Computer upgrade

Sam.G

New Member
I'm looking to upgrade my computer but I'm not sure what to upgrade. I did the 3DMark skydiver benchmark and the only test it didn't do to well in is the physics test. Here are my components:
AMD FX 6300 Black Edition (six core)
MSI 970A-G43
8 GB of DDR3 Vengance ram (4GBx2)
Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 (MSI 4GB)
I have stress tested the components and the heat barely increased.
Thank you in advance.
 
How does your system perform currently? What games do you play? What kind of budget do you have and what exactly do you expect to get out of this upgrade?
 
How does your system perform currently? What games do you play? What kind of budget do you have and what exactly do you expect to get out of this upgrade?
My system playing GTA 5 will run at 60 or more FPS with about medium settings but I would like to be able to play things mostly on high settings. Also Just Cause 3 only runs at about 20-30 fps. The maximum price i will pay for a part is £180.
 
The maximum price i will pay for a part is £180.

Good luck on that one especially the video card. You are looking at least a gtx 980. You'll also need a better cpu. But at this point, you'll be looking at a new build, intel is recommended.
 
Good luck on that one especially the video card. You are looking at least a gtx 980. You'll also need a better cpu. But at this point, you'll be looking at a new build, intel is recommended.
Thanks, I guess I'll just have to play games on lower settings.
 
You could probably grab an aftermarket CPU cooler and bump the FX 6300 a few hundred MHz to get a little performance boost. Upgrading the processor would either be a marginal upgrade to an 8320, which isn't worth it as it's just two extra cores, or spending the money on a new motherboard, chip, and RAM. Which isn't in your budget. A GPU more powerful than the 960 also isn't in your budget.

I'm pretty familiar with GTA V and how it performs and you should be able to do more than medium settings I'd think. What are your temperatures when playing games?

Just Cause 3 is pretty demanding, particularly on your processor. What's your power supply out of curiosity?
 
I played JC3 fine at 1080p with a i5 2500K OC'ed to 4.3GHz and a 4GB GTX 760 so your system should handle it OK, especially if you overclock the FX-6300.

The best way to get more performance would be to buy a higher-end GPU but I wouldn't really bother doing that when actually you could probably do with upgrading your CPU too. The only CPU you can upgrade to without changing your board isn't worth the while or money so you'd need a new board too and likely new RAM since the latest platforms are DDR4. Intel have their Skylake platform at the moment which you can buy right now which will perform very well but will be quite expensive. Or you can wait for AMD's new performance-orientated platform and see what that's like. It should be coming out this year.
 
I haven't experimented as much with JC3, particularly at 1080p, but I thought 20-30 FPS sounded kind of low too. The GTX 960 is roughly on par with the R9 380. My roommate has a FX 6300 and a R9 380 and it runs JC3 definitely better than that.
 
Back
Top