Thinking of upgrading my PC but not sure if it's worth it

super_furry

I have about €275 that I could spend on upgrading my rapidly aging gaming PC but while it's served me well, I'm not sure if it's actually worth upgrading or not anymore. I output in 1080p to a bog-standard 24-inch monitor and with something like Vermintide for example, it's chugging at medium settings. A second 660TI in SLI is out of the question because of the motherboard but I had been thinking about just buying a new graphics card, but am worried about a potential bottleneck and whether I'd see any major improvement.

Processor: AMD FX6200 Six-core @ 3.8GHz (64 bit)
RAM: 16GB RAM
Graphics Card: GTX 660Ti 2GB
Motherboard: GA-78LMT-USB3

Thanks for any advice you may have.

Digital Solitude

You sell the chip and board for maybe €100, invest in a H81M board with an i5 4460 for about €220.

That leaves €155. The 660Ti is worth about €70 by a rough guess, putting about €200 into a 4gb R9 380 would leave you with a huge PC upgrade.

My second hand prices are pulled off the top of my head so they may be inaccurate. You'd have to keep the RAM or else invest in another 8gb, but that'd leave you only a few euro over.

ED E

That FX6200 will limit you in some titles, GPU in others.

Socket AM3+
Motherboard	Model	GA-78LMT-USB3
PCB	4.1
vendor	CPU Model	Frequency	L2
Cache	L3
Cache	Core Name	Process	Stepping	Wattage	System
Bus(MT/s)	Since BIOS Version
AMD	FX-8370	4000MHz	1MBx8	8MB	Vishera	32nm	C0	125W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-8370E	3300MHz	1MBx8	8MB	Vishera	32nm	C0	95W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-8350	4000MHz	1MBx8	8MB	Vishera	32nm	C0	125W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-8320	3500MHz	1MBx8	8MB	Vishera	32nm	C0	125W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-8320E	3200MHz	1MBx8	8MB	Vishera	32nm	C0	95W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-8310	3400MHz	1MBx8	8MB	Vishera	32nm	C0	95W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-8300	3300MHz	1MBx8	8MB	Vishera	32nm	C0	95W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-8150	3600MHz	1MBx8	8MB	Bulldozer	32nm	B2	125W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-8120	3100MHz	1MBx8	8MB	Bulldozer	32nm	B2	125W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-8120	3100MHz	1MBx8	8MB	Bulldozer	32nm	B2	95W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-8100	2800MHz	1MBx8	8MB	Bulldozer	32nm	B2	95W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-6350	3900MHz	1MBx6	8MB	Vishera	32nm	C0	125W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-6300	3500MHz	1MBx6	8MB	Vishera	32nm	C0	95W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-6200	3800MHz	1MBx6	8MB	Bulldozer	32nm	B2	125W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-6120	3500MHz	1MBx6	8MB	Bulldozer	32nm	B2	95W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-6100	3300MHz	1MBx6	8MB	Bulldozer	32nm	B2	95W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-4350	4200MHz	1MBx4	8MB	Vishera	32nm	C0	125W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-4300	3800MHz	1MBx4	4MB	Vishera	32nm	C0	95W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-4200	3300MHz	1MBx8	8MB	Bulldozer	32nm	B2	125W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-4170	4200MHz	1MBx4	8MB	Bulldozer	32nm	B2	125W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-4150	3900MHz	1MBx4	8MB	Bulldozer	32nm	B2	95W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-4130	3800MHz	1MBx4	4MB	Bulldozer	32nm	B2	125W	5200	F3
AMD	FX-4100	3600MHz	1MBx4	8MB	Bulldozer	32nm	B2	95W	5200	F3

And it seems Digital got there first.

Digital Solitude

ED you know your stuff, can you comment on the second hand prices I've listed if you know off your head

super_furry

Thanks lads. Didn't think it was going to be as straight-forward as a graphics card swap and there's plenty to go on now.

Digital Solitude

Graphics cases swap would do a good job, but you're setting yourself up for a few more upgradeless years with the i5 and 380

ED E

All I was gonna chime in with is even going up to an 8xxx series chip on the current platform your single core perf won't rise hugely which unfortunately is a big enough deal for games. That said, if you could find one cheap 2nd it might be worth it as a nice intermediary boost. It would be nice if intel didn't dominate so much but currently still waiting on AMD to catch up.

TerrorFirmer

Switch to Intel. DS hit the nail on the head. AMD is grossly behind Intel for games, single core performance is just desperate - even AMD's flagship 9590 plays second fiddle to 4th gen i3 in many titles at this stage which is ludicrious, but it is what it is.

Can't offer any more advice other than what Digital said. It's sound.

Eoinmc97

What games do you play OP? Your CPU only hinders your min and max frames, by a +-7 FPS. Tbh, I could live with that whilst we wait for CPUs like Zen and Kaby to drop. The €250 would fetch an R9 380X, and if you sell your GPU for around €60-€70, you could pick up a 390 (if your PSU supports that power)
I'll post later the effects of the FX line on your FPS variances, on mobile now so I don't have the chance.

TerrorFirmer

Eoinmc97 wrote: »

What games do you play OP? Your CPU only hinders your min and max frames, by a +-7 FPS.

Realistically that is completely untrue. Fallout 4 is one example but there are loads of others also. Faster 8-core 8320E is a whopping 43% behind the i5-4690 (non-overclocked) in minimum and average framerate.

Again the Fx-6200 is only a hex core by comparison and Fallout 4 does make use of extra cores/threads pretty well, so you would be looking at 50%+ in Fallout 4 versus the i5 4690 due to a lack of two extra physical cores.

The AMD CPU's were pretty good in 2012/2013, and they are still OK for most games now, but in 2015/2016 they are so far behind Intel it's really not funny and they fall really flat in games that require significant CPU grunt.

Flagship 9570 at 4.7Ghz barely beats 4th generation i3 in Fallout 4, that is an absolute joke.



Also a very notable observation from Techspot's GTA V review:

Clocked at 4.5GHz the FX series is slower than a Core i7 clocked at just 2.5GHz in GTA V which is obviously disappointing.

Also, Skyrim is also a good one for testing raw CPU grunt even though it's a few years old. FX6200 once again 40% slower than a 3rd generation i5 (no haswell or skylake in this test - embarrassingly even considerably slower than a first generation i5 in Skyrim)



Just Cause 3 is another good example....once again, 40% slower than i5-4670.



If we look at overall across the board performance, it is generally 40% slower than a Haswell i5-4670.



FX cpu is still largely OK for most games, obviously especially those that are CPU friendly/GPU heavy as I said, but to say that there's only 6 or 7 frames in the difference is way off. There's no point posting benchmarks to games that run the same on an FX as an i5, because it hides the truth of the matter - in anything that eats up CPU power, every single FX CPU falls flat compared to Intel.

TerrorFirmer

And I only noticed now that you mentioned Vermintide, that is really tough on the CPU actually, haven't played it on my current machine but even on my i5-4670/R9 390X machine it got choppy when things kicked off on screen.