Upgrade from A10 6800k....

Chaos_Theorist

Commendable
Jan 15, 2017
31
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So I'm trying to help my brother upgrade his build to something a little more capable for gaming as it's barely hanging on by a thread. He currently has an A10 6800k, 16gb of ddr3 and using my old gtx 970 reference edition.

We're looking to upgrade the CPU (and the motherboard, obviously). We are definitely on a budget...so the goal is to find the best deal that isn't part of some weekly bargain or something, as it might be a few weeks before we make the purchase. We'd like to reuse the RAM, so want to stay DDR3. Don't mind staying on the AMD side...bottom line is we just want the best deal we can find between 200 and at the most 300 bucks. He will be upgrading to something like a 1050 or 1060 soon, so preferably a CPU that will compliment that card and not bottleneck.

I know it's a horribly optimized example, but he's getting 10-30 fps in Battlegrounds, and his goal is a steady 40-60 (which the 970 should be more than capable of in my experience)

BTW it's the TA75MH2 Motherboard, so I believe it's a MicroATX sized case.
 
Solution
Going from a GTX 970 to a GTX1050 or 1050Ti wouldn't be an upgrade at all. Even a GTX 1060 3GB or a RX480 4GB would only be a marginal (~10%) upgrade. For ~300$, you might be able to pair a 6th or 7th gen i5 with a motherboard that still uses DDR3.

Maybe something like this:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6400 2.7GHz Quad-Core Processor ($231.75 @ Vuugo)
Motherboard: Asus B150M-A D3 Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($86.00 @ Vuugo)
Total: $317.75
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-04-17 03:54 EDT-0400

It might not be the best performance per dollar, unless you are willing to...

LowlySkeleton

Reputable
Aug 5, 2015
235
1
4,860
Going from a GTX 970 to a GTX1050 or 1050Ti wouldn't be an upgrade at all. Even a GTX 1060 3GB or a RX480 4GB would only be a marginal (~10%) upgrade. For ~300$, you might be able to pair a 6th or 7th gen i5 with a motherboard that still uses DDR3.

Maybe something like this:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6400 2.7GHz Quad-Core Processor ($231.75 @ Vuugo)
Motherboard: Asus B150M-A D3 Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($86.00 @ Vuugo)
Total: $317.75
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-04-17 03:54 EDT-0400

It might not be the best performance per dollar, unless you are willing to shell out a little more for the cpu to go for something like a i5-6500 or 6600.
 
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