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Upgrade GPU or CPU first?

K

Kd2k5

Junior Member
I figured I need to upgrade my 3+ year old PC. Both will be upgraded, but about a month or two apart. I wanted to know which is in need of an upgrade more. My Motherboard/CPU, or my GPU.

CPU: Quad Q9300 2.5GHz
GPU: Radeon 4890

Thanks.
 
Kd2k5 said:
I figured I need to upgrade my 3+ year old PC. Both will be upgraded, but about a month or two apart. I wanted to know which is in need of an upgrade more. My Motherboard/CPU, or my GPU.

CPU: Quad Q9300 2.5GHz
GPU: Radeon 4890

Thanks.
Click to expand...
Upgrade your CPU, MB & RAM 1st.
 
Blain said:
Upgrade your CPU, MB & RAM 1st.
Click to expand...

For general computing, yes I agree. But if we're talking gaming the 4890 is only equivalent of a 7770. Even a HD7850 is twice as fast. The Q9300 is still quite potent and should have few problems hitting 3GHz with proper cooling. I could live with being slightly CPU limited for a few months...
 
Thank you for the replies so far.

1. Used for basic day-to-day activities, and some gaming. I don't need the newest games to be played on max settings, but I want them to run well enough.

2. Looking to spend about $250 for a GPU

3. Living in Canada. I've usually bought items from tigerdirect.ca

4. Currently have:

Core 2 Quad Q9300 2.5Ghz 6M 1333Mhz
Radeon 4890 1GB
6GB DDR2 800MHz
Ultra LSP650 650-Watt PSU

5. Don't plan on overclocking, will just upgrade CPU and motherboard if needed in the coming months.

6. 1920 x 1080

7. Planning on making a change to GPU within the month, then the CPU/MB when needed in the coming months.
 
I'd go for a new GPU first as well, but with the caveat that a $250 GPU will be seriously bottlenecked on that system, so you really will need to have at least a $300 budget for a new CPU/motherboard/RAM to take advantage of it. That's why it usually makes sense to plan both things together.

If your additional upgrade budget were closer to $200, I'd use some of the GPU budget to bump up the CPU. In fact, there really aren't any GPUs exactly at $250 right now - you're either looking at a $300 HD7950 or a $220 HD7870 (estimating Tigerdirect.ca prices).
 
go with the GPU first as it's probably more limitating on the new games, especially since crysis 3 requires dx11 to play.

When you change CPU, you will also have to change MB and RAM so redo your calculations if you haven't taken this into account.
 
Either way you'd be jumping 2 process nodes, so its about the same. You should do the gpu because once you do you might find no reason to justify a new cpu.
 
What is your pain point right now? Is it games or something else?

Since your system doesn't have an obvious imbalance right now, the task that you want to improve will determine what you need to upgrade first.
 
Mainly just gaming. I think I'll take the advice and upgrade my GPU. I'll go with the 7950, as it seems it may last me a bit longer than the 7870. The in the next month or two upgrade my CPU/MB if I find my games aren't up to par.
 
Kd2k5 said:
Mainly just gaming. I think I'll take the advice and upgrade my GPU. I'll go with the 7950, as it seems it may last me a bit longer than the 7870. The in the next month or two upgrade my CPU/MB if I find my games aren't up to par.
Click to expand...

:thumbsup: Good plan.
 
Just a follow-up question.

I purchased the 7950, should be here tomorrow. I will still be upgrading my CPU/MB soon enough. I had a question about my hard drive:

WESTERN DIGITAL CAVIAR SE 160GB 7200RPM 8MB CACHE SATA II 3.5-INCH HARD DRIVE

It's pretty old, but was doing it's job based on the amount of space I needed. Would upgrading this HDD be worth if for gaming? I researched a bit and it seems it wouldn't help, just decrease load times.

Just wanted opinions on whether to upgrade the HDD or put the money towards my CPU/MB?
 
I would get a new drive just because running on a 6+ year old one would scare the crap out of me. You can replace it with a bigger SSD like the Sandisk Ultra Plus for $170. An SSD makes everything you do on your desktop faster: booting up, loading programs, heavily multitasking, and yes loading game levels.
 
A drive that old is also significantly slower than pretty much any modern drive. For comparison, the speed of even a slow modern drive is faster than a two way RAID0 from 6 years ago.
 
Get an SSD, keep your old hard drive for storage. I wouldn't build a new system based off a 6 year old 160GB SATA II drive.

Once you go SSD, there's no going back.
 
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