Advice on upgrading my PC

[Topbloke]

Hey guys, I was wondering if you could give me any advice on what would be worth doing with my PC. Its roughly about 4-5 years old, it runs most big games(ARK, GTA V, BF1) fairly smoothly on lowered settings. I am wondering whether I can simply upgrade my graphics card, however I don't know what my CPU and motherboard will be able to handle and if they might bottleneck things.

Specs are as follows;
Win 7 64 bit
Intel Core i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz
RAM DDR3 8192 MBytes
AMD Radeon HD 7800 Series (Sapphire)
Motherboard ASUSTeK Model P8Z77-V LX (LGA1155)
PSU 800w Gold corsair

So what kind of card could that system handle? I would be willing to buy something pretty pricey to transfer it to a new build in maybe 1-2 years. How restrictive are my motherboard and CPU, I don't remember spending a load of money on them but I don't really want to start a new build right now.

Thanks in advance

 

[Row1]

You are using a PCI-E 3.0 slot for your video card. That is normal.
Your MB and CPU won't be so much of the bottleneck - if you put in a much better PCI-E 3.0 vid card, you will get better game playing. And, you could use that card in your next build.

Browse your vid card and other vid cards at videocardbenchmark.net and see what you like.

 

[SNGX1275]

I concur with Row1, everything on your system is pretty solid. You are good to go with just a new video card, won't even need to upgrade your PSU. However, I'd consider, also bumping your RAM to 16 gigs.

 

[Row1]

I forgot to add: a video card offloads a lot of work from the CPU.
So, given a computer, having a separate graphics card - if it is performance based - has tremendous potential to boost game playing ability on almost any current pc-based system.

The computer is good at throwing raw data from the program, the CPU, and the RAM, down to the vid card, which then "renders" the video info and puts it in video signal format (HDMI, VGA, etc.) and sends it down the wire to the display.

This is like putting a Food processor next to a cutting board as you cook.
put the raw veggies in the food processor and they are processed in seconds, while chopping them on the cutting board would prevent you from using the cutting board for anything else, and would go relatively slow.

Your hands can only get food in and out of the food processor so fast, but the processor itself is superfast, regardless of your handling and chopping speed.