Possible System Upgrade Help

[Cerin_Amroth]

Hi all, hoping someone can give me some advice, I am wondering whether an upgrade of some sort would help me out at all, my current system runs most things quite well, games like Witcher3 and FFXIV Heavensward all run nicely but the general system in windows does seem ponderous now, file transfers, compression and decompression and multitasking struggle a little and the system is a reasonable new install of Windows 10.

Would a new Skylake board, chip and DDR4 memory perhaps be all I need? Do you think I would notice a difference in anything? My monitor is a new Gsync AOC 1080p unit so 1080p is my limit anyways, games run fine but I cant enable all options, I am guessing this is the 2Gb limit of the VRAM.

Just don't know if I should get a new chip, board and memory or would perhaps a 4gb 970 or something maybe be a better upgrade, the I3 just seems quite old even with its decent overclock.

Current Spec : -

Base PC - OCUK AvP Predator System (UDH-55 Gigabyte Board, i3-530 2.9Ghz clocked to 4.0Ghz
Memory - 8Gb DDR3 Geil Black RAM
Hard Disks - Samsung EVO 500Gb SSD, Crucial 500Gb SSD
Graphics - EVGA GFORCE 960 2Gb
PSU - 600W Non Modular Generic

 

[zola25]

What you've described certainly sounds like you're CPU bound in particular tasks. Skylake i5, Z170 board and some DDR4 would fit the bill nicely. You could save some money by going for a Haswell i5 and keeping your DDR3 RAM, but if I was going to the trouble myself I'd go for the newer Skylake.

Depending on your budget I'd advise swapping out your generic PSU for a new one by a reputable manufacturer, and definitely do this if you do decide to upgrade your GPU. A 970 is a considerable upgrade on a 960 and should allow you to max all settings on a 1080p Gsync monitor. It's not just the VRAM limitation - although that won't help - it's also down to rendering power.

 

[dacads]

Any budget? If it's tight you can go with a devil's canyon build and it'll also mean you can re-use your current DDR3 RAM. I'd also be looking at a new PSU, as it's the last component you want to be "generic", especially if you get a GTX 970