You can only upgrade one: the i5 2500K processor OR the GTX 570 video card?

Definitely the GPU. I'm still on an i5 2500K with a GTX 970 now and it's doing me just fine.

The only minor thing making me want to upgrade my CPU is that its starting to strain a little with recording/streaming while playing newer games. But that's not a massive issue. When just playing games I've never run into any CPU issues. Also worth noting that if you were to change CPU, there's a decent chance you'd need a new motherboard as well.

GPU, no question about it.

100% the 570.

You can crank that overclock up to keep the 2500k competitive. There's nothing you can do to fix the (now) small amount of VRAM on the 570.

Time to get a new GPU.

GPU, but that CPU is getting due for an upgrade soon.

GPU all the way.

OC the 2500k and buy a new GPU. The 2500k can sit at an easy 1ghz OC no problems with a semi decent cooler.

For games the video card is for sure the bottleneck. Buy a Geforce 1060 or AMD RX470/480 they cost around 180-250 bucks. They are all a good bang for your buck. Of course there is always 1070 or 1080 but they are expensive. If you are short on cash then look for used cards. The 570 is really old by now. I've seen a lot of used Geforce 770 or Radeon 7970 for around €80 here and that's going to be a big upgrade for less than $100.

The CPU is getting old but for games the GPU is much more important and there is absolutely no point in getting a new CPU unless you plan on going for a high end GOU like a 1070 or 1080 as well.

I've never seen a poll 1-99% lol. But yeah, I had a 2500k for probably close to 5 years until I started doing CG work and need more rendering power. Your average game rarely makes full use of all the cores on your CPU and the 2500k is quite possibly the best chip they ever produced, when you scale it to the tech level of the past decade.

Also, in all honesty the GPU is the cheaper upgrade at this point. Modern cards all still use PCI-e ports. If you wanna upgrade to a new Intel chip, that means a new mobo and new ram at the very least because they use different tech now. Personally, if I was gonna go the 2500k route and forgo more pricey upgrades, I would just save up for a 1060 or 1070 or even a 980 or ti and call it a day without having to worry about anymore until you feel like you can handle doing a complete rebuild.

The GPU is always the biggest performance factor in games, so it's typically what you want to look at first. Your CPU should be fine, but if most of your components are as old as your CPU/GPU, you might run into bottlenecks and not get full performance out of your new card. You should also make sure your PSU has the right pin-connectors for your new card. Most new cards require at least one 6+2 connector.

My i5-2500K, for gaming, is current.

Because a cheap cooler (because you should get a nice cooler on there to make the most of it and deal with any extra heat from overclocking - finally dump that stock cooler and the dust it has probably accumulated in the last 5 years) gives basically every 2500K they sold the ability to cruise to 4.5GHz while still being quiet. Which is enough of an overclock to put it a lot closer to current CPUs (which have been able to overclock slightly less each gen so the gap hasn't been as much as the 10% per generation IPC Intel target for their designs). You should also check you've got enough RAM still and it's running as fast as the memory controller on the CPU will allow, because that's also somewhere where stock speeds are now higher but you can overclock your way close enough to significantly reduce the gap.

At this point, I can see no reason to upgrade that 2500K today when AMD have announced that within 6 months they will be pushing a compelling CPU with 8 cores (16 threads, something like Intel's hyperthreading is coming to AMD) that will hopefully be priced to move. That should (assuming they're accurate in the pre-release messaging and technical presentations about it - something we'll know for sure the moment the reviews are here) offer something that is offering a move from Intel mainstream (i5, the cheap i7s that fit the same motherboards) to their HEDT (High-End Desktop) premium chips (i7 Extreme and some Xeons - basically high-clocked server chips) without the price premium Intel currently demand (because the mobo doesn't need to wire up quad channel RAM etc).

I don't think, for gaming, there's a case for buying an $1100 CPU. But if AMD can get that down to $400 (or less for their full range), I'm a lot more interested in getting more cores for non-gaming as long as the cores are quick enough to be good for gaming too. Now everyone is building game engines to work on 8 very slow Jaguar cores on consoles, engines should be moving to be better with exploiting many threads (this move is visible by use of DX12 and Vulkan on PC as both of those make it a lot easier for several different threads to all feed the GPU). But it's really about the GPU that is being fed by the game when it comes to 3D. That's the major bottleneck for almost all systems.

i5 will still be okay for you. By far the GPU. I have a i5 and a 760 and I really don't have CPU problems. I want to upgrade my GPU but it does alright (medium to high settings depending on the game and the settings).

Change graphics if you can only get one, but remember you may need to change your PSU as well so keep that in mind. From my little understanding, it seems like the intel chip upgrades just haven't been all that huge over each generation. I guess since AMD just can't compete.

Real advice, it might be time to do a full upgrade

I replaced my GTX 560 paired with me a A8-5800K @ 4.3 with a GTX 950 and it was substantial upgrade. i have now been able to replace the A8 with i3 6100 and i am glad i did the GPU first.

Gpu. You can get by with an older processor pretty well in games. Although it might be a good idea to upgrade that soon as well.

Woah, VERY important advice I was not aware, thank you.

@howardian: My GTX 1080 took two 8 pin connectors, for reference.

Video cards are beefy.

I'm still using a 2500k @4.4ghz with a 980 and it's doing fine.

This is good advice for me as well, as I have this processor. Thanks guys.

GPU,

plus if you end up getting a new rig later you can reuse that component initially probably more easily than a new CPU

GPU, but if you go 980ti or higher your 2500k will bottleneck you.

Trust me, I know. I have a 980 TI and started having problems with my 2500k bottle necking.... so I bought a 6700k the other day along with 16GB of DDR4 and holy shit the difference is night and day.

people kept telling me the 2500k wasnt worth upgrading now, but that is so false. The difference is fuckin huge. But in your case the graphics card is the priority.

I went from a 470 to a 770 this year and it's been great. Enjoy the new GPU!

@cigaro: This is the first time I see someone with a different opinion. The thing everyone says is that the 2500K is fine. I don't want fine. I need to know if this upgrade will change anything. I do have a 970 though but I want to get into making videos and streaming. OBS chugs and it says its the CPU. What motherboard / RAM did you get?

GPU for sure!

I did the gpu upgrade also first. Saw a huge appreciable difference. Now I am just counting the days I allow myself a new build (because that is what it will have to be) with a new CPU and accompanying MB and memory. That is why probably the gpu first. Imho. Unless everything is so damned old everything needs replacing, Or your gpu is already capable of the games you want to play, as is mine. I ditched my 570 a few years ago for a gpu roughly equivalent to something contemporary. My present cpu is a i7 950

Unquestionably the graphics card

Get a 970. Great card

I had the same setup as you had and upgraded my video card (to 760) a year back. I can run most modern games at high graphics quality now.

Jump yourself to a 970 and you will probably be golden unless you get into weird multi-thread games which are few and far between still. At the least it will keep you going.

@cheetoman as well:

I don't think a 970 in late 2016 is a very good suggestion. Not only is the 970 two years old at this point, but now we have cards like the GTX 1060 for as low as $199 that outperform the 970 by 20% or more before overclocking. Beyond that, all Nvidia partners discontinued production of the 970 months ago. It's a legacy card.

Unless your GTX 570 is super special that card has 1.25 GB of video memory, not 1.5. Just saying'.

Easily the 570, drop in a 1060, 480 or 1070 in it's place.

I agree but I thought it was a good budget item upgrade for right now that would put you into the range to get strong performance without spending a ton. $200 isn't always in the price range for everyone and you can probably nab a 970 on good sale prices these days.

It's good right up to the point where the DX12 API is implemented at which point Maxwell's performance goes right off a cliff. It's not a good option for someone who sits on hardware for a couple of years at this point.

My cousin just bought a GTX 1070 and gets over 100 FPS on DOOM (1080P), he is using an 8 year old i7!!! (generally a slower model than your newer 2500k)

I was surprised when he told me, I thought he had at least an Ivy Bridge model. He showed me Tomb Raider (latest one) and that ran swell too.

Intel's CPU performance gains in the desktop space have been marginal at best for years, zero competition in that space has led to some really lax development. The focus these days is on lower power stuff.

@korwin: There's a fun section in an older Forbes article that really illustrates your point:

There is an old fable in the silicon business, which goes like this: Intel wanted to stay out from under the potential scrutiny of the regulatory authorities, particularly the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, and so it allowed AMD to stay in business. The reason AMD was in business at all is that IBM, the original requisitioner of the PC specification, required a second source for processors. So, Intel, reluctantly, licensed AMD the x86 design. For decades, IBM bought no processor volume from AMD, and when it finally did, AMD had already evolved into a specialty house serving white box builders, developing markets, and smaller brands. The scrappy little licensee survived long enough to develop its own technology. So, around the time Justice was taking Microsoft to task for monopoly practices, AMD was a small but viable competitor that Intel could point to, wide eyed, and say, “There! We’ve got one. You can’t say we’re a monopolist.” Whenever AMD got ahead, as in the mid-2000s, when its processor market share got to 20%, Intel would turn up the heat. Whenever AMD’s share fell to 5%, Intel would let up, just a bit. Most of this heat came from pricing, which Intel, with higher margins most of the time, could easily control, and from support in the form of co-marketing dollars that it could supply to large PC makers. There were rumors of other practices, like late deliveries and temporarily missing documentation that may have also helped tip the board. But, whatever the causes, which are lost in the mythical mists of time, AMD’s market share bounced between those two limits like a yoyo. Which brings us to today.

The gloves are definitely off now. Intel no longer seems to care about maintaining AMD’s market share and has pounded it into the ground in most markets, notably server, where Intel’s unit share hit 98.3% in 3Q14, according to Mercury Research’s PC Processor Report, and 98.5%, according to IDC. In notebooks, Mercury’s 3Q14 figure is 92.9%, while IDC pegs it at 90.3%. Mercury says Intel’s desktop share was 82.7%, while IDC puts it at 81.8%, but those desktop figures are small comfort to AMD, since desktop is the least profitable of the three segments. At this point, Intel’s revenue is an order of magnitude larger than AMD’s, and its market cap is nearly two orders of magnitude greater.

It's amazing what you don't have to can do when your nearest "competitor" needs quotation marks. I really wish AMD could come out swinging with some miracle, just so Intel can't keep delivering the same 8-15% per generation boost at the same old price points.

@mirado: Ye, the great last hope is Zen. 8 cores, 16 threads; potentially a range of models that clock slow but cheap (like i5-competitor cheap) and up to fighting the i7 Extreme rebranded server chips.

That 8-15% per generation boost isn't even what Intel have truly been offering as they've been slowly pushing the clock speeds up (as well as doing arch edits to increase IPC) while not improving (or actively making worse in the case of the heat spreader) the headroom on the chips. So an i5-6600K may be 200MHz higher than an i5-2500K out of the box, but overclock them and they'll both hit 4.5-4.8GHz so that boosted clock speed advantage at stock goes away. If it wasn't for the ageing memory controller (even that is partially countered if you buy new, fast DDR3 RAM) then the i5-2500K would be hard to tell apart, baring the old iGPU block that people who game don't use.

@shivoa: Yeah, it's a sad state of affairs. I'm hoping Zen shakes things up, but only time will tell.

There's never been a better time to be playing video games. There's never been a better time to buy a graphics card.

Value wise, RX 470 4GB fits the bill for 1080p gaming.

New card, no question.

The 2500k is getting long in the tooth and will probably need a replacement within 2 years or so, but it's still pretty solid now for a strictly gaming rig.

True if you upgrade one generation to the next or only play games, the 2009 i7s are much slower than the 6700k, I upgraded from a 2600k and it is noticeably faster outside of gaming.

I got the Asus Z170-AR and crucial ballistix DDR4 2400 16GB

@cigaro: Thanks duder thats good stuff.

As with like everyone else, gpu, no question.