Looking to upgrade PC, €400

Septim

Hi! Current PC was built 4ish years ago and has served me pretty well up to now but it's really showing its age.

I'm not sure where to begin with upgrading since this PC was actually built by a friend so I'll just leave the current specs:

Phenom II X2 550 Processor
2GB DDR3 RAM
Radeon HD 4800 Series
MSI 770-C45 Motherboard

It is (and will be) used mostly for games. Really, I'm looking to run Battlefield 4 as more than the slideshow it appears as on my current PC.

Thanks!

Monotype

You could do with a bit of an overhaul there alright. Everything there is a weak point really.
Have you tried unlocking cores on that phenom? If you could get it to a tri- or quad-cores, maybe it would hang on a while longer. Otherwise, I would go and overclock it as much as possible.

Games will always be most heavily dependent on graphics card, so having a bit of power there is essential. Something like a 270 would go a long way.

RAM needs upgrading too. You can get away with 4GB, but 2GB is not enough for today's standards.

Here's suggestions for a complete gutting.

Item|Price
Gigabyte Radeon R9 270 WindForce 2X OC, 2GB GDDR5|€157.30
AMD FX-6300 Prozessor, Boxed, Sockel AM3+|€97.79
ASRock 970 Pro3 R2.0, AM3+, ATX|€57.67
8GB-Kit Crucial Ballistix Sport Series DDR3-1600, CL9|€64.34
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€396.09