New rig or upgrade

Here's the deal. I graduate soon (yeah to not being broke anymore), I finally have enough to buy a solid cpu, or upgrade, I do not care which way I go.

I'm not very good at computer hardware (ie I won't be installing anything myself) or understanding hardware specs.

I am going to be buying a new computer or upgrading either way, so I want it to run POE pretty optimally.

Here are my specs:

Asus Desktop PC CG8350 Series
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40 GHz
8.00 GB RAM
64 bit
1 trig hardrive

Should I upgrade or just by a new one?

I'm hesitant to give a budget, when I was searching the internet, and the forums I found a tendency for people to look at your budget, and shoot right to that number.

You don't list your graphics card there.
The rest of the PC seems fine though...nothing is particularly old, good processor, more than enough ram and a large HDD.

If you wanted to upgrade i'd go for a SSD as a main drive and keep the HDD as a storage drive.
Probably a new gfx card and PSU to keep up with it depending on how much you want to spend

It just says Intel(R) HD graphics, its a card that came with the cpu

id say upgrade ur graphics card (ur power supply will probably not supoprt it so grab one of those as well, if it supports it then great!)
ur rig is fine except u have no graphics card.. no need to buy a new rig lol

The intel graphics are the default processor based one, meaning you don't actually have a dedicated gfx card...that would be a priority but you would need to know the PSU wattage and rating as you might need to upgrade that as well when you get a dedicated gfx card

Sounds good on getting a solid graphics card,

would upgrading to 16gig ram be worth it also?

Thanks for the help!

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Lightfighter1580 wrote:

Sounds good on getting a solid graphics card,

would upgrading to 16gig ram be worth it also?

Thanks for the help!

If you're only gaming no, 4 gig is still good enough for most games 6 gig is enough for just about everything 8 gigs will do you for a few years yet any more is not really needed unless you want to do something like a ram disc

You're using an i7 CPU of the second generation which is decent, but the latest is the 4th generation (Haswell)

Your RAM is fine and upgrading it is simply sticking in another bar of the same type assuming you still have a spare slot for that

I recommend the ATI R9 series for your GPU or the GeForce GTX series.

Also a good upgrade is to use a SSD drive instead of a HDD.

My setup:
Intel i5 4670K @ 3.4Ghz
Sapphire ATI R290 Trixx
8GB RAM
Samsung EVO 840 SSD of 250GB

Altogether I recommend I new rig, but definitely not a computer you buy in stores. To get the optimal price-quality-performance balance you'd better order something online..

There are a lot of sites you can use to hand pick each component. You can either put it together or have it done for you with an assembly service + warranty.

That way you possibly save hundreds of Dollars or Euros...

I always use www.tweakers.net to determine what components I want. They post reviews for several budgets and types of systems each month. You can also compare prices of many online suppliers for each component.

I think you will need to use a translator because its in Dutch, but here you find the review of this month for desktops: http://tweakers.net/reviews/3595/desktop-best-buy-guide-juli-2014.html

Thanks alot for the help guys. Going to ponder a video card or upgrade for a bit.

When upgrading your PC you are usually looking at 3 main parts. The Mother Board, CPU, and Vid Card.

Your CPU is already great, no real need to upgrade there, if you did not build your PC, and bought a proprietary one, chances are a new MB would be a pretty good idea. Most proprietary PC's come with pretty crap MB's.

Other than that I would check the quality of your cooling system, and start looking into mid to high range vid cards based on your budget. I would also consider getting another 8 gigs of ram for a total of 16.

You can also increase game performance by running your games on a separate hard drive than your operating system. Its usualy best to get an SSD drive for this.

If you are going to be upgrading your vid card, you will also need to make sure your PSU(power supply) can handle it. For gaming PC's its best to get a modular power supply. Modular power supply's allow to better promote air flow throughout your PC.