Advice on upgrading Gaming PC

Gateway FX 6803-35

Operating system: Windows 7 home premium 64 bit

Processor: intel core i7 930

Graphics:ATI Raedon 5850 HD 1024 MB

Hard Drive: 1.5 TB

Memory:9GB DDR3 memory

Optical Drive:Blu-Ray ROM drive + DVD Super Multi drive

Card reader:Multi in one media card reader

Hello Giantbombers, This is my first time upgrading parts for my Gaming PC that ive owned for more than 5 years,i took a step away from gaming for a while but decided to come back to the scenes,The games usually play are HearthStone,SC2,WoW,Overwatch,Amnesia,GTA V,DOTA 2,and a few other Steam games....my Goal is to catch up to todays modern tech upgrades as well to run todays high end games coming out, and which upgrades are worth upgrading now & which to postpone on till theres a better upgrade or gets older...money is not a problem as long as its worth the price of the upgrade for it and notice a differece in it.

I also plan on using my PC to connect to the TV for occasional Multiplayer games,the PC Would be connected to a 55 samsung 4k curved

Further more maybe as well thinking of investing in the Oculus Rift in the future.

You need a completely new build, not an upgrade.

You are at the point where i would start thinking about building a new PC but since the graphicscard is 90% of the performance why not swap that one out first and see if its enough for you? If not then just go all new.

If you dont have any use for your old PC you can carry over the case, drives, OS and PSU into the new build to save some $. Those parts are not performancerelated.

If money aint a problem Nvidia 1080 or Titan X with an custom cooler are your choices.

If so,Can i get advice on building my new Gaming PC for the things i need it for what i mention above,Sorry im new to all of this

Wow so 5 years is a bit too old already and behind todays tech,yea i wouldnt have and use for my old PC since its the only i use for gaming so i would go that dirrection to save some money and invest it in upgrades,question.When your saying the case you mean by the tower?,okay and what kind of coolant would excellent with the nvida 1080

You should really be asking Dan about this as Giant Bomb's resident PC expert, I'd hit him up on twitter.

What?

You probably want to purchase a brand new PC. I'm not sure your motherboard would even support modern graphics cards (PCI express 3.0); and it certainly wouldn't support any modern CPUs as old as it is. Considering you are thinking about a rift in the future, I would assume you have the money to spend on it; so you are way better off just getting a completely new PC.

@ev77: So far i have came up with this particular build....http://pcpartpicker.com/list/wgBcM8 any other advice or recommentation on what to swtich out,im working on a $2000 budget maybe a bit more if worth the upgrade and notice a difference.

Here's a starting point.

It's pretty close to what I built very recently. I opted for a GTX 1070 instead of the 1080 because I'm not rich, I found that I could get faster memory (3200 instead of 2400) for nearly no extra cost (check before you buy if you can do this too), and I had to get the 750W version of the PSU because the 650W version wasn't easy to find in Australian stores, but otherwise that's all my stuff and I'm happy enough with it (except for the 1070, that's in the mail). I might've sprung for a more expensive liquid cooler instead of the bulky 212X heatsink/fan cooler for aesthetic reasons (the case has a window and everything else in there is pretty), but I can't complain about the performance.

Caveats:

• You'll need to pick out storage according to your needs, or carry over your current storage. If you keep your 1.5TB (presumably mechanical) storage drive, I'd consider looking at getting at least a 256GB SSD as well, because they've really came down in price in the years since you bought your last machine.
• Be warned that the NZXT case doesn't have optical drive bays -- you know if you use CDs/DVDs/Blu-Rays, if you do then you can probably carry over your current optical drive or get one really cheap but you'll have to opt for a different case or get an external optical drive.
• As already mentioned, you can probably carry your OS, case, optical drives, and PSU, although installing Windows 7 is a tiny bit more complicated on Intel's current CPUs/motherboard chipsets. Also if that version of Windows 7 you have is OEM (i.e. not retail) then you might need to get a new Windows license.

Things to be aware of wrt when to purchase stuff:

• The GTX 1070 and 1080 come with Gears of War 4 (for the Windows 10 store, so you'll need Windows 10) if you buy before the 30th. (EDIT: make sure the store you buy from offers this deal before you buy. Apparently Amazon stopped offering it after people abused their system by buying the card for the code and then cancelling the card order, which is a shame because I would've saved more money if I'd bought my 1070 from Amazon.)
• There are rumours of Nvidia releasing a GTX 1080 Ti in the next few months (January?), which you might find more appealing, but if you get an EVGA card and live in the right country (US, Canada, EU countries?) then EVGA has a step-up program which will let you send back your card and pay the difference to upgrade it within 90 days of purchase. Please actually look up and research this scheme if you intend on actually using it, because I don't know entirely how it works and you could get burnt.
• Intel is teetering on the edge of releasing a new generation (7000 series) of CPUs and motherboard chipsets called Kaby Lake, but apparently they won't substantially outperform the current (Skylake) chips or really add any features that gamers are likely to care about, and the video card matters more anyway, and they're saying that Kaby Lake won't support Windows 7 so if you're adamant about sticking to Windows 7 then you might want to double down on Skylake.
• If you want a really fast boot/gaming storage drive, wait for the wave of M.2 NVMe SSDs that are apparently coming out in November (or if you're made of money, consider a Samsung 960 Pro). They should all land at around US$130 for 250GB (e.g. the Samsung 960 Evo is meant to sell for this price), except for the Pro which starts at $330 for 512GB. ftr I'm currently running on old storage and waiting for these November NVMe drives.

lol, you posted this while I was working on my post. Starting with your list, some remarks:

• You probably don't need the i7. The consensus seems to be that gaming usually makes no use of the extra virtual threads, and that when it does the performance improvements are tiny. Get the i7 if you're a video editor or have other workloads that are known to use hyperthreading well, or if you don't care about money, but otherwise I think most people are going to tell you to stick to an i5 6600K.
• The Cryorig H7 is apparently a great cooler.
• Motherboards... Ugh. When I was planning my build I had a thread here that got kinda mired in the whole motherboard thing. I spent ages researching them, and my conclusion was that I couldn't understand why anyone would get a board more expensive than the board you've picked out. Stick with the M5, or don't, I don't have any advice either way other than that the M5 should be fine.
• Your memory is probably fine, or even a little overkill. You probably won't see any benefit if you pay a premium for memory, unless you have a weird workload for it (not gaming), so I wouldn't spend more on memory unless you can get a substantial jump in speed for chump change. G.Skill seems like a fine brand, and 2x8GB is what every gamer is getting lately.
• Storage is fine, you can probably use your old drive if you're disassembling the old machine though. The NVMe stuff I talked about in my previous post is an option, but the SSD in your list makes sense if you don't go NVMe.
• Cases are hard to pick, and I think they're all kinda ugly and unsatisfying at the moment. I was going to go for the H440 -- it does seem to be the prettiest case on the market right now -- but I decided to save the money. The H440 might reduce the ambient blowing sound I get from my S340 at the moment, but I don't mind it. Probably a good idea to look at a variety of cases and reviews and video reviews, because I did find them helpful.
• Consider paying slightly more for retail Windows instead of OEM, especially if you envision upgrading your CPU frequently.

@fnrslvr: @yuyo562: Both of these builds look pretty great. A 1080 is a little overkill in my mind unless you're using a 1440p/120hz monitor, but if you can afford it then why not. And at this point you might want to opt for a single 16GB stick of DDR4 and think about buying a second stick down the line. A lot of games are starting to push recommended RAM amounts well over 10GB, so future proofing with 32 gigs might be a thing worth considering.

Also, I couldn't imagine living with only a 1TB hard-drive, but maybe I just have special needs.

Can you run a single stick of DDR4? Something something dual channel etc. Also, these board have 4 memory slots, so moving to 32GB at least is fine, and maybe DDR5 will be here by the time 64GB is worthwhile so you'll need to get new memory then anyway.

I'm living with ~200GB of storage right now. My next storage upgrade will likely be an M.2 drive with 256GB or 512GB of storage, and honestly I expect it to take me a while to fill that. People's needs vary wildly.

@fnrslvr: I don't know about all that dual channel stuff. But if your MB has 4 slots then you should be fine with buying two 8 gig sticks for now.

My storage needs are largely dictated by shooting a lot of raw photos and video, which leads to me needing terabytes upon terabytes of hard-drive space. But if you've been out of the PC game scene for a while, do note that many big releases require 60-90 gig installs nowadays. So if you have issues with internet speeds for example and thus don't want to re-download games all the time, future proofing your storage might be nice. I keep 1-4 games on my SSD and move them to my hard-drives when I stop playing them regularly.

@yuyo562: I've been out of the computer-build game for a few years now so I'm not sure what all is the best value/money anymore but I do have a couple of hard/fast rules I go by.

1) Don't ever buy the "top-of-the-line". Moore's law and all that; it just isn't worth paying the extra premium to get the "best" when you can get one step down for a fraction of the price.

2) Set a budget and stick to it. The price margins can be so small at times (just another $20-30 bucks gets me X% better) but if you do that on each item you end up $2-300 over what you were hoping for. Just set a budget beforehand, and stick to it.

3) Don't forget the little things like thermal paste and motherboard stand-offs/screws (my last computer I built the motherboard didn't come with standoffs and I had to wait a few days for amazon to mail me some =/).

As far as your linked build goes, it looks fine. If you really wanted to be frugal you could drop the card to a 1070 (though maybe ask around and see if anyone has a 1070 and a rift/vive to see how it performs if this will be your future VR computer) and drop the SSD (or lower its size). I mean SSDs have come down in price but IMO they are still a little too expensive if you are wanting to save money to spend other places. 7200 RPM drives are super cheap and perform just fine. You'll notice the extra ram/CPU/GPU specs in gaming far more than you will SSD vs HDD IMO.

Also I would get 2 sticks of RAM, as fnrslvr said before some motherboards require dual-channel (or atleast they did back when I last made my computer); though I think they've stopped requiring you to put them in specific slots to get them to read correctly? Or atleast I hope they have, I believe the last time I had to deal with that was either 2 or 3 computers ago. Anyway, I'd imagine the other guys in here will probably have more specific helpful info for you as they seem more up-to-date than me.

If you're connecting it to a 4K TV, and planning to run games in 4K, then a GTX 1080 is currently the only option for you. A Titan X is twice as expensive, so I wouldn't consider that a good investment. That being said, if you're okay waiting three months, NVIDIA will most likely to announce the GTX 1080ti at CES in January, which will be faster than a 1080 at a much more reasonable price than a Titan X. They will in all likelihood drop the price of the 1080 as well. AMD is also expected to showcase, and perhaps launch their new cards before the end of the year, and they're usually competitive in terms of pricing.

Of course, if you think you'll get by at 1440p, and a lot of people can't really tell the difference between 1440p and 2160p(4K), then a GTX 1080 is overkill. A 1070 is great for 1440p, handling 1440p with max settings and getting a steady 60 fps. If you're set on 4K, however, you'll have to really compromise to get a steady fps with a 1070.

If you are getting one of these expensive high end GPUs, then you choice of CPU is really simple. If you only intend on playing games, get an i5-6600K. If you're also creating videos and large image files, you should get the i7-6700K, however there aren't enough performance gain to consider the i7 in gaming.

You need a Z170 motherboard to pair with your CPU. It doesn't really matter which one. You can pay a premium and get LED warning lights, more USB 3.0 slots and four PCI-E16 slots, but it's not really that important. Get what you need, but don't overpay on insignificant luxury features.

Get a good PSU. Check online for feedback on quality. A poor PSU can short-circuit and take your motherboard and components with it (absolute worst case scenario, but still). Even well known manufacturers can have stinkers, so check around. There is a PSU tier list (2.0) on Reddit. It hasn't been updated in over a year, but anything on the first two tiers will be a solid choice.

Memory isn't complicated. Get at least 8 gb (or 16, but you don't need more) DDR4 memory. 2133MHz is the most common speed, but most people will tell you to spring for 2666 or 3000, since the price difference is only a few dollars. Again, DDR4 8 or 16 gb.