What to upgrade?

[AlbanHampton]

This probably isn't under the right category but I have recently built a computer and I was wondering what should be upgraded first?

Specs
Intel i3 2120 3.30GHz
Sapphire Radeon HD 7770
8GB 1333MHz RAM
500GB Western Digital HDD
Gigabyte H16M-DS2 Motherboard
Alpine 700W PSU


I want this computer to be for gaming, when I built it i was on a tight budget, but now I can upgrade, so in what order do I upgrade? And what should I upgrade to?

 

[swifty_morgan]

budget/monitor size-res/games/

 

[huilun02]

What's your budget? You might be able to upgrade more than one component. What games will you be playing and at what monitor resolution?

 

[AlbanHampton]

Pritty much all games, for example, the upcoming Battlefield, Call of Duty, Crysis 3 ECT
And the resolution i'm running at the moment is 1920x1080

 

[AlbanHampton]

And I'm not sure of the budget, I want it to be cheap as possible, but with decent FPS. Don't get me wrong, my computer is giving me some good FPS at the moment..

 

[huilun02]

Get a HD 7870 XT or LE. It will give you fantastic performance at 1080p, with a price hard to beat at that level.

If you can't afford it here are some alternatives from worst to best:
GTX 650 Ti Boost > HD 7870 > HD 7870 OC/Ghz

After that you can upgrade to a better CPU, an i5-3350P or i5-3570K

 

[AlbanHampton]

Thank you, do I not need to upgrade the motherboard? And is 8GB RAM sufficient enough?

 

[huilun02]

Yes you can upgrade to a Z77 motherboard, but you gain most benefit from a better graphics card and CPU, so get those first.

The ASRock Z77 Extreme4-M is great value for a gaming performance board
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157294

Or if you have the space for a full sized ATX board, you can get its big brother counterpart (which strangely, is cheaper)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157293

Your RAM is already DDR3 and you have 8GB of it. RAM quantity is most important and 8GB is more than sufficient for heavy usage and gaming. Upgrading it means getting higher Mhz sticks which will give you close to no benefit as compared to the above parts.

 

[swifty_morgan]

spend money on the video card first. the board is the last thing I would mess with. you'll be core/thread bound ( cpu ) before the board comes into effect.