Need to upgrade my dated PC for cheap

[Fleshfeast]

I only play games on this computer. Mostly play MMO's but would like to be able to play FPS too (BF4 would be great). I have around ~$200 give or take $25 + what ever the old parts would sell for but no more than that.

The goal is to be able to be able to play BF4 and new MMO's on any setting (pref medium) with ~45 FPS in 1200p.

To give you an idea of where my computer is now here are some games that I play and how they run. BF3 at launch was around ~20 FPS on conquest large with all low settings 720p (I would like to play at native res of 1200p) but when Back to Karkand came out it went down to ~10 FPS on the new maps and it became unplayable. I run Warcraft for the most part fine ~30 (in 25 man raids I sometimes dip to ~15 fps). GW2 was around ~10 FPS in large WvWvW battles and ~16-20 in crowded cities.

My current setup:
CPU: AMD Phemon II x4 840
Video Card: GTX 460 1GB SE
Memory: 8GB DDR3 1600
Mother Board: BIOSTAR A780L3G
Hard Drive: 750GB WD Black 7200rpm SATA
PSU: Cooler Master 650w
Case: I'm using an old Pentium 2 case (I'm not even lying) with the side off so over clocking might be hard.

I would think that I need a new CPU / mother board more than anything. If I did upgrade that I would be able to sell the old ones for about $50 I would think and could put that toward the new ones budget.

I'm in the US by the way.

[Deleted]

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i3-4330 3.5GHz Dual-Core Processor ($124.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: MSI H81M-P33 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($37.98 @ Newegg)
Total: $162.97
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-02-16 08:31 EST-0500)

this will make a huge performance increase in mmo´s.
next upgrade will be the gpu. for bf4 i would aim for something like the 270x which should cost around ~220$, for mmo a gtx 660 (~170$) will do fine and it is able to play bf4 on med/high.


edit.: maybe get a new case with the cpu and mobo:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i3-4330 3.5GHz Dual-Core Processor ($124.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: MSI H81M-P33 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($37.98 @ Newegg)
Case: NZXT Source 210 (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case ($29.99 @ Microcenter)
Total: $192.96
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-02-16 08:41 EST-0500)

[Fluorescent0]

I usually refrain from telling people to wait, but seeing as you have a limited budget and to make a sensible GPU upgrade you'd have to wait anyways, in a month Maxwell cards should be coming out (and a few weeks before the 750ti as well), so I'd wait to see how those pan out.

This is of course related to the GPU upgrade, and I agree with flens as far as the CPU suggestion goes.

[Fleshfeast]

Wouldn't I be better off with at least a quad-core CPU? the AMD FX-6300 is $120 on Newegg, not sure how it would perform though.

[Flame6]

These forums generally highly recommend intel CPU for it's increased performance in games especially in WoW.

[Fluorescent0]

Wouldn't I be better off with at least a quad-core CPU? the AMD FX-6300 is $120 on Newegg, not sure how it would perform though.

AMD CPUs are ~40% behind in IPC (instructions per clock), which means their single threaded performance is far behind. Most games don't really stress more than 2 to 3 cores, and the i3 is perfect for that as it is 2+2 (hyperthreading).