Upgrade to Phenom X6?

Hey guys, I'm looking for suggestions on upgrading my pc. Please note: my primary use for the pc is gaming, web browsing, email and word processing.

My current (5 year old) setup is:
Asus M4A79 Deluxe
AMD Athlon II X2 250 (running @3.6GHz)
Radeon HD5850
Corsair XMS2 8gb

Honestly, my pc's a champ. It's still running all of today's games at 1920x1080 with little issue. In fact, Wolfenstein was the only game that gave my system problems (frequent hard crashes despite otherwise smooth gameplay and odd audio/video delays during cutscenes).

I don't have a concrete reason to upgrade, but if I were, would something like a Phenom X6 1100T or 1090T make sense at this point in time or should I just build a new system in the future? I'm on a budget and I don't feel like starting from scratch with a new rig at the moment, but I'd like to hear some opinions.

Well you have a decent board if you want to go with an X6 , it would also be a bit of a boost over a dual core. With a decent cooler 4.0 or close to it is usually attainable. You should also conside getting a new GPU the one you have is OK but getting pretty old. You might also need a new PSU depending on what you currently have.

The point is, am I going to care as far as games are concerned? I don't want to upgrade just to upgrade if I won't see any performance benefit, and as far as I know, games still aren't really taking advantage of multiple cores. A GPU upgrade would seem much more reasonable certainly.

You'll see more of a gain in games by upgrading the GPU to something more current.

More and more games all the time will use more than 2 cores and some up to 8. The X2 250 is a good CPU no doubt but it's getting old. I'm sure it could drive a better card but in the end you're going to need to do both before long. Just my opinion.

Johan45 said:

More and more games all the time will use more than 2 cores and some up to 8. The X2 250 is a good CPU no doubt but it's getting old. I'm sure it could drive a better card but in the end you're going to need to do both before long. Just my opinion.

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I agree wholeheartedly. Both are getting close to being needed.

The 5850 was definitely a decent workhorse and not surprised you've been happy with it. Does Wolfenstein hard crash when you lower visuals or resolution down?

Could be the card itself going bad more than its to much for it to handle or the drivers for that card are not keeping up very well with handling new games. Would try and figure this out first since if the gpu is going bad replacing it first is more important. Run some 3dmark benchs maybe. Clean windows install might help.

If you live near a MC I'd go for an AMD bundle in a heartbeat but I wouldn't recommend wasting money on an older cpu only upgrade, it doesn't help you in the long run. New mb and cpu should give you some noticeable benefit now and set you up for a new gpu.

Could try selling your system as is and building entirely new.

Just a heads up, you may be better served getting a Phenom II 955 be over a 6 core as the six cores are getting hard to find and are also expensive. You'll hard pressed to find one for less then $150.00 where you can still find 9xx chips for less then $100.