Would this be a good improvement for this rig?

Question

I am planning to improve my current PC. I am already going to buy a new RAM stick, to get 8GB of RAM, and I am going to add a SSD (probably a 120gb drive). Beyond those, I have about £300 to make some more improvements. My current PC specs:

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/yh7899

CPU: Intel Core i5-4440 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor

Motherboard: MSI Z87-G41 PC Mate ATX LGA1150 Motherboard

Memory: Kingston Blu 4GB (1 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory

Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive

Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB Video Card

Case: NZXT H230 (White) ATX Mid Tower Case

Power Supply: Corsair CX 600W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply

I would like to swap the 7870 for a R9 390. My goal is to able to play pretty much any 2014 game on Ultra (I am mainly interested in Starcraft 2, Dota 2, and Dark Souls 2) or at the very least on Very High at 1080p. My only issue is my PSU: would the CX600 be enough to power this rig if I used a R9 390?

Answer 1

Considering your games are not the most demanding, I'd recommend using a slight bit extra money to get a 256GB SSD. Even if you don't need that extra space, it'll be faster and more write-durable, due to the extra chips. Your PSU isn't exactly high quality, so I'd hesitate to recommend AMD's high end. Tonga would be fine on your computer though.

For those reasons, I recommend the Tonga PRO R9 380, specifically, the Sapphire R9 380 Dual X 2GB retailing at £142.22 at Amazon.uk. Yeah, it's a lot less than your budget, but it's going to be all you need to do what you want.

If you feel the need to have more VRAM (for big textures, maybe) or want to have an easy upgrade, I'd recommend any 4 GB version of the same card. Unfortunately, SLI is not possible, and using PCIe X4 would likely be very bad in terms of performance, even with AMD Crossfire, therefore, multi card configs are not recommended. You'd have to purchase a new single GPU, upgrade your Motherboard and/or upgrade your PSU.

The equivalent from Nvidia is the GTX 960, with both 2 GB and 4 GB versions as well. The advantages are that it may be slightly faster in certain games, it runs slightly cooler and may be a better overclocker. The difference is really small though. It may be slower in other games, and you'll have to wipe the AMD drivers beforehand. The two cards both have their merits, and it's really just brand preference if the prices are similar.

Answer 2

I would upgrade the memory to at least 8GB.

An SSD would be a good idea to put the OS on, as well as a few programs/games that you want to start up fast.

Another thing that will help a lot when gaming on high quality is graphics memory. If the game textures are big, they can't fit on graphics memory, and are stored in normal memory instead. That makes things a lot slower.

You should probably get a reasonably new graphics card with at least 4GB of memory on it. Something like an r9 390, or 380 if you don't have the money.

As for the PSU, apparently, it's fine.

As for the processor, it's probably fine.

Answer 3

I would go with GTX 970 (4GB DDR5 version), which is just around 325$. This is the top 10 best currently commercially available graphics card and will last you for years. The processor should not be a bottleneck, at least for now. Though I would consider, unless you have one, adding a custom CPU cooling, and adding a front/top fan to have at least 3 - see for reference on how many is enough here: how many fans should I have?.