Partial PC upgrade

bifl

Hi All,
I’m looking for some advice for an upgrade to my current PC which is getting creaky with a lot of hard drive action and longer and longer boot up times. My current build was done 6 years ago. Mostly used for normal home stuff aside from some battlefield gaming. It seems my graphics is no longer good enough for Battlefield 1, so I need to change the GPU and I’d go as far as 1080p s as that’s the limitation of my computer monitor. The current build is as follows

Corsair HX 750W PSU ATX 12V V2.2, 80 Plus Silver
Cooler Master HAF 922 Midi Tower Black
Intel i5-750 Quad Core Processor - 2.66 GHz, 8MB Cache
Zalman CNPS10X-Quiet CPU Cooler
Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3, P55, Socket-1156 4xDDR3, ATX,
4GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 1600MHz Ripjaw Series (8-8-8-24) Dual Channel kit for Intel P55
plus
8GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 1600MHz Ripjaw Series (9-9-9-24) Dual Channel kit for Intel LGA1156/AM3
Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 1GB GDDR5 PCI-Express 2.0, DVI-I, HDMI, DisplayPort, Lite-Retail
(x2) Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA2 32MB 7200RPM
Sound Blaster Fatality X-FI

Having done some reading to see where things are at over the last 6 years!! I’m thinking of the following: doing a fresh install on a 500GB SSD and upgrade the GPU to a 4GB RX480

So my questions I’m wondering are
Is the ‘balance’ right, or do I need to go further and do CPU and motherboard?
The GPU is at the current sweet spot but perhaps maybe too much for what I need?
Appreciate any thoughts on this please.
Bifl

K.O.Kiki

Yes, it will bottleneck.
How much depends on if you're running a good overclock.

Best practice is to install the new SSD + GPU and see how well it runs, before committing to motherboard+CPU upgrade.

Simi

So long as the cpu is sufficiently overclocked it won't significantly impact framerates. Physics heavy sections will obviously take a hit, but a 470/480 is a good choice.

A gtx 1060 would be better for dx11 games as amd drivers lean more on the processor in pre dx12/vulkan games.

Digital Solitude

A 480 or 1060 is overkill unless you're planning on upgrading the CPU soon, it'll really hold back one of those cards in the latest and greatest.

A 460 or 470 will be a massive upgrade for you. A new i5 and motherboard combo will set you back about €250, so you could squeeze one in with a 460 but I'd say grab a 470 now and start saving towards your new i5, or wait and get them all together.

If you overclock the cpu it'll help it last a while longer but realistically it's too old for keeping up with new AAAs

K.O.Kiki

Digital Solitude wrote: »

A 480 or 1060 is overkill unless you're planning on upgrading the CPU soon, it'll really hold back one of those cards in the latest and greatest.

A 460 or 470 will be a massive upgrade for you. A new i5 and motherboard combo will set you back about €250, so you could squeeze one in with a 460 but I'd say grab a 470 now and start saving towards your new i5, or wait and get them all together.

If you overclock the cpu it'll help it last a while longer but realistically it's too old for keeping up with new AAAs

I disagree.

The 480 would be held back, but it would still be there when the CPU/mobo upgrade comes.

That said, an overclocked RX 470 4Gb performs equal to a 4Gb RX 480.

TerrorFirmer

Definitely need a fairly hefty overclock on that CPU to keep pace as well, otherwise it will bottleneck significantly but Battlefield 1 would still be playable at stock speeds.

If you can only afford one upgrade though definitely get a card, it can always be carried over later. If you've survived with a 5670 until now, a 4GB RX470 or 480 will blow your socks off!

bifl

HI Folks,
Thanks for your help and contributions with the posts above. Maybe I need to think about CPU and Mobo (the PSU and Memory should be ok hopefully). Where is the current sweet spot with CPUs currently with price vs performance . It seems to be the i5 but I see they cover socket 1150 and 1151 ? It's annoying that every time I look to upgrade the CPU sockets have changed and I have to throw out in this case a perfectly decent mobo....

TerrorFirmer

Well to be fair your current 1156 dates back six years, since then there has been socket 1155, 1150 and 1151.

Anything s1155 still doesn't need upgrading in most cases but S1156 is just a bit too long in the tooth. The thing is though that i7's in that socket are dirt cheap, for about €40 you can get something like a S1156 i7-870, overclock it a few hundred mhz, and that would tide you over pretty well for the next while.

I've played a few games like Fallout 4 and Battlefield 4 on a s1156 i7-870, still delivers very playable framerates and doesn't really bottleneck up to somewhere above GTX960 levels. An RX470 would be technically bottlenecked in many games but still give solid performance.

Not much difference between S1150 and S1151 except DDR4 ram, if buying new then S1151 is the only option, but nobody on S1150 would really need to upgrade.

To buy now, the sweet budget spot is a H110 or H170 mobo, i5-6500, and 8GB of DDR4 for a total cost of around €300.