As above I've got £270 spare burning a hole in my pocket, the Mrs goes away for a few days this week so want to upgrade my PC so she doesn't find out about it, spending 3 grand on a car this month was hard enough. Currently I run an AMD FX6300 Black Edition. Hex core chip. MSI 970A G45 Motherboard 12 gig of RAM 2 GIG GTX 660 (non Ti version) 240 Gig SSD for main OS drive. 750 Watt Corsair CX750 Generally speaking my PC is quick, I have no complaints at all - that said I've always fancied playing with some proper Intel kit, my number 2 rig in my sig I sold off sometime ago and downgraded it as it wasn't being used - but whats left over from here will go to my number 2 system and whats in number 2 will get sold off. I'd like to think I can get some Intel kit on the used market for reasonable money and a new GFX card. Would I actually see much of a performance boost in going for say an i5 3rd gen or an i7 2nd gen ? Or leave my PC as is and spend less, and upgrade my laptop as this only has 4 gig of RAM and a 1 TB hard drive running at 5,400 RPM with an i3 chip so upgrading that to 8 gig of RAM and slamming in an SSD and leaving some change for Diesel for the car ? I have been using the laptop a lot recently and I get very frustrated with how slow it runs sometimes.
Difficult as your rig is actually a very good balance. If this is purely for games then a GPU would help, i5's are great but the FX6300 holds its own in most games and I'd imagine you are already GPU limited.
New GPU, you can pick up a decent 970, new for ~£250-260... [effectively less if you flog on the free copy of Tomb Raider...]
Disagreeing with the consensus thus far, unless there's a serious bargain for something else, i'd prioritise a half decent SSD for the laptop - not least as it's the thing that's annoying you the most. (the memory really depends on what you're actually trying to run) Yeah, i forgot quite how slow machines are with just HDDs until i was sorting some bits out for my sister over Christmas, prior to sticking a 500GB 850 Evo in it that had become spare... ...& it went from a laptop that she hated using but didn't have the money to readily replace to something that she now enjoys using. That's not to say that a new gfx card wouldn't be a good idea at some point - albeit there's no info as to what res you're gaming at, so it conceivably 'might' be a pretty poor use of money - but as you've not stated that there's any issues with gaming or whatever then it really doesn't sound like what you've got is significantly holding you back. Oh, & it also depends if you're happy going 2nd hand - as you 'could' put another £15 ish in & get a new 500GB 850 Evo & (based on a sold items search) a 2nd hand 970.
I'm running most my games at 1920 x 1080 on pretty much high settings on everything. I think the only game I had to knock things down for was Fallout 4. But it would be nice when newer games come out that I could handle them at max settings on my current monitor 23 inch AOC which I must say I am very impressed with. Might keep my eye out for a R290 and get an SSD for the laptop, I've got a spare bits laptop here which I can rob 4 gig of ram out of so thats no real big issue.
2nd-ing the GPU + SSD for laptop. Assuming gaming is important they'd both be the two main things that would give you really substantial real world performance boosts, especially the SSD if you find your laptop slow. If your laptop has an optical drive I'd consider how much you use it and maybe consider swapping out the optical drive for a 2nd 2.5" bay. I swapped the HDD for and SSD in my laptop then replaced the optical drive with the original HDD as a 2nd drive using one of these: http://www.amazon.co.uk/VicTsing-12.../B00LIQOOB6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1454858591 I really like the setup. I have a cheap USB optical drive for the odd occasion I need one these days.
The optical drive is useful, I tend to burn stuff to DVD on the laptop more so than my desktop - I'm looking to move my storage to a server of some description.
I keep my laptop pretty empty to be honest, so I can always get a USB3 enclosure for the drive that comes out if extra storage is needed.
If you're happy with your performance for now, get the SSD for your laptop and save the rest of your money till Pascal arrives.
Thats my intention to be honest, until I can spend the money I need to sell my old car first, pay off what I owe Mrs Behemoth for the roofing work we had done. I can get an SSD into the house and she won't know, a full system upgrade/gfx card is a bit harder !
A mate had a Zotac GTX650TI Boost 2GB and an FX6300 which was struggling in ARK so he upgraded to an R9 390 and it seems to handle it much better now. Mate with an FX8320 and a R9 290 seems fine running FO4 at 1920X1080 though.
Hello mate, not seen you about for ages, do you still post on Hexus ? Like others e saying the 970 is the card for me, just currently biding my time before I order it, she who must be obeyed says before more toys can come into the house, some toys must leave the house. My PC room is like a grave yard - half built systems and parts all over the place.
