ok. so i had a chance to look at the APU route. specifically, the one you posted. it looks promising. most everything i read indicated that it performs well compared higher priced cpus and same thing with gpu (although with gpu it looks like it performs like a good "entry-level gpu," but hey, the gt730 is an entry-level card as well. but is the a8-7600 up-gradable? are AMD's APUs future proof for at least the next 5-7yrs or so?
I doubt you can call any current AMD processor that future proof. The AM3+ socket is essentially dead and waiting to be replaced (hopefully during the year 2016), even though the FX-series is far from useless. The FM2+ socket may have a bit more life left in it. The newest APU (A10-7870K) was released in May and that would be an upgrade to the A8-7600. However, as a CPU that A10 is still slower than an FX-6300 - or even an FX-4300 - based on the little research I had time to do, so an FX-6300 will probably keep you going longer without the need to upgrade than any APU you might find. And while you can get a discrete GPU to go with the APU and thus increase its gaming performance, it will not get quite as much out of better GPUs as the FX-6300. The ace up APU's sleeve is that when that integrated R7 is not in use, it's GPU cores are available for other tasks (a very neat feature IMO). The downside is that I don't know of any software that actually takes advantage of this, nor will there likely be very wide support for it.
APUs are good value if you can't afford a discrete GPU, in which case they can sometimes best similarly priced Intel processors and their integrated graphics chips in gaming performance. However, even if the GT 730 is an entry-level GPU, it will still probably outperform the A10's R7 (which has two more GPU cores - 8 in total - than the A8, and is thus somewhat faster). For example in 3D Mark's Firestrike test, the A10-7870K scores roughly 1500 points, whereas the GT 730 combined with an Intel Pentium G3220 - which is a slower CPU than the A10, but comparable to the A8 in Futuremark's tests - scores roughly 1800 points. This is just one synthetic test and may not be the whole truth about real-world performance, though. Also, that 300 point difference isn't quite as big as it might sound - neither can really run that test at speeds that are pleasing to the eye.
I'm not sure what your needs regarding your PC are, but while the FX-6300 combined with the GT 730 should perform notably better than the A8-7600, the A8 should still be a decent CPU for everyday use. AMD will hopefully realease Zen by the end of next year, so you could just opt for the cheapest system now, use it for testing anything you can think of and see what are its weak points are regarding what _you_ want to do with your system. At the end of the day, both the FX-6300/GT 730 and the A8-7600 may spark a hunger for something really powerful and at that point the extra performance of the former combo doesn't really matter much, as your new rig will probably blow both out of the water.
So, in short, the APU setup will in all likelihood be the slower one. However, both setups will be notably faster than your current setup. If you want to stay as close to your initial budget and start saving for a proper rig, I wouldn't consider the APU setup a bad choice. After all, you can always beef it up a bit by buying a discrete graphics card.
P.S. If you want to consider the APU option, I suggest you read up on the other APUs as well, and not just the A8-7600. If you want to learn about overclocking, you should look for "unlocked" CPUs, which are a bit easier to overclock.
P.P.S. Now that I've been reading up on the APUs, I sort of want to build an APU rig someday just to see what they can do. x)
