Potential Upgrade Advice

Greetings, I'm having some mental conflict about what to upgrade in my PC, and how to go about doing it.

Current specs:
CPU: FX8350, 8 cores, 8 threads @ 4.0 GHz (Bought in December 2016)
Motherboard: Gigabyte 970A-DS3P (Bought in December 2015)
RAM: TeamGroup Elite Black 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz (Bought in December 2015)
GPU: Gigabyte Windforce GTX 1060 Windforce 3GB (Bought in December 2016)
PSU: SuperFlower 450w (Bought in December 2015)
HDD: Seagate 1TB (Bought in December 2015)

The PC was originally bought prebuilt in December 2015 with an FX4300 and a GTX750ti, but I upgraded these to the FX8350 and GTX1060 in December 2016. At the moment it's clear that the Intel CPUs are better for gaming, and I'm considering upgrading my system to an Intel i5.

Proposed Upgrade:
CPU: Intel i5-7500, 4 cores, 4 threads @ 3.4 Ghz
Motherboard: Asus Prime B250-Plus
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB DDR4 2400 MHz
All other parts remain the same

This would cost about £400 in total, and I'm wondering if it would be worth the money to upgrade to this, as the Intel platform is clearly superior for gaming performance. However I'm struggling to justify spending that much money when I spent about £350 upgrading the CPU and GPU already in December 2016 only 5 months ago. Another thing to note is that my Windows 10 is the OEM version and therefore I would have to buy another Windows 10 key after doing this upgrade, this adds more to the total cost of switching to Intel.

An alternative upgrade would be to buy 16GB of DDR3 RAM and keep everything else that I currently have the same. As the current 8GB of DDR3 RAM that I have is proving to be not enough in some situations. This would cost less than switching to Intel (about £100) and wouldn't be a complex upgrade, just adding more RAM.

What are your thoughts about my possible upgrades, and what would you suggest?

Thanks in advance.

Comments

  • Firstly: AMD processors have gotten a lot better recently. Especially the new Ryzen processors from AMD are really quite good, and are quite a lot cheaper than the Intel processors at the same power-level. Your motherboard doesn't support the new AM4 slots that Ryzen runs on however, which is a shame. This does make the Intel jump worth it however, as their older processors are better than AMDs older ones.

    Other than that, I would say that it is definitely worth it if you really want to switch to Intel. The new processor you are buying is A LOT faster than your old one (about 50 % I'd wager), and 16 GB of RAM is more than you will ever need in this day and age.

    The motherboard you are upgrading to supports pretty much all Intel processors as well and up to 1024 MB of graphics memory so it should last for quite a while. It should also be mentioned that your old board does NOT support DDR4 ram. Also your new MB has sweet-ass LED lighting. Nice.

    £ 400 isn't bad at all for this kind of performance increase, I'd definitely go for it if you feel like you need the extra processing power. Do be aware that very few GAMES actually use processing power. Only poorly optimised games like ARMA and Minecraft, as well as some naturally CPU intensive games like Planetside and some MMOs actually need a lot of CPU power.

    IMPORTANT NOTE: OBVIOUSLY MAKE SURE THAT THE NEW MB FITS IN YOUR CHASSIS

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