In 2011, I bought a $500 Newegg bundle deal for a computer with an Athlon X4 635, GTX 640, and 4 GB of RAM. For the past 6 months all decent games have been running terribly (FPS that jumped from 20 to 40 and random half-second freezes and lag spikes). I made sure nothing was running in the background, my 7200 PRM hard drive was defragmented and not too full, etc. but nothing worked. I installed a statistics server and monitored the load on all the components on my Android phone. I found that when a performance drop occurred, my CPU stays at 100% load while the RAM hovers at 70% and the GPU at 40%. It seems that I should buy a new CPU, but since I'm stuck with an AM3 motherboard, a midrange processor (possibly a quad-core i5-4670 Haswell @ 3.4GHz) on a midrange Z87 motherboard (ASRock Z87 Pro4would be the best upgrade that should significantly improve my performance. Is my analysis and upgrade correct? Would a 120 GB SSD with caching software give a performance boost as well/instead? I'm a student so the cheapest option with room for future upgrades is best.
TL;DR: Athlon X4 635, GTX 640, 4 GB RAM give lag spikes and low FPS at the lowest graphics settings. Reasonable steps didn't do much and stats monitor says CPU at 100% while RAM at 70% and GPU at 40%. I have AM3 mobo so should I buy a i5 4650 (Haswell 3.4 GHz) with an ASRock Z87 Pro4? And/or 120 GB SSD? I'm cheap and want to upgrade later.
TL;DR: Athlon X4 635, GTX 640, 4 GB RAM give lag spikes and low FPS at the lowest graphics settings. Reasonable steps didn't do much and stats monitor says CPU at 100% while RAM at 70% and GPU at 40%. I have AM3 mobo so should I buy a i5 4650 (Haswell 3.4 GHz) with an ASRock Z87 Pro4? And/or 120 GB SSD? I'm cheap and want to upgrade later.
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