I've been feeling like I need to upgrade for a while but my funds are very limited and it will have to last for years so I don't want to upgrade right before a generation shift.

I have an i7-2600K @ 3.2Ghz, with 4.2Ghz turbo (am I right in thinking it dynamically goes to 4.2Ghz when needed? I don't understand that feature). I also have an EVGA factory overclocked GTX670.

The GTX970 is a very affordable upgrade, but it's not super new either. As for CPUs I have no idea what the market is like right now or what makes mine old. I want to hear recommendations and thoughts on what benefits I can see from upgrading. a 670 to a 970 might not be much of a difference at 1080. Not sure.

Your rig seems fine for another year, but if you really do want to upgrade I recommend an MSI 970 as it is basically perfect.

Your CPU is great and there is absolutely no reason to upgrade it right now.

@alistercat: There's really no need to upgrade your CPU at the moment, at least not for gaming. As for your GPU, a quick benchmark comparison shows a fairly substantial performance increase from the GTX 670 to the 970. So it's a decent upgrade unless you can hold off until next years series.

@chumley_marchbanks: @corevi: Thank you for the feedback. I may just get a 970 in January then, if there are some good sales.

I didn't know my CPU was still 'great'. Whenever I try to overclock it the motherboard powers down just entering that part of the bios, so I may be out of luck getting more out of it.

@alistercat: Sounds like either your mobo or PSU is messed up.

@alistercat: You feel like you need to upgrade? I have an i-5 processor with a GTX660Ti and I feel like it runs games pretty great still. I've never messed with overclocking though, I guess I'm not that sophisticated of a PC gamer.

@hippie_genocide: Well, it's just Dragon Age really. It doesn't run very well, though I hear that's the case for most people.

@alistercat: as for the turbo mode in your processor; its a simple over clocking feature that Intel builds into the K series of processors. Instead of fiddling with voltages and clock speeds, you can just set the system to use the turbo mode with a setting in the bios and you can be pretty certain it will be a stable overclock.

In other words, you have to choose to use the turbo feature, it's not dynamically applied.

@rollingzeppelin: Thanks for the clarification. I looked through the bios, and it is enabled on all accounts as I thought. I increased the turbo frequency to a value I have seen in reliable benchmarks, as well as the power range available. It seems my bios contains some software to change voltages etc as it sees fit. I have no way of knowing what difference it'll make though.

Yeah your CPU is fine for now. Wait one or two more years to bump up on that. GPU could always be bigger though. I just went from a 770 to a 970 and I've been really surprised by the jump up in power. Going from a 670 to a 970 will easily be double the "practical" performance at 1080. By practical I mean actual in game performance, not a benchmark. Assuming you have a 2GB card, the additional RAM will also give you the headroom needed to play newer titles.

Seems fine. You could upgrade your GPU, but I don't see a reason why you have to upgrade anything unless you're a stickler for games only looking their 100% best (which on PC means they look 5000x better than anywhere else).

I wouldn't recommend being a stickler if you are on a limited budget. It's better to save your money for other things.

@rollingzeppelin: everything you said is wrong , the turbo boost is on almost all Intel CPUs and it runs whenever the PC uses a lot of resources or you set your PC on always performance on the power options, the K in the name of the CPU means u can change the multiplier to w/e you want and that's what makes it easy to overclock , if you want to overclock you need to disable the turbo boost because it cause the instability in your PC then change the multiplier slowly and test it out with Prime95 and see if it's stable and keep increasing the multiplier until your PC become unstable then go back to whatever setting you found your PC running fine or go a bit higher and fiddle with voltages but I advice against that as someone new to overclocking , if you want to go deep into it there is always videos and specialized forums on that matter , as the guys said your CPU is really good , even better than a lot of the new CPUs if you overclock it , some people manage to get it to 5GHz with no problems but with the default clock speed it won't bottleneck 970GTX or 980GTX for that matter ,In fact you will almost get double "fps" in a lot of games that are GPU dependent by upgrading from 670 to 970 and that's worth it, also your PC power down because of the instability caused by changing the boost clock(has nothing to do with your PSU OR MOBO) , you should disable it and increase the default CPU multiplier and see how it goes.

You would see a noticable difference in smoother gameplay, but im sure you can run almost anything on your current hardware at 1080, i upgraded to a 5820k and love it but i was starting to see slowdown in CPU heavy games with my 2500k and i also just had the itch. Is there anything you cant run or you would like better performance in? If the answers no and you don't upgrade for the fun of it then wait.

@shock: thanks for the clarification, Captain Run-on-sentence.

I guess what I was trying to say was that you have to turn the turbo boost mode on yourself. I didn't know that it works by dynamically controlling the CPU's frequency, that's pretty cool.

@rollingzeppelin: @shock: Lets clarify further. Turbo Boost is enabled by default on Intel Cpus that support the feature. What it does is boost the frequency provided there is thermal headroom to do so. This is particularly useful for single threaded (low threaded) tasks as the lack of utilisation of other cores may provide the required headroom.

Notably if the cpu starts reaching the thermal ceiling it throttles down turbo boost.

@shock, your post made my eyes bleed...

If you have a 4GB card you dont need to upgrade now, wait for next year when the real jump in Nvidia GPUs come.

If you have a 2GB card atm and have the cash, go for it.

Bare in mind that there seems to be serious issue with coil whine with the 970s across the board so you might end up with a card that makes some noise.