Upgrade for $350

[Coen010]

Hi guys,

I have 350 dollars amazon credits,
My specs,
AMD fx-6350 stock cooler
2GB icidu ram
650W Antec Neopower
NZXT h440
Asrock 970 extreme3 r2.0 mobo
Asus GTX 560 TI
Samsung Evo 850 120GB ssd
and a HDD 250G
What should i upgrade?



Edit:
id like to play the witcher series in the future on 1080p or lower. (Forgot the resolution)

 

[fudgecakes99]

gpu
350 will get you a 390 or a 970.

 

[Chettone]

Stock cooler for starters and replacing your RAM.
With that you can get some improvements in your performance with a few bucks, but if you want to make a significant upgrade I think you should sell and replace other expensive components such as GPU and CPU.

 

[fudgecakes99]

either one of those will work with a 650 watt psu. Both are good graphics cards, though the 390 does perform slightly better. It also uses more wattage then a 970. If you plan on overclocking go 970 it will overclock better on the account of better power management. But the 390 does have 8 gigs of gddr5 while the 970 has 3.5 gigs. Meaning the 390 will perform better at higher resolutions. Higher then 1080p that is. So it comes down to whether or not you play more nvidia optimized games or amd optimized games. Or generally personal preference.

 

[royalcrown]

What OS are you using or want to use, are you gonna go to 10 ? I'd say more ram no matter what you do, 2 is low for antyhing nowadays and even going 4 you'll get a large boost in system performance and less waiting.

 

[fudgecakes99]

wow i didn't see that buy 8 gigs of ram, then a 290 with your left over money you should see a dramatic increase in using programs and gaming.

 

[atheus]

RAM would be the first thing I'd look at. 8GB is pretty much the minimum today, and 16GB is a normal number. After that I'd sniff at the GTX 970. You might be able to get both.

From another perspective, though, you could hang onto those 350 bucks and put them toward a 100x better Sky Lake build in a month or two. That much cash could nab you a top notch CPU and motherboard. You'd probably need to dip into your wallet for memory, though.

 

[fudgecakes99]

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Memory: Crucial 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($37.49 @ SuperBiiz)
Video Card: Zotac GeForce GTX 970 4GB Video Card ($309.99 @ B&H)
Total: $347.48
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-08-02 23:20 EDT-0400

This should be within your budget and you should see drastic improvement with gameplay and multi tasking.

 

[royalcrown]

No way to get a whole skylake build for that @ $350, especially when it just comes out, but It'd be a nice chunk to start with.

RAM would be the first thing I'd look at. 8GB is pretty much the minimum today, and 16GB is a normal number. After that I'd sniff at the GTX 970. You might be able to get both.

From another perspective, though, you could hang onto those 350 bucks and put them toward a 100x better Sky Lake build in a month or two. That much cash could nab you a top notch CPU and motherboard. You'd probably need to dip into your wallet for memory, though.

 

[atheus]

No way to get a whole skylake build for that @ $350, especially when it just comes out, but It'd be a nice chunk to start with.

From another perspective, though, you could hang onto those 350 bucks and put them toward a 100x better Sky Lake build in a month or two. That much cash could nab you a top notch CPU and motherboard. You'd probably need to dip into your wallet for memory, though.

I wasn't suggesting he could get an entire Sky Lake PC built on $350. He could easily buy a CPU and motherboard, though, possibly memory too depending on what he likes. The rest could be stripped from his old computer, and then he would have a Sky Lake PC.

Down the road he'd probably want to pick up a nicer GPU to go with the sweet CPU though.

 

[Coen010]

I was thinking about a 500gb samsung ssd for 177 and the nzxt kraken x61 plus 8gb of ram

 

[Coen010]

I think im getting the gtx 970 for my birthday. So any other upgrades??
My theme is mostly blue with black.

 

[atheus]

Upgrading your CPU cooler doesn't really do you any good unless you're planning on increasing your overclock, or your current overclock is yielding unacceptable temps/noise.

The SSD upgrade is probably one that would be on my list if I were on a 120GB SSD (I was for a while years back). Annoying having to jockey games around among my drives. 250GB HDD is pretty tight, too. A nice 3TB+ drive would probably be my next pick after the SSD if I were upgrading storage.

 

[fudgecakes99]

if you're already getting the 970 then ram and an ssd as atheus said. should seen an improvement in loading times and overall multi tasking performance.

 

[Coen010]

Thank you for your very kind answer, and should i buy the nzxt kraken x61?
And is it silent?

 

[fudgecakes99]

I wouldn't put those sticks together. Mixing and matching ram sticks is a bad idea. Buy the 8gb of baltack but don't just throw 2 sticks of whatever random ram you have together with it. It either won't work properly it'll mess with the timings or a host of other issues will plague your system.