Where should I start with my upgrade?

[allifatmat]

Hey guys, I bought a prebuilt from dell a few years back and I have neglected upgrading for too long. Being in a stable enough place for the first time in a while I'm getting itchy to upgrade my computer and I'm not exactly sure where to begin. My build right now is an i7 3770 (non-k) w/ a cheap dell 1155 mobo, an AMD Radeon 7700 HD, a couple of decent harddrives that I've upgraded and 12Gb of Ram they threw in there.

I'm wanting to basically rebuild the whole thing over time, but right now I don't have the funds to get it all at once, so it'll be either the CPU or GPU first then a little while down the road some more replacement. I'd like a newer CPU, Skylake i5 if possible but I'm not sure where to start with the GPU.

My buddies are calling my pc Theseus' Ship, which is alright given my circumstance but I don't know where to start. Any ideas??

 

[Ketchup]

A Skylake i5 will not be an upgrade (in speed) from an Ivy Bridge i7. Plus it will take a new motherboard and RAM, so if you wanted that, ignore the upgrade idea and build from scratch.

The better video card isn't a bad idea, but you will need a better power supply if you want anything beyond an Nvidia GTX 950 (and just about anything current on the AMD side).

Get an SSD, if you haven't already. That's the best bang-for-the-buck "make my computer faster" upgrade right now.

What model is your Dell?

 

[allifatmat]

It's a Dell XPS 8500

 

[Ketchup]

OK, that model came with a 460-watt PSU, so what I stated in the last post would still apply. You may find this thread interesting.

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/desktop/f/3515/t/19602879

 

[allifatmat]

That's actually extremely helpful, thank you! I'll work on getting the upgraded ssd for now probably then try and get the PSU and GPU at once

 

[fralexandr]

The 460w has a combined 385w (32A) on 12v split to 3 rails 18A, 16A, and 8A.

Stock configurations support 7870 which are equivalent to 270/270x/370/370x gpus.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1034?vs=1079
I have a 7870, but fallout 4 doesn't run well enough on mostly high settings average ~45 fps with areas running close to 20 fps

Theoretically the psu could probably support GPUs that full load at ~<192W (not sure which rail the CPU is on) so a 380/280 might work but would be cutting it too close. If you can wait ~2-3 months, polaris 10 might be a good upgrade since it's rumored to use ~110-130W