Upgrade my GPU, CPU, motherboard or all of them!?

[trjp]

On power supplies - there's almost nothing sensible a decent 500W can't power these days. PSUs above that are a mixture of 'marketting' and 'mentalists running mad overclocks and 3 GPUs and liquid cooling and shit'.

Power Supplies do have a finite life tho - even the best PSUs will lose 20-25% of their effective power over 3-5 years (crap ones lose 20% a year) which means even good PSUs are less than ideal as they approach the 4/5 year old mark (I've yet to see an PSU pass 6 without issues).

To the OP - I'd say that a new GPU will be useful when you decide to upgrade everything else anyway - that 5770 would be sub-par for a nice shiny-new i5+mobo tho so perhaps that's where you should start - you'll see some benefits for sure (and I'll have your 5770 :) ) :)

[Sakkura]

As long as the caps are quality, PSUs can live a very long time.

And also: 450-550W is regular system territory. 650-750W is SLI/Crossfire territory. If you want SLI/Crossfire, a 750W PSU is a good choice.

[Finicky]

I think it is fair to say that it is overkill now, and overkill forever. The main aim on tech these days is not performance, but power effeciency, with newer generations of hardware requiring less and less power (Look at, say, the power difference between the Q8400 and the Ivy Bridge i5 - the latter is faster but requires less power).

On the other hand, having a 750 watt PSU will mean that you probably will never have to upgrade that thing ever again. And, as a side bonus, a PSU that can perform reliably at 750 watt will most certainly perform extremely reliably at 500 watts, and reliability is all you want when getting more expensive components (PSUs have a nasty tendency of doing splash damage when they go down). It will probably also last quite a bit longer.

Personally, though, I'd rather go for a 600 or 650 watt PSU, and invest the money you save on the other components. A 750 watt PSU is only requiered when you plan to build a computer with the high end i7s or AMD processors, and if you crossfire or SLI two or more graphics card. But if you had the buying power to do that, you wouldn't be here asking if you should upgrade your CPU or GPU first.

There is, unfortunately, no defintive answer I can give you on that point.

It's overkill but if you upgrade you'll probably never have to upgrade!
Derp.

OP stick with your 500W psu till it someday breaks or you want to go SLI. You need a better psu as much as your tv needs a monster cable.

[Sdoots]

Okay, cool. Thanks for the clarification.

Last night, I tried something with PS2. With all low graphics settings, in a full blown massive scale battle, I was getting 3 fps.
Out of some hybrid of frusturation and curiousity, I turned everything on high, enabled motion blur, whatever the fancy lighting filter is called, and restarted the game.

I'm now consistently getting 14 fps or so in large scale battles, and 30-40 in smaller skirmishes. It's also actually using my GPU sometimes now, sometimes during those big fights.

Anyone else thinking of upgrading for the sake of PS2, try putting it all on high. You might get even better results than I did.

[Finicky]

It's because the game was coded by monkeys and if you play on low settings in cpu heavy battles, your gpu will go into idle clocks mode. You want to turn up the settings untill it says 'gpu' next to the fps counter when you are at a low pop area to avoid that.

[Grizzly]

It's because the game was coded by monkeys and if you play on low settings in cpu heavy battles, your gpu will go into idle clocks mode.

Actually, Monkeys wouldn't even think of doing that.