What should I upgrade first?

[familyman1]

Hey everyone,

I am looking to upgrade my system and want to know which I should do first.
Specs: CPU-Athlon II x3 450, Mobo-Asrock M3a770de , Memory- Gskill sniper 8GB, GPU- HIS hd4670 iceq, PSU- Tagan 800w. I'm thinking maybe CPU and GPU are holding me back the most. I have the cpu at 3.8GHz right now but the mobo will not let me oc the memory past its rating of 1600 MHz without bluescreening, so I would be willing to get a new mobo also. My budget is $400 max.

Thanks in advance!!

 

[Indigo]

Mobo for sure, get a good 990x based chipset, and you can keep your existing processor to give you a little more time to get a processor truly worth writing home about. The Rana chips at 3.8 GHz are screamers, so there's little reason for you to want to upgrade the CPU right now. At 3.8 GHz you're already hitting a wall at what your 4670 can handle, so just upgrade the motherboard and get yourself a good video card, then you'll be sitting pretty when the new Bulldozer based processors appear, and then you can upgrade to something that should give your Athlon II a run for the money.

 

[familyman1]

Sounds good! Thanks for your help. Have you heard when Bulldozer is going to hit the market?

 

[Indigo]

Later this month is the official launch month, unless AMD pushes it back again. They have been shipping the server based version for a good couple of weeks, so hopefully desktop won't be too far behind. I'm waiting to see how it does performance wise, I'd love to get my hands on one of the octo-core chips since I'm already running a hex.

 

[CleverBut]

I would think an SSD would bring you the most happiness. Everything else looks quite nice.

 

[Indigo]

I would think an SSD would bring you the most happiness. Everything else looks quite nice.

SSD isn't going to be top priority in this case.