Motherboard and CPU reccomendation for upgrading

[Wasntmenl]

Hey Anandtech community.


A friend of mine recommended you guys for help with hardware questions surrounding pc's so here is my question. Its for both the Motherboard and CPU so I just chose to put it in this part since I didnt know what to do. Sorry

I took over an old video card from my brother since he upgraded to an Geforce GTX 980 TI and gave me his AMD Radeon 6900 series (4 years old now).

Now I have noticed that my even older than 4 years pc can't handle the new card in an optimal fashion and it seems that the cpu and motherboard are the culprits that hold the framerate down (also the aux input is slowly failing with cracking sounds becomming more frequent). In the bottum are screenshots of my system and the case with a side open. My power source is a corsair HX520W modular power supply.

My motherboard only supports up to ddr2 and I also have 2 spare 4gb ram cards that are ddr3 so I want to upgrade to a motherboard that has preferably 4 ram slots that support ddr3 till 5. As well as a cpu that can eventually handell the GTX980TI when my brother upgrades again, since I will take over that card as well in probably 4 years. By than I will also upgrade the power supply unless you guys think I should upgrade it now in order to meet the power need in my system.

For now the goal is to run CSGO smoothly with mostly low settings and a decent stable framerate for competative play. And if possible run fallout 4 when it eventually releases hopefully on mostly medium settings(this is most likely a dream given the graphics card itself). Other games I would like to play more smoothly are Europa universalis 4, Shogun 2 total war, XCOM enemy unkown and cities skylines. Its mostly just the performance that I am interested in and not the graphical fidelity altough a nicer picture is always a bonus.

My budget is around 300 euro's but I can go up to 500 if the investment will be long term.

Any additional suggestions are more than welcome.

 

[escrow4]

Cheap upgrade right now, 4590 non K + H97 mobo (Gigabyte H97-D3H) with the RAM you have and that GPU as a start. I don't think a 980 Ti will fit in your case, modern cases have removable bays yours doesn't. That GPU also will barely do anything modern beyond medium though.

 

[Wasntmenl]

Thanks for your recommendations I was thinking about the i5 4690 non k version but this one will also do the job and is a bit cheaper. I am going to upgrade the case and power supply when I get the new video card since thats probably still 4 years away.

 

[Ketchup]

Some folks will tell you to wait for Skylake, which will be just a few months away, but will require DDR 4. Based on what CPUs have done for gaming the last couple years (read: not much), upgrading from what you have to a Haswell now is not a bad idea (good performance increase all around). I like Wasntmenl's recommendation.

 

[Wasntmenl]

Yeah unfortunatly I am not in a position to buy the latest of GPU's so I will have to rely on the GPU's that my brother gives me when he upgrades. Most games I play are more strategic or tactical and not far cry 4 or one of the crysis games. So medium graphics are fine for me.