGFTWxZOMBIE]

I want to upgrade my AMD A4-7300 APU CPU without swapping out my motherboard or power supply. Any recommendations would be helpful??

 

[krzyimprt]

I want to upgrade my AMD A4-7300 APU CPU without swapping out my motherboard or power supply. Any recommendations would be helpful??

Hard to tell as I don't know what your motherboard is. It's a FM2 CPU. You really won't gain much by upgrading as you won't see much benefit due to AMD's weaker cores. Depends on what you'll be doing with the PC.

 

[spdragoo]

Like @krzyimprt said, it all depends on what your motherboard can handle, not just in the socket type (i.e. FM2 vs. FM2+), but in terms of what CPUs are officially supported (i.e. some motherboards might only accept the 65W chips, while some can go all the way to 100W).

That being said, an A4-7300 is kind of weak, being a dual-core chip (or, more technically, a 1C/2T CPU). So there are plenty of 2C/4T options you might have:
-- If your motherboard will only accept Socket FM2 chips, then at the least you should be able to go up to an A8-6500 or A10-6700. Although slightly slower (3.5GHz base for the A8 & 3.7GHz for the A10), their boost clocks are right on target with your current chip, & you'll gain the extra core/threads. If you can go full-power, I would go for the A8-6600K or A10-6800K, as they have higher base clocks & the option to potentially overclock.
-- If your motherboard can handle Socket FM2+ chips, at the very least go for the A10-7860K (comparable to the A8-6500, but uses the later Jaguar microarchitecture) if you're limited to 65W CPUs, or the A10-7850K/7890K CPUs if you can go full power.
-- If you're willing to consider buying a discrete GPU, you could also consider getting one of the Athlon X4 chips instead of an A8 or A10 chip. They're cheaper because the integrated graphics are disabled, but they provide the same CPU power. The X4 750 (65W) or 760K (100W) work for FM2 boards, with the X4 840 (65W) or 860K/870K/880K (95W) working for FM2+ boards.

The nice thing is that they're pretty significant CPU improvements. You currently have an 8th-tier CPU -- roughly equivalent to the very old Core 2 Duo chips & the dual-Core Pentiums based on the Core 2 Duos -- but going to these alternatives boosts you up to 5th- or even 4th-tier (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html).

 

[Dooop805]

I still have an a4 7300 laying around somewhere, I upgraded to a a10 6800k. But if you use dedicated graphics 860/880k is essentially the same thing without the graphics cores. so its cheaper...