Okay so I'm at a debacle some help. So right now with my current rig I can play all of my games. I play bf4 at 2560x1600 but at maximum low settings, with everything off. (40-75fps) The games I want to get or are waiting for release are: Arma 3, Rainbow 6 Siege and The division, project cars and possibly Hard lines. I want to be able to play theses games with some settings on and turned up. I don't want to break the bank but I know I need to upgrade to do what I want. my question is should I just up my current pc with a SSD, up the ram size (gig), and possible get the gtx 980, 970 or titan. Or should I build a new pc and new mobo, ddr3/4 and cpu but keep the current video card.
If it was a choice of only upgrading the gpu or the cpu and mobo, you'd get a lot more of a performance boost out of getting a new gpu like the 970. However, you could try going the second hand way and upgrade both. For instance, there's are currently a gtx 680 classifieds in the marketplace available for 150, which will offer a massive performance increase on you current card. If you put up a wanted thread for a cpu, mobo and ram bundle, you'd probably be able to get something pretty decent for £150-200.
hi i would either get a complete cheaper 1155 system and a 970 eg a 3570k with mobo some ddr3 at least 8gb at least a 120ssd and 1tb drive
Rocking the DDR2! Spending money on that rig is like spraying perfume on a pig. So the question is what can you buy now that'll remain useful with future upgrades. The clear winner would be the GPU. Upgrade to a GTX 970 then the components around that can be updated as and when.
The Q6600 even clocked will bottleneck a 970 quite badly in certain games (BF4 multiplayer IIRC is hard on the CPU) but you will obviously see a massive performance boost from your current setup. Honestly it depends on how much you want to spend now and what you want from it. If you just want a quick boost and arn't too worried that you are getting 100% from the card then a new cheap 970 would be a good bet (or heck a used 780/290 would also be worth a look at around £200). If however you want to get the maximum out of a new GPU then you are going to have to overhaul the entire system. If it was me I would do the latter, perhaps with an interim £100 upgrade on the GPU to tide me over (say a 7970/670/760 etc).
Okay so I'm limited to just micro atx, I was looking into CPU's and mobos. I really want my next build to just be amd (CPU GPU RAM MOBO). I know people, Intel may be better but this also a budget build I dont want to spend $1500 on a new rig. I was looking into the AMD CPU 7850k (4cpu + 8 GPU) and the athlon 860k (quad core). If I was to use the 7850k with the apu and have a dedicated GPU would i get any benefits? or does it just APU just turn off and run the D-GPU. What one would you choose the 7850k or the 860k? and another thing I can assume I will get some FPS over my current CPU? Like I could build a new pc all AMD for about $600 and i know i could run with the settings turned up.
Realistically a AMD Kaveri APU isn't much of an improvement from a well clocked Q6600 (IIRC IPC is similar but the APU is clocked higher). It will be a bit quicker but it will still bottleneck a high end GPU. As an example I ran a 290X for a while on a clocked Athlon 760K. I had thought that running Eyefinity I would not be CPU limited at all due to the massive GPU limitation you normally see with very high resolutions. Crysis 3 proved me (very) wrong with the CPU maxing out at 100% CPU load whilst the game stuttered all over the place. Other games were fine but I always had a nagging feeling that future games would cause an issue. Honestly I would put a bit more money into a decent core i5 / dedicated GPU setup (or a FX8xxx would also be an option but mATX may be a problem). It will cost more but will also have the legs for the future. That said if you stick to say a 270x level GPU (still a massive performance increase over your current card) a 7850/860K would be well suited and shouldn't bottleneck massively (although your could also argue that clocking your Q6600 would also suffice). However don't bother with the 7850K if you are going for a dedicted GPU, get the cheaper 7750K instead (same CPU but less GPU cores). If going down this route get one with a iGPU just in case you have issues with the dGPU.
