which to upgrade first, cpu or mobo Help!

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astakiller89

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Oct 22, 2013
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I have a custom built amd based machine. I'm currently in sort of a dilemma on what to purchase first since i am working on limited funds from week to week. My machine currently consists of the following.

amd fx4100 zambezi clocked at the turbo 3.8.
MSI 760g p23 mobo
1 500 gb seagate sata 3.0Gb/s 32mb cache
serveral external hdd
Sapphire radeon 7850 oc edition.

i would like to upgrade my existing processor to the fx 6300 4.1 GHz turbo 6 core 95w vishera.
which i know is a minimal performance gain for gaming but it has an overall 15% increase in multi threaded applications performance over my current cpu.

My question is would i be better off performance wise upgrading to a motherboard with the amd 990fx chipset, a board with sata 6Gb/s and usb 3.0 and all the newer features and just rebuild my system on the newer board with my existing processor, or should i upgrade the processor first and then worry about the mainboard later on a month or so from now. which would give me the better performance while i wait to afford the other.

Any advice or opinions professional or not would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,



p.s this is the board i am considering http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157281
 
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Personally I'd get the mobo first. this way you might be able to save up a bit more for the 8320 or 8350.

You'll get more performance going cpu first, but like i said if you go mobo first you can try to save up a bit more for the 8 core and see some substantial performance gains.
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ethereal essence

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Personally I'd get the mobo first. this way you might be able to save up a bit more for the 8320 or 8350.

You'll get more performance going cpu first, but like i said if you go mobo first you can try to save up a bit more for the 8 core and see some substantial performance gains.
 
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geofelt

geofelt

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Oct 9, 2006
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6gb sata is only useful with a ssd in sequential operations. For other devices, sata 2 is no hinderance.

I would not do a small upgrade. You will be disappointed if you do not see nice results.

Upgrading to a ssd for the os and some apps would give you wonderful improvement in everyday usage.

Once you are looking at a mobo change, and a $200 cpu, I would look at Intel.
 
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astakiller89

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The thing is, i have windows 8 on my main hdd and i dont believe its an oem version. i have only one install to my knowledge, i could very well be wrong. i have many software applications, and games installed that i would not want to lose. i was told that as long as my OS was installed on an amd chipset and processor, simply swapping my hdd to the a new amd mobo and processor wont cause any issues, but trying to do the same with an upgrade to intel board and cpu wont work.
 
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ethereal essence

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I doubt swapping to another motherboard and/or cpu would be seemless without a reinstall of the OS. I could be wrong (I've always just resintalled the OS anyways on the few systems I've upgraded).
 
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geofelt

geofelt

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If you change motherboards to one with a sufficiently similar chipset, you have good odds of being able to boot into windows and update your drivers,

I have had good success with swapping intel motherboards.

But amd to intel has failed every time.

Just changing a cpu on an existing motherboard should be seamless.

If you buy a ssd that can hold the contents of your current os drive, then you can clone your drive to a ssd.
Intel and Samsung offer free clone utilities for their drives.

Whatever you do, do not bother with interim changes, that you will need to throw out later.



 
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astakiller89

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interim changes meaning what, don't spend my money on hardware

that are only a step or two above what i'm running already? i figured

an upgrade to a processor with a more efficient architecture and a

motherboard with all the upgrade capabilities i would need to have for

the future would be a good investment. I love intel but amd is much

more affordable and they're processors have always performed for me

very well. Maybe i should have made this a discussion, but im new to the forum so i apologize.

swapping to intel is not an option. So i assume that ill be fine sticking to amd chipset motherboards and i can swap my OS hdd without issue.

I'm considering what was suggested, to buy the mobo first and rebuild my system with it, and save up for a processor thats worth upgrading to.

thank you for the great advice
 
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geofelt

geofelt

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By interim changes, I meant that do not spend much on anything that you will have to discard soon. say 6 months.

If you are running multithreaded cpu bound apps then by all means the FX series are a good option.
If I am not mistaken, you can drop in any FX cpu into your current motherboard.
You will then have the convenience of not having to reinstall windows.

If, on the other hand, your main app is gaming, then I think a stronger graphics card would be a better upgrade.
For gaming, even a FX-8350 is not a big jump over your fx-4100.
Here is one study: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-processor-frame-rate-performance,3427-9.html
If you are talking about more efficient architectures, you should be talking about Intel.
Even the cheap i3-2100 dual core does well in that study.
 
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astakiller89

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Thank you for your time and excellent advice. I am going to upgrade my motherboard and graphics card, then decide on a new processor in the next month or so.

Appreciate the input.
 
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