My first Build completed- where should I go from here?

the first obvious upgrade is a move to 8 gb of ram. you can get an identical 4gb stick matching what you have now which should work fine or get a new matched set of 2x4gb.

some will say the second stick won't work but i have not has this issue.

second shot would be to play with overclocking the fx-6300. you have plenty of power to work with on that psu so a good air cooler will let you unleash what the 6300 can really do.

finally, a better gpu would also improve things.

i would wait for a while before moving to a new cpu. give it some time to play and learn and you can move up to an i5 cpu/mobo later on. you got a good overclocking chip and you can learn a lot about what all that means with what you have now before spending a bunch to move to a better cpu.

+1 to adding 4gb RAM.

+1 to SSD

Instead of overclocking your CPU and replacing your GPU, overclock your GPU a little. Performance gains will be marginal most likely, but still better than nothing at this point. If you have a nice budget for upgrades, you could go with the GPU upgrade. Don't worry too much about overclocking the CPU.

what makes you suggest this? other than the cost of a cooler, it is pretty much free performance when oc'ing the cpu. why is it worthwhile to oc the gpu and not the cpu? i figure since he is new to building and looking for some gains, oc'ing the fx chip would be an obvious option, both for low cost and for the opportunity to learn a bit. sure he could spend more on a better gpu (which i suggested as well) but i was thinking about not spending a bunch of cash. a decent cooler and he would be seeing really good fps increase with a simple oc.

just wondering why this would not be an option for you. keep in mind i am not belittling you, just looking for some extra info to help both the op and myself understand the reasoning behind your suggestion. care to explain

Look at his computer's specs. There's no reason why overclocking his CPU would give him a more noticeable improvement compared to a GPU overclock. If his CPU was the bottleneck in games, sure overclocking the CPU would make more sense, but the overclock on the GPU would make much more sense in this case as the CPU is definitely not the bottleneck in a large majority of newer games. As for older games, the CPU and GPU together should be able to yield a good frame rate anyways.

For the programming aspect of this, compilers are usually decent enough to be able to complete it in a fair amount of time in my opinion.

I agree that overclocking on the fx chip is a good learning experience though. It's up to OP to learn this or not. It would most likely only yield a learning experience rather than performance.

Overclocking won't burn your house down if you take it slowly. Both have relatively similar steps anyways. Bricking shouldn't be a problem if you have a decent cooler like the CM 212 evo or CM T4. Worst case scenario when you have high temperatures is that your computer will just shut itself down to cool off.

2 main things I'd say would be the main things to look at when overclocking:

1. The temperatures. Make sure it's within safe temps. AMD's is like ~65C I think.

2. Voltages. This goes along with the temperatures. You don't want to overvolt the CPU. If anything, you want to avoid bumping the voltages up unless you absolutely have to.

As for the overclocking process, bios is probably the best way to go about it in my opinion. Bump the multiplier up 2-3 increments and then test for stability of the system. When you hit the unstable point, you'll have two options to go about it usually. Either you bump the voltages until it's stable or you can lower the overclock by one increment until it's stable. It's all dependent on how far you want to push your CPU. If you want to push it further, then go with the voltages. And the other one you probably can figure out. You could also do this through some softwares if you want, but i find it easier with the use of the bios since it has much more options when it comes down to tweaking other things.

To test for stability, you can use prime95 or AIDA64. I think with AMD cpus, you want an older prime95, else you should just use AIDA64. If you hit an instability, it'll be a system crash.

As for GPU overclocking, it's a fairly similar process. You could do this through MSi Afterburner or the catalyst software, or radeonPro, or whatever you want to use. There's lots of software for this. Anyways, for overclocking, start with the core clock. Usually, you could bump the clock ~100MHz fairly easily, you might want to raise the power limit by ~5% and the fan speed to around maybe ~65% if you have a dual fan cooler on your Graphics card. Then test for stability. Push it up slowly with increments of 10-25Mhz from that point on. If you hit an unstable point, you can downclock it or increase the power limit. Same process basically.

To test for stability on the GPU, you will probably want to play one of your more GPU heavy games. If you hit a stability, it'll be artifacts or a system restart or something.