Upgrading PC

[ceej010]

Hey, looking to upgrade some components for >$400. Thanks!

Power Supply: Corsair CMPSU-750TX 750-Watt TX Series 80 Plus Certified Power Supply
Memory: Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D Dominator 6 GB 3 x 2 GB PC3-12800 1600MHz 240-Pin DDR3
Processor: Phenom II X4 965 Black AM3 3.4Ghz 512KB 45NM 125W 4000MHZ
DVD Drive: Lite-On LightScribe 24X SATA DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Drive IHAS424-98 - Retail (Black)
Motherboard: ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 - AM3 - AMD 890GX - DDR3 - USB 3.0 SATA 6 Gb/s - ATX Motherboard
Case: Antec Nine Hundred Steel ATX Ultimate Gamer PC Case (Black)
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1 GB GDDR5 Video Card 100314SR
SSD: Intel 80 GB X25M Mainstream SATA II Solid-State Drive (SSD)
Cooler: Corsair Liquid CPU Cooler H60
HD: Random 2TB HD

 

[Sunius]

Hey there! What is the main use for you PC? Gaming? 3D Modelling? Video editing, maybe? Also, which country are you from?

P. S. Did you mean upgrade for <$400 (As in less than $400)?

 

[simon12]

If you are at 4GHz on a 965 I suggest get a graphics card and 2x4Gb RAM to run in dual channel the 3rd stick could be hindering performance as it should run in Dual channel. Maybe get a new CPU later after Haswell has been released.

 

[ceej010]

I'm from the US and yeah, I meant less than $400. I use it primarily for gaming but also do some digital art/modeling and video editing. I also wondered about the 3 sticks instead of 2 but I'm not an expert.

 

[lostgamer_03]

Your CPU is fairly weak. It might sound great with a quad-core CPU with high clockspeeds, but it's just not about that, the architecture means a lot too.

I know that it's only an 955 in this benchmark, but the performance isn't much different.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/far-cry-3-performance-benchmark,review-32584-7.html

Maybe you should start by updating your MOBO to an Intel socket 1155 a B75 or a Z77 and add an i5-3570 or an i5-3570k depending on if you want to overclock. Then you could get a little more money, sell your old GPU and get a new one later on. You could also do the opposite and start by the GPU, but that is more up to you. I believe starting to upgrade the GPU will give a little better performance boost, but will be bottlnecked by your CPU, so will the new CPU by your current GPU, but still the advantage of upgrading the GPU first will be the biggest.

 

[Sunius]

I would personally go for a graphics card upgrade. Something like GTX 670 and exchanging RAM for dual channel setup would be perfect (as Simon said, 2x4GB).

 

[HEXiT]

1 light scribe drives are garbage. especialy lite-on 1s.
2 get 8 gigs of ram on 2x4 gig sticks. amd cpus only use dual channel.
3 dont bother getting 1600mhz the cpu mmu can only use 1333 max b4 you see no improvement in performance. buying faster ram than your cpu handles nativley is a total waste of cash and often you will get less perfomance due to higher latencies. so buy 1333 cas 7 or better if you can.
4 forget the ssd until you can afford 250gigs. its just to small to be effective on a gaming system.
better to get 2x1tb hdds and raid 0 them i have this kind of setup and its more effective than a small ssd as i dont have to remove stuff constantly to put new stuff on... i have it partitiond 500gig for the primary boot and the rest is just fast storage... currently i get an average of 180MBps and a max of 250MBps which aint to shy of the average 250MBps most low end ssd's give
end result more storage and almost as fast load speeds of games and other software.(although the o.s does take 45 seconds to boot compared to 15 on an ssd)