AMD 6800k upgrade

[savagesam117]

A buddy of mine has an AMD 6800k and is looking to upgrade his PC over the next couple of months.

I don't know anything about AMD CPU's at all so I don't know how this chip is going to fair in the mix of things. He is going to be gaming and light video work for YouTube etc.

Now I've said upgrade to a 4690k and that'll be him sorted then but he's a bit short on money and cant really afford £200 for a CPU. I suggested that he could get a dual core Pentium K chip then upgrade that later. He's a bit unsure.

His current PC.

AMD A10-6800k,
8gb ram
No card because apu,
And a 300w crap psu.

He's getting:
Gigabyte 970,
8gb ram,
New psu.
An SSD

What would you guys say?

 

[TheMorningStar]

Personally, I'd just start with the GPU, PSU and SSD in his existing system, if he is still dissatisfied with performance he can save for a bit and get a MOBO and CPU upgrade at a later date.

Not sure if he is swapping the RAM out but when on a budget replacing 8gb for another 8gb really isn't the best way to spend his money.

Get an SSD in the 256gb ish area or above as 128gb is rather limiting once the OS is installed.

 

[savagesam117]

I didn't mean the 8gb, he's got 6GB. I thought 6gb would be okay but he wants new stuff i didn't even mention RAM to him.

How do the 6800k chips perform? I see they are a bit down from the i5 but would it still be okay or would it be bottlenecking the GPU?

Already got an SSD in the new parts.

 

[TheMorningStar]

Well it all depends on how he uses his machine, I have 8gb in my machine now but I'll be taking that to 16gb, perhaps even 32gb for my next build but I game while chrome is running with upto 20 tabs running in the background and that is pretty high on memory usage. I get constant errors at 8gb. Many people don't mind closing everything else while they game but i'd rather not but I'll be paying for that privilege on my next build. 6gb would also be okay for gaming if nothing else is running.

I had a quick look at the 6800k performance and it's apparently pretty close to my aging yet loved PhenomII 940. Now I am somewhat bottlenecked when it comes down to my CPU running alongside a 7950, the 970 is somewhat more powerful than the 7950 so it will be worse for him, however.. this all depends on the games he is playing. I personally cap my framerate to my monitor refresh and I get a constant 60fps in everything I play. If he like RTS he is likely to really feel that bottleneck, even a £200 cpu may run crappy in such a scenario mind, but notably better than what he currently has, nothings really going to fix that until we have dx12 and games built for it.

He will see the biggest improvement from the gfx card alone, it will feel like a new PC, the SSD will also give him a similar wow factor, none of the other planned upgrades will come close to the satisfaction that those two pieces of kit will grant him.

remember he isn't just replacing the cpu, he has a mobo to buy on top of that so an extra £40 ish on top of that 200 cpu.

My way of thinking is buy the things he can get to work with his existing setup first, he's loosing nothing this way and there is nothing stopping him buying a mobo, cpu, ram upgrade later on. Applying this mentality to upgrading will save lots of money over the years

Definitely get the good PSU mind, 500-600watt ish for an average build, 800watt+ if he ever wants to sli/crossfire, will see him through multiple upgrades for the next decade if it lives that long.