I realised my setup is now getting long in the tooth. I don't *want* to upgrade the lot unless I need to, but a bit more oomph would be useful for rendering out footage etc. I don't think I can get much more out of what I currently have (if I'm wrong, please tell me). I have zero idea how much more I can get out of a modern AMD/Intel setup, I know nothing about Ryzen or if Intel's naming/numbering schemes are still confusing/misleading vs performance level. Current brief setup is - FX8350, Sabretooth 990FX, 4*4GB 1333, GTX950. Lots of rusty storage and an SSD doing dual boot OS duties. It's primarily used for Video editing (Vegas) and Image editing (Photoshop/GIMP). Gaming isn't demanding, Cities Skylines runs fine. Help and pointers appreciated.
What sort of budget do you have? As an example, you could get an amd ryzen 2700 (8core 16threads), 32gb ram, motherboard, cooler and 500gb m.2 SSD for £600. You could scale that back to a Ryzen 2600 and 16gb to save £100.
No set budget, I dont mind spending if I need to, but I won't be doing anything unless it'll get me a noticable advantage. I'm not interested in theoretical numbers or bragging rights.
To be fair, anything current gen you upgrade to is going to give you a noticeable advantage over Bulldozer, theoretical numbers and bragging aside. You just need to find your price to performance point that you're happy with.
This is basically what I did a few months back, except I splashed out on the 2700X. It's pretty durn nippy in The Gimp. I knew I'd posted some benchmarks somewhere: That's a comparison of my old AMD A10-5800K to the new Ryzen 7 2700X, performing a bunch of different operations on a 4k-resolution image in The Gimp. According to CPU Boss, your FX 8350 gets a touch more single-core performance and has twice the cores, so the difference won't be quite as stark - but you should still see a decent uplift.
Damn near any non-mobile CPU (and probably some higher end mobile CPUs) is going to be faster than the FX8350, and by quite some margin depending on workload. Given how many parts you're going to reasonably be replacing (CPU, motherboard, RAM, ideally SSD) it may be worth looking at pre-build deals as well as components.
An abacus would give you a noticable advantage. Seriously though, a 2700, DDR4 and an m.2 SSD would be like going from a reliant robin to a bugatti chiron. Grab a 2700 or 2700X if you fancy the extra stock speed. The stock heatsink is perfectly capable if you're not going mad on overclocking. Pick 16 or 32gb ram depending how much you want to spend, go for at 3000 or 3200mhz as ryzen performance scales well with ram speed, but can be tricky to get stable past 3200 AFAIK. Decide on your motherboard first and get ram from it's QVL list to ensure smooth sailing. Pick a b450 or X470 motherboard of your choice, price and feature dependant. Think of how many USB connections you want, onboard wifi/sound. How many m.2 drive slots you might want. Maybe you want to go small form factor and get an itx board and case? For an m.2 drive you'll want at least 500gb, a Samsung 970 evo plus is about the sweet spot for price/performance. As fingers said maybe consider a new power supply if your current one is fairly old. You don't want that to go bang and take your new system with it. 500-600W is plenty and modular cable ones are now barely any more expensive andmuch easier to work with. At some point, now or in the future, you can get some nice cables to make it pretty if you so wish. Gpus, the market is in a bit of a weird place at the minute. Practically anything would be an upgrade from a 950. If you don't anything that troubles your 950, maybe leave that for now? Alternatively grab a second hand 980 or something.
Cheers for the ideas and pointers. Looks likely to be exactly what you've suggested. Ryzen 7 2700, 32GB, and as many M.2 & SATA ports as I can manage to get on a board that isn't otherwise compromised. PSU isn't ancient, it's Corsair 550W unit, upgraded with the GPU about 2 years ago, which I think should do the job.
