Upgrading my PC

[MoshJosh]

Thinking about upgrading my PC a little.

mostly for gaming and school.

currently
intel i5 6500
GTX 1060 founders (having issues)
24 gigs of DDR4
Samsung evo SS drive
short stroked mechanical drive

Think I’ll leave my motherboard the same, MSI gaming M3 skylake chipset lga1151

trying to go as cheap as possible and ok with used stuff from reputable sellers, probably eBay.

was thinking upgrading to:
Intel i7 7700
2 RX480s in cross fire
Leaving my ram
Upgrading to all solid state drives, maybe a raid 0 set up for kicks haha

not sure how much an “upgrade” the RX480s would be, but it was sort of what I wanted to do when I started building but could find RX480s, plus I can buy them one at a time as my paychecks allow.

so would these things “upgrade” my current setup? I.e could I run games at higher FPS and such? Just better performance overall? . . . or not worth the price I’ll pay?

Orrrrrr should just start a whole new build on a new chipset etc???

 

[Werecow]

Hardly any games support SLI/Crossfire nowadays, and when they do it often introduces annoying stuttering. You'd be much better off just saving for a better single GPU.

 

[Choop]

^absolutely, getting a faster single card is always preferable IMO. You get a more stable framerate in my experience with less dips and stutter, and don't have to worry about whether or not your dual card setup would be optimized or even supported at all in a given game. I'd personally still upgrade the CPU though to the i7 for general productivity stuff. I feel like there was a reason that running SSD's in raid 0 didn't really get you much of an advantage like it does with platter drives, but having all SSD's would be cool anyway.

 

[Bandersnatch]

Thinking about upgrading my PC a little.

mostly for gaming and school.

currently
intel i5 6500
GTX 1060 founders (having issues)
24 gigs of DDR4
Samsung evo SS drive
short stroked mechanical drive

Think I’ll leave my motherboard the same, MSI gaming M3 skylake chipset lga1151

trying to go as cheap as possible and ok with used stuff from reputable sellers, probably eBay.

was thinking upgrading to:
Intel i7 7700
2 RX480s in cross fire
Leaving my ram
Upgrading to all solid state drives, maybe a raid 0 set up for kicks haha

not sure how much an “upgrade” the RX480s would be, but it was sort of what I wanted to do when I started building but could find RX480s, plus I can buy them one at a time as my paychecks allow.

so would these things “upgrade” my current setup? I.e could I run games at higher FPS and such? Just better performance overall? . . . or not worth the price I’ll pay?

Orrrrrr should just start a whole new build on a new chipset etc???

Agreed with both of the above. Ditch the idea of CrossFire. Also, if you can find a good price on a 7700K over any other sku, then do it. You'll have a much better time overclocking on a K series.

Also, you might want to look at bumping up your RAM to 32GB if you do anything other than gaming on your machine, while gaming. It's a sweetspot for price : performance and is especially useful if you compile code.

Lastly, if you really don't care about redundancy, sure. Go with Raid 0. Be aware that if one of your drives fail, you lose ALL of your data. If you want speed and redundancy, go with Raid 5. Just remember that the only real advantage of running storage in a Raid array is more or less to combine the capacity of all the drives into a single partition. Keeping the drives as separate partitions gives you more flexibility with how you store your data.

 

[Xaios]

Upgrading your video card is the avenue that's going to yield the biggest returns. As others have mentioned, CrossFire is dead (and so is SLI, for that matter). However, you will also run into a CPU bottleneck at some point. While it's not a huge upgrade, if you upgrade to an i7 7700K, in addition to a small frequency bump, you'll also get Hyperthreading, something that's becoming more important as games are finally being programmed to utilize more and more cores. Only upgrade that, however, if you can find a 7700K for a low price. A quick peek on EBay suggests that no one is offering one for a decent price (as in people are asking the same price for a 7700K as what a Ryzen 7 3800X costs retail), so you'd be better off posting a Looking to Buy ad on a Reddit swap sub and seeing what offers you get.