Desktop Computer: What Should I Upgrade for Gaming?

sparkanum on 10/10/2015 - 13:10

With Fallout 4 on its way, I'm keen to make sure my computer is good enough to play it. My current PC specs are:

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 945 Black Edition (3.0Ghz) (5 years old ish)
MB: Lan Party 785G-M35 (5 years old ish)
RAM: 8Gb (4x2Gb) Corsair DDR3 1333Mhz (5 years old ish)
PS: Zalman ZM-600st 600W (3 years old ish)
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6670 1Gb (3 years old ish)
SSD: 240Gb Samsung EVO 850 (https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/202585 … woo!)
HDD: 1TB 7200RPM (3 years old ish)
CASE: Heavily beaten-up buy very much adored Super LAN Boy (10+ years old)

Looking at minimum requirements for Fallout 4 it might just scrape through, but I'd like to make sure it'll play comfortably. I've only just started getting back into games and there's a lot of stuff I'm keen to get at some point (X-Com 2, No Man's Sky, GTA 5, Arkham Knight if they ever get it fixed for PC) so would be nice to know I have them covered as well. When I play games, I'm much more interested in smooth gameplay than I am in having ultra high detailed graphics or anything like that.

Question is… which bits do you recommend upgrading? Am I best off just upgrading the GPU, or do I need to get a new MB / CPU / RAM? And if that's the case, should I just grab a pre-built machine from somewhere?

Being the frugal man I am I don't want to spend money if I'm not going to feel like I get appropriate utility for it. So, budget is $500 or less if possible. If over $500 I'd probably begrudgingly do it, but if over $1000 it'd have to be able to do other things (e.g. clean my house, magically bring things I drew to life, double as an ice cream machine) before I'd think I was getting value for money out of it.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Computing

Comments

  • ozhunter on 10/10/2015 - 13:46
    +1

    http://www.pcgamer.com/fallout-4-system-requirements-release…

    Looks like only the gpu needs upgrading. Your cpu is the minimum required so obviously it would be good to upgrade that too which will mean you'd have to upgrade the motherboard. Aside from those 3 parts, everything else is good.

  • moar bargains on 10/10/2015 - 14:43
    +1

    CPU upgrade is probably not going to add that much, and would blow out the budget. My rec: just do the GPU, and think about doing the CPU later on.
    By the time you added CPU/Mobo upgrades, I reckon you'd be better off just buying a brand new PC and flogging your current machine on Gumtree.

    • sparkanum on 10/10/2015 - 16:12

      Thanks for the advice. Although I just noticed that my motherboard only has PCI-E 2.0, whereas all the video cards I'm looking at are PCI-E 3.0… I know they're backwards compatible, but is that going to seriously limit them somehow?

      • scrimshaw on 10/10/2015 - 17:24
        +1

        Not for the majority of GPU's. Only the most high-end ones, but they're out of your budget anway.

        • sparkanum on 10/10/2015 - 17:57

          Well that changes things… had I known my motherboard could handle pretty much any graphics card I would have done this ages ago!

          Thanks for the info!

  • rdx on 10/10/2015 - 16:51
    +1

    Buy a cheap ~$80 Asus H81M-Plus, get an Intel i5-4460 $269, and a ~$250 GTX 950.
    That's $600, but you mentioned GTA V and Fo4 and they are all new games, so you'd be much better off to get a new card than an antiquated one, and this setup will last a while.

    However, if you really really can't justify that extra $100 over your initial budget, then go for an R9 270X, which is $180, bringing the total spend to just $20 over the $500 budget.

    • sparkanum on 10/10/2015 - 17:56

      Thanks for the tip.

      I'm thinking what I might try is getting a GTX 950 (or a GTX 960, as MSY has the asus one for only about $30…) and just seeing how that goes. If I find out it's not enough, then I can always run out and grab the mboard/cpu you suggested and chuck that in.

      • rdx on 10/10/2015 - 20:55
        +1

        No worries.
        I don't recommend using a brand new graphics card with a really old CPU/motherboard, mainly due to the CPU becoming a bottleneck for the GPU (meaning you won't be able to use it's full power), as the CPU is very weak.

        Also there is much more support for the newer gpu on newer chipsets with newer CPU's.

        • sparkanum on 19/10/2015 - 16:52

          Thanks again for your help on this, and sorry to ask another question of you, but why the i5-4460 and not a similarly priced amd (eg the fx-8350)? I get conflicting advice from benchmark sites and would be interested in your view.

        • rdx on 19/10/2015 - 18:06
          +1

          @sparkanum: no worries

          The AMD processors are quite old and nowhere near as popular. The Intel CPU uses more current technology, and offers better performance IMO. Generally, the Intel chip runs cooler and more reliably.

        • sparkanum on 20/10/2015 - 08:13

          Thanks once again!

  • littleDealFish on 19/10/2015 - 16:14
    +1

    You may need to do a bios update (although whether your board has any new updates is questionable) to get the 9 series gpus to work - my friend with a gigabyte 1155 3 y/o motherboard needed to update or it would hang at the bios for about 3 minutes before booting into windows.

    Also, cpu bottleneck may not be too bad unless you're running a really ancient one. According to someone in this forum post below the The 955BE is equal in power to a FX4170 - 7 fps below an i3 which i have used quite comfortably for gaming.

    http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1979575/phenom-955be-…

  • donkeydoc on 21/10/2015 - 09:28
    1. Graphics Card
    2. CPU + Motherboard
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