Upgrading from AMD Phenom X3 with Asrock A790GMH motherboard!

[MauroDiogo]

Greetings!

I currently have a computer running with an AMD Phenom X3 2.6Ghz processor and the Asrock A790GMH/128M Motherboard.
I'm doing okay for Ram and I have a 550W PSU so it can take a lot.

For a lot of games this setup is fine. I play mainly MMOs and none has really been unplayable, apart from GW 2 who would dip to around 15 FPS during big fights.

Wildstar is fast approaching and while I know the game isn't optimized yet I'm in the beta and in normal areas I get an average of ~24FPS.
I've got a small budget of £150 right now but £240 or so at the end of January.
What components would you recommend I invest on?

I'm currently using a SAPPHIRE Radeon HD6870 and feel everything else is bottlenecking the system as the components are a lot older!

Thanks in advance!

[Fascinate]

Id save up if i were you, just upgrading CPU's wont do a whole lot imo.

Save up and move into an intel system is where you are going to notice real differences in games. These two parts would do fine:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Intel-3-10GH...=intel+core+i5

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-Mot...im_computers_4

[tielknight]

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i3-4130 3.4GHz Dual-Core Processor (£83.99 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: MSI H81M-P33 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£34.98 @ Ebuyer)
Memory: Kingston 4GB (1 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£29.00 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £147.97
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-12-21 08:38 GMT+0000)

Intel dual-core, MMO's love Intel(single-core performance is what most of em rely on).
New mobo to go with it.
New RAM to go with the mobo as your ram is DDR2(according to your motherboard specs) and that shit ain't gonna fly in a mobo that accepts DDR3 only.

Good thing about that is all you gotta do is buy another stick and slap it in there and you'll have 8GB and be set.

[Fascinate]

Ah didnt realize his board only supported DDR2 memory only (crazy how long AMD has used same socket lol). If thats the case i still suggest parts above and save til next january, if he has a 240 budget then he can fit 8gigs of ddr3 into it.

[MauroDiogo]

Thanks a LOT for the recommendations so far and quite fast too!

The Graphics Card wouldn't be an issue with either of those MBoards right? And power wise it's about the same as what I'm running now?

[tielknight]

Thanks a LOT for the recommendations so far and quite fast too!

The Graphics Card wouldn't be an issue with either of those MBoards right? And power wise it's about the same as what I'm running now?

No problems should happen with either the GPU or the PSU. Though if you can suffer another month and save it, you can get something a bit better. Is the 240 the amount you will have TOTAL at the end of January or you will have the 150 + 240 then?

[MauroDiogo]

Yeah it's a rough total as I'm on small budgets every month.
If I had 390 total I'd definitely invest in an even better CPU to go along with new Motherboard. Even if the ones you guys posted seem pretty good enough already (and definitely a major upgrade).

[tielknight]

Yeah it's a rough total as I'm on small budgets every month.
If I had 390 total I'd definitely invest in an even better CPU to go along with new Motherboard. Even if the ones you guys posted seem pretty good enough already (and definitely a major upgrade).

If you can wait, your looking at something like this.


PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i3-4130 3.4GHz Dual-Core Processor (£83.99 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£93.44 @ Scan.co.uk)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£60.62 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £238.05
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-12-21 09:06 GMT+0000)

Which you can then save up for a i5-4670k to slap in there later on(hence the Z87 motherboard) and overclock to get even more performance out of it.

[Fascinate]

Gonna disagree with above suggestions. He never mentioned he wanted to overclock and buying a z87 board for an "in case of" scenario is kind of silly considering he could actually fit an i5 in his budget with a b85 chipset board. The difference between a core i3 to an i5 is much larger than a non overclocked i5 to an overclocked i5 in terms of performance.

[MauroDiogo]

I really appreciate and I'm really grateful for the other posts though! But that's a good point as yes... I'm not looking into overclocking.
I mean, I'm quite tech savvy (quite ironic since I'm asking for advice on what components to buy right?) and it's not out of my reach, specially with a plethora of tutorials on youtube and such but since I've always been on tight budgets and don't want to mess something up and not being able to replace I never looked into overclocking no.

So a b85 chipset would be better because I could get an i5 and have it not overclocked for more performance around the same price?

[Fascinate]

Thats correct. The parts i linked above would still be my recommendation but you should come back when you have the money as prices change all the time. But you should have no problem doing a standard i5/b85 mobo/8gb's ddr3 for your 240 budget, probably even cheaper as ram is quite expensive right now.