Upgrade CPU or GPU?

[liam13white]

Hi,

 

I want to know what is better to upgrade first, Processor or graphics card. I currently have an AMD Phenom II X4 965 CPU (3.4Ghz) & a Nvidia GTX650Ti (2GB MSI) in my system. But i don't really know what would be better to upgrade first?

I was looking at a  AMD FX8350 Black Edition 8 Core Processor (4.0 Ghz) for the CPU or an Asus Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 DirectCU II OC 2GB 

 

Any suggestions would be helpful   

 

Thanks

[ELSknutson]

gpu

 

a 970, 980 or a 280x,290 or 290x would fit that just fine

[xox]

I would look at getting a second-hand or unboxed GTX 770 as they are dirt cheap. Some are only just more expensive than the 760.

[Mao_Zedong]

A gpu would be better for now, but you really need a new cpu. FYI you should go intel as a 4440 is better than an 8350 and costs less if you include the motherboard.

[TheSTS]

That CPU could do with an upgrade, but for gaming performance it's all about the GPU. GTX 970 offers crazy performance for the price, so if that's a possibility on your budget, go for it.

[Faceman]

GPU first.  The Phenom is better than the FX because of its superior single core performance.

[SuperPug]

Pretty sure anything above a r9 280 or GTX 760 would be a complete waste with that cpu...

 

Edit: Im running the Phenom II 940 and it severely limited a GTX 580...

[SuperPug]

GPU first.  The Phenom is better than the FX because of its superior single core performance.

 

I highly doubt that... theres no way that old-ass phenom has better per clock performance / ipc than the FX

[Faceman]

I highly doubt that... theres no way that old-ass phenom has better per clock performance / ipc than the FX

I'm lazy, so just going to copy and paste from somewhere else I have posted.

 

The architecture behind the FX CPUs cannot keep up with high end graphics cards that require strong cores to consistently feed the card.  Monitor your GPU load in your games and you will quickly see that your GPU is not running at 90%+ if you own a high end graphics card paired with an FX processor.  Use an FX with a mid range GPU all you want, that is fine and you won't limit the card's potential and makes for a much more balanced rig. If you get into the upper echelon of GPUs, that is when you are holding your card back by the FX that has worse IPC than Conroe which dates back to 2005.

Even when you pair the FX with a mid range GPU, it doesn't change the fact that some games are largely CPU bound and require strong IPC.  Parallelism doesn't exist in games.  There are not many, if any highly repetitive calculations going on in games that the CPU can guess what is coming next like in video editing or rendering.  They have tricked you into thinking that more cores and higher Ghz is what matters for your CPU, when it all comes down to the architecture and instructions per cycle. 

 

Websites like cpubenchmark.net have a suite of synthetic benchmarks that they run each processor through to spit out a score.  Going by this, the FX8 outperforms the i5 because those synthetic tests are highly repetitive calculations that benefit from more cores.  People see that result and automatically think "Oh, the FX8 is a much stronger processor than the i5."  And in some tasks it is, gaming is just not one of them.

 

[Adreyu]

both but gpu first

[SuperPug]

..

 

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/102?vs=697 Anand gets different results... anyway im just gonna refuse to believe that the phenom beats out an FX8350 in gaming...

[Lingrah]

First off welcome to the forums.

2 Things, which you should upgrade depends on what you do.  A GPU if you do a lot of gaming, and CPU for most everything else.

2 ALSO PLEASE DONT USE BLACK TEXT!  The people using the dark theme can hardly read it and most likely need to past it into a .txt document.  Just like you can't see this white text.