Windows 7: Upgrading PC

Hello.



Im planning to upgrade a few components in my PC.
Mainly my mobo, CPU and GPU.
But my knowledge on PC is rather bad. at the moment im planing on buying a

GPU

ASUS DirectCU II 28nm Graphics Card HD7970

and for CPU

i5-3570k or i7-3770k ( but don't know if the i7-3770k is worth the 60 / 70 bucks more)

And i have no clue what so ever about mobo but im thinking on buying a ASUS P8Z77

So im wondering if anyone have ideas on what i can buy insted to save money or increase the performance on the PC and i really dont wanna go over a price tag of 500-600.

and if you have some ideas on what i should swap out. please tell me why. Like what makes that GPU so much better than the other one and stuff like that.

Any ideas are welcome.

Hoping for response and thnx for your time : )

If the PC you wish to upgrade is the one in your specs, don't bother with the CPU and motherboard. IMHO, you won't get enough gain.

The graphics card is another story. You might consider one of the "gigahertz edition" models instead, but the 7970 is a great card. (The nVidia GTX 680 is an alternative. It uses a little less electric power.)

Another worthwhile upgrade would be an SSD. A 120-128GB model is more than adequate for the OS plus a few applications, and such drives are getting to be inexpensive (less than $100US).

So you think the CPU is power full enough to run for example BF3, Crysis 2 and other high graphical games?
And i hear people talk about "bottleneck" like in the CPU is to weak to so it "drags" the power from the GPU down aswell, so you dont get all the power you can from the different components.

And sinse im buying a GPU with PCI-express 3.0 connection. Wont it then be good to have a mobo with a 3.0 slot in it?
And is it worth buying a mobo with the "new" 2011 socket?

And i would really like the GHz edition cards, but the price tag is a bit to high.
And as i said in my first post. any graphic cards is welcome as long as i get as much as i can for my money. so if you think a 680 would be a better choice than a 7970, i would like to hear why and stuff.

Too many ways to handle this, all of them costing money.
What issues do you have with your current system?
Have you tried those games you mentioned?

Dont really have any issues with my system.

And yes i have tried and played a bit of BF3, but can only play on low settings, so the graphics isn't that good and my fps is only around 30-50. So i would like to upgrade it so i can play with higher settings and get better fps.

And i got some friends who knows a lil bit about PC and stuff, but all of them are nVidia "fanboys" so all they say is that nVidia is best and that's it. So im asking here on this forum to get some other comments on it.

and the budget i have is around 1000 USD ( witch is around 6000 NOK)
and the price on components may very different here in Norway compered to the US

What I've read about PCI-E 3 suggests that it makes very little difference, particularly if you're not doing SLI or Crossfire with a high-res monitor. The exception is for GPU computing, which isn't of much interest to gamers.

Socket 2011 is of interest mainly if you want more PCI-E lanes, or quad channel RAM. It's probably not worthwhile with a single graphics card, and marginal with two. 2011 would be required if you want a six core Sandy Bridge-E CPU, but that would kill your budget. (I7-3930k, over $500US. You'd also need to buy a cooler, as the retail 3930k doesn't include one. It would be easy to spend close to $1000, without the new graphics card.)

Ok so 2011 socket is out of the picture then. So i stand to choose between the i5-3570k or i7-3770k CPU as i posted.

And for the GPU
And a friend of mine (one of the nVida "fanboys") advised me to get a
ASUS GeForce GTX 670 2GB PhysX CUDA.
Insted of the
ASUS Radeon HD 7970 3GB GDDR5 DirectCU II TOP

He said stuff like the architecture and stuff is better, so it would be a better choice (I got no idea what that means, and i asked him. But didnt get a concrete answer back)

And for the mobo im clueless, just know its gona be a 1155 socket.

And just noticed i said in my first post that my budget is around 500-600 bucks, witch is wrong as i miss calculated the currency from USD to NOK. My budget is around 1000 USD

I would go for the i5 if you want to go for performance but are on a budget (not as stable as the i7 under heavy workload) and the i7 if you can afford that little extra. BTW, I love Norway! Amazing country, much more beautiful than Finland!

Well thats mainly what im wondering. I got the budget for it but is the little extra power from the i7 is worth it.

Hehe thanks. Its mostly the nature around mid Norway and down that is worth visiting. The north is just crap ;P
Never been to Finland tho never heard much about ether. But if i get a chance to go il go ;P I never decline a chance for a trip out in the world : )

The main difference between the I5 and the I7 is that the I7 supports hyperthreading, so it would show 8 logical processor cores in Windows. May be of nearly zero use in gaming, but there are some real world applications that can benefit from heavy multithreading. I believe that some overclockers turn off hyperthreading so that the CPU can be clocked a bit higher. Either Dell or the IT department turns off hyperthreading by default for the systems at my employer, presumably because of compatibility issues (mainly with older software).

As regards AMD vs nVidia, my general feeling is that AMD offers more performance for the money, but I prefer nVidia's drivers. Others may disagree.