Next upgrade- GPU or Processor

[Deleted]

It's come to that time again where I'm itching to buy something to upgrade my rig.

Current set-up:

NZXT Phantom Full tower
Corsair 650W TX PSU
Asus M4A88T-M 880G Mobo
AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE currently @ stock speeds + Arctic Cooling Freezer 7
8GB G. Skill Ripjaws 1600Mhz
MSI HD R6850 Cyclone 1GB GDDR5 Power Edition

So basically I'd like to know what'll give me the bigger performance boost- I suspect the GPU but I have been known to be wrong

If I'm upgrading the GPU, I don't want to go much over £150 (£180ish is doable). I have plans to upgrade to an Ivybridge set-up in the future but obviously there's a fairly hefty price tag on a new processor/mobo, so it's going to have to wait.

I'll be buying from here http://www.ebuyer.com/

[Jakexe]

I'd suggest to upgrade the gpu if you're after an upgrade sooner rather than later as the new intel cpu's will be out in a month or so which makes upgrading to ivybridge anytime soon a waste of money.

For that price i'd suggest getting an evga gtx660 superclocked as my personal preference. I'm not well versed enough in AMD cards to suggest one but they very may well be better than the 660.

[Deleted]

It depends on what games you play. The 965 BE is still fairly strong in most games but tend to slack quite a bit in WoW. If you're playing WoW then a CPU upgrade is probably going to be the best upgrade for you. So, start saving up for that Intel set-up because your current MOBO isn't really allowing you to get an acceptable upgrade in the processor department anyways.

If you don't care about WoW then 965 is good enough(For the time being) and you should consider upgrading your graphics card. GTX660 would be a very suitable upgrade for you in terms of budget and it will also balance out your system nicely once you go for that Intel upgrade

[Deleted]

My bad, should have put in the original post that I pretty much only play WoW and Skyrim!

[Skarsguard]

IDK I don't think I would upgrade anything atm and save up for the Haswell when it comes out. If you are really set on upgrading something now I guess you could get a 7850 for that amount something like this http://www.ebuyer.com/390921-sapphir...d-11200-14-20g. I was looking at that site and I don't know the brands of 660's that's in your budget the only one close to your budget is http://www.ebuyer.com/409673-kfa2-gt...s-66nph7dn7dxz but I don't know anything about that brand and it's more then the 7850.

[Deleted]

My bad, should have put in the original post that I pretty much only play WoW and Skyrim!

In that case, save up for a new motherboard and processor. Your current motherboard doesn't support AM3+ sockets so you can't really upgrade your processor sensibly, you'd have to buy a new motherboard either way so you'd be better off going for that Intel build straight away.

[Deleted]

In that case, save up for a new motherboard and processor. Your current motherboard doesn't support AM3+ sockets so you can't really upgrade your processor sensibly, you'd have to buy a new motherboard either way so you'd be better off going for that Intel build straight away.

this and perhaps start looking into entry level overclocking if you wanna get the most of out of your hardware. (mostly just cpu for wow)

[Tehterokkar]

For WoW, CPU is a bigger upgrade, I'd wait a few months until newer gen i5 CPUs are released from Intel and snatch 1 of them for a massive upgrade in CPU power.

[Deleted]

Thanks for all the replies guys, looks like I'm holding off for a new CPU then.