Some assistance on upgrading my PC!

deftrance

deftrance

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Good afternoon folks,

I'm interested in maybe doing a small bit of upgrading over the next month or so... I'm going to put a 200 dollar budget on it. Here's my current specs:

CPU: AMD Athlon II X3 455 Rana 3.3GHz Socket AM3 95W Triple-Core
GPU: HIS H685F1GD Radeon HD 6850 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1
MOBO: ASRock 770 EXTREME3 AM3 AMD 770 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
RAM: Kingston HyperX 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333
HD: Western Digital WDC WD2500AAKX
PSU: Antec BP550 Plus 550W Continuous Power ATX12V V2.2 80 PLUS Certified Modular

Most likely whatever I replace will be used to build/upgrade a new budget rig for the fiance. I'm just not sure what would be the best 'bang for my buck' upgrade at this point. I primarily play RPGs/FPS games.
 
You could go 1 of 2 ways probably. Upgrade the CPU & mobo or the HDDs. For $200 you could get a a smaller SSD for the OS and some programs + a 1tb HDD for storage (or one larger capacity 10K rpm drive). Or you could easily get a mobo/CPU combo (if staying with AMD). Either certainly would boost system performance but may not be such a huge boost to gaming.

Seeing as how you plan to build another PC I'd vote for mobo/CPU combo unless you are cramped for storage space. You probably won't have the space to install many games on the SSD so it wouldn't benefit your gaming much and a newer CPU would at least somewhat. Also the mobo would be more up to date for future upgrading (PCIe 3.0 for example). Plus you can use the old ones in the new build.
 
SSD!! I didn't think that a SSD would make that much of a difference for gaming. On some games i cant even read the loading screen tips/etc because the game loads too fast :D
 
[quote name='no_chocobo']SSD!! I didn't think that a SSD would make that much of a difference for gaming. On some games i cant even read the loading screen tips/etc because the game loads too fast :D[/QUOTE]

This is true, I didn't think of it at the moment but if you've learned to live with 250gb of storage so far, then you could get a single 250gb SSD drive for about $200, maybe a little less if you come across a real good deal.
 
As for storage, I was using a 140gb Velociraptor until recently. The platters died in my recent moved, so I shoved the 250gb in place as the storage drive for the time being. For actual storage, I have a few TBs in the rig. I was thinking the best upgrade would be either a video card or CPU, but I'm unsure. SSD is an option, too.
 
most of your hardware is old not worth keeping around, you should get all new parts. I'd invest in an i5 3rd gen CPU. DD3-1600 etc...and don't skimp on the video card if you want to game at 1080p with a good size monitor. I've liked Nvidia better - their drivers are more stable than ATI but ATI has some very nice higher end cards that sometimes are cheaper than Nvidia.
 
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