Upgrading from amd a8-5500 apu

[postal_service]

Hello! I currently am running with a very old desktop that uses what I believe is a gpu and cpu combined, the amd a8-5500 apu. Since 2015-2016 newer games have really been giving me trouble and or are unplayable (fallout 4, overwatch, witcher 3) My question, and this may sound dumb so I apologize. If my chip is an apu, and I want to replace it would I need to get both a gpu and cpu? Also, would it be more or less beneficial to just get a newer better apu instead.

If anybody has any recommendations or if you need anymore information from me this is all im doing this weekend. I plan on getting new parts for this I just have no clue what to get. I dont exactly have the cash to just buy a new system.

Thanks in advance !

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Found some useful info: http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c03499587 This is my exact computer and a link to all of its specs, hope it helps!

 

[Ecky]

Depending on your motherboard, you might have some minor drop-in upgrade options, but frankly the FM2 socket is not going to offer you much. You have two options:

1) Drop in a GPU and call it a day. You'll see greatly improved performance in most games.

2) Upgrade CPU + motherboard + add a GPU + maybe replace RAM too, depending on which CPU/board you choose

AMD's CPU single-threaded performance hasn't improved much since around 2009, and multithreaded, since 2012 (they doubled the number of cores in the FX CPUs). Your CPU might cause degraded performance in some of the games you play when compared with a recent Intel CPU, but you'll definitely still see an improvement from a GPU upgrade regardless of whether or not you change out your CPU.

About how much are you looking to spend? In the $175 range, the R9 380 is a good buy and offers much better performance than the similarly priced nVidia GTX 960, but AMD's GPU drivers are much less forgiving of weak CPUs. nVidia has some decent values in the GTX 750 Ti/GTX 950 (closer to $100), and in the GTX 970 (closer to $300).

 

[postal_service]

Depending on your motherboard, you might have some minor drop-in upgrade options, but frankly the FM2 socket is not going to offer you much. You have two options:

1) Drop in a GPU and call it a day. You'll see greatly improved performance in most games.

2) Upgrade CPU + motherboard + add a GPU + maybe replace RAM too, depending on which CPU/board you choose

AMD's CPU single-threaded performance hasn't improved much since around 2009, and multithreaded, since 2012 (they doubled the number of cores in the FX CPUs). Your CPU might cause degraded performance in some of the games you play when compared with a recent Intel CPU, but you'll definitely still see an improvement from a GPU upgrade regardless of whether or not you change out your CPU.

About how much are you looking to spend? In the $175 range, the R9 380 is a good buy and offers much better performance than the similarly priced nVidia GTX 960, but AMD's GPU drivers are much less forgiving of weak CPUs. nVidia has some decent values in the GTX 750 Ti/GTX 950 (closer to $100), and in the GTX 970 (closer to $300).

Thanks for narrowing it down first of all, its complicated for me to fighure out if I needed to replace just the cpu and gpu, or one or the other. For price im around $300 right now but I want to spend more on it later, so would dropping in the gpu then upgrading the cpu + motherboard later make sense?

Lastly if I can just upgrade it with a gpu, will it matter which one goes in? (power supply wise) I checked the serial number on the side of my desktop and couldn't really get and idea of how much I was working with.

 

[Ecky]

Right now, AMD and nVidia are in the process of releasing their next generation of GPUs, after the first die shrink in close to 5 years (when it used to be every 1.5-2 years). I'm not completely up-to-date on what's being released when, but a GPU upgrade is reasonable to do now, seeing as you'll probably get more mileage from it. You might want to hit up the GPU forum for a better recommendation than I can give, in the context of what's coming out soon.

The CPU landscape probably isn't going to change much any time soon. AMD's Zen is schedule to come out sometime in 2017, but there's relatively little info on it, and Intel has been making modest ~5% improvements year after year. Whatever you buy in a year will be very marginally better than what you get now, and cost about the same.