Upgrade advise

[Rossbacher]

Hello everybody!

I'm considering (no surprise) upgrading my machine. That would actually be a first for me, in the past I just built a new system every 3ish years. But since the machine is working just fine in everything but newer gaming titles, I was thinking about maybe going the upgrade route for a change. After looking at MSI Afterburner, the current bottleneck for performance seems to be my gpu. Before investing into a new one I wanted to get some advice from more experienced people whether upgrading is the more reasonable thing to do vs saving for a new build (which would take a while). So, here is my current setup:

1. Intel Core i5-2500K
2. GTX 570 (1 GB memory)
3. 8 GB DDR3-1333
4. ASUS P8Z68-V
5. 580W PSU (bequiet! 80 Plus Silver)

The things I am looking at for an upgrade are the gpu and the RAM (due to a huge cpu cooler fitting more than 2 sticks on the board might be impossible, though). I do a lot of photo editing, so more RAM might be nice for that, too. But in terms of gpu I have no clue what to aim for. Get a really powerful card (where my cpu would be  bottleneck) that I can put into a new rig later down the road or look for a card that maximizes my cpu's potential? AMD or NVIDIA? I really love AMD for their business policy and the way they interact with the industry in general, but NVIDIA seems to be making the better gpus right now. Power consumption and noise levels are important to me - power isn't free and for my home office work I prefer a quiet machine.

Looking forward to your recommendations! Thanks a lot in advance :-)

[TheRandomness]

What PSU exactly? Also, AMD's mid range cards currently offer better price to performance than Nvidia's (390 >= 970, 380X >>>> 960, 380 >> 960). Also, you can keep the memory through the upgrade if you decide to go to Haswell refresh or something.

[Rossbacher]

Hi thanks, forgot to add that. I edited the original post :-)