PC Upgrade Ideas

A buddy of mine is running an LGA 1156 setup. He started out with some weak dual-core—I think it was an A4 3300—but I tracked down an $100 A6-3650K for him, so he grabbed that instead. The motherboard is actually decent enough, and since we picked up an LC CC 95, I’m planning to overclock the CPU by a few hundred MHz.
Now we're hunting for a GPU. The PSU is just a generic budget unit for now, but we'll be upgrading to a Hexa soon. Honestly, I don't see much point in going higher than a GTX 1650, which probably won't happen anyway, so I'm looking at used cards on eBay. I'm assuming there's no need to aim higher than a 7870 or a 660Ti/760? How much would a mid-range 3670K bottleneck something like a GTX 1650?
I hope I didn't mess up by picking the 3670K; it's roughly in the same ballpark as those old Phenom II chips, right?

If you bump the clock speed up by 10% over the Phenom II, they basically tie. So, I guess you'd need to hit 3.2-3.3GHz to match an X4 945, and honestly, you might have been able to drop $17 😁

The HD 7850, 7870, or the GTX 660/660Ti is really where the ceiling is, yeah. The GTX 1650 is maybe just a tiny bit faster, or right around there.

crimsonstag84 said:If you bump the clock up by 10% over the Phenom II X4 9xx, they're basically equal. You'd need to hit about 3.2-3.3GHz to match an X4 945, and honestly, I think you could have even dropped the $17 😁

The HD 7850/7870/GTX 660/660Ti is the ceiling, yeah. The GTX 1650 is just a tiny bit faster or right around there.

There’s a great saying: "Something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it." 🙂
Whatever, there's hardly any LGA 1156 CPUs around here, let alone quad cores at a decent price. It's similar to Sandy Bridge. It isn't anything special, but because it's rare, anyone who actually needs a Sandy Bridge CPU or motherboard will pretty much give you whatever you ask if they really need it. He initially asked $350, so I pushed him down and he dropped it to $300. Because, you know, I still had to cover the $13 shipping costs.
So it was either $300 plus $40 for shipping, or sticking with that A4-3300 which can't even handle HD video on YouTube. 🤣

So with the Hex overclocked to 3.3-3.4 GHz plus a GTX 1650, it should be a pretty solid setup for gaming, hopefully. Also, how much stronger is the A8-3850 series compared to the A6-3650? I mean CPU-wise—I know the integrated graphics are better. Is it the exact same architecture just with a higher clock, or is it a matter of better Intel or something like that?

It’s pretty much the same deal as today’s APUs—the only real difference is the dedicated graphics card since they’re running on the same core (Llano); everything else is just clock speeds.

Yeah, that's what I figured. Honestly, it's not such a bad chip. It probably won't handle BF4 with 64 players on Ultra settings, but you should be able to run most single-player games just fine. That is, assuming we aren't talking about titles like Dishonored 2 where even i5s struggle because of terrible optimization.
Btw, regarding overclocking, can I push it to 3.3 without bumping up the voltage? It's sitting at 3.0 right now, and temps barely even hit 40.

Honestly, none of us can really say for sure until you actually try it. 😛 From what I’ve seen, they don't overclock particularly well—it's hard to push them past 3.5 or 3.6 GHz, even if you're using top-tier motherboards and a solid cooler.

Well, I figured maybe someone else had messed around with this before and actually has some experience under their belt 😁 It's not like I'm expecting to push past 3.3 GHz anyway—this isn't exactly a high-end motherboard or a top-tier cooler. I'm running an LC CC 95 and an ASRock A75M HVS. Worst case scenario, the system just crashes and that's that, right? RIGHT?! 🤔