Upgrade for 6 year old PC ?

[sinky]

Hi,
I purchased the following from PC Specialist at end of 2010. It is for general use and casual gaming....

Case COOLERMASTER ELITE 430 BLACK CASE
Processor (CPU) AMD PHENOM II X4 965 (3.40GHz/8MB CACHE/AM3) - BLACK EDITION
Motherboard ASUS® M4A78LT-M: mATX MAINBOARD, DDR3, USB 2.0, SATA 3.0Gb/s
Memory (RAM) 4GB SAMSUNG DDR3 DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (2 X 2GB)
Graphics Card 1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX460 GDDR5 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 11
1st Hard Disk 1TB WD CAVIAR GREEN WD10EARS, SATA 3 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE

I was considering upgrading the graphics card to a 3GB GTX 1060 and upgrading memory to 8GB.
I am hoping that would give me a much improved gaming experience on my 1920x1080 monitor.

My question is will I see the full benefits from this upgrade or will the ageing motherboard and Processor become the bottleneck ?

 

[Oussebon]

Depends on the game. Some games seem to be really quite generous to the CPU such that and older and weaker CPU will still yield good performance:



But other games will be visibly less happy with weaker CPUs:


Obviously those kinds of benches are often done with GTX 1080s and Titans and whatnot, but if a CPU's showing below 60 fps average or big sub-60 drops then it's probably not going to give the smoothest experience at the highest kinds of setting a 1060 can push.

Not to mention the many multiplayer games that are heavily reliant on single-threaded performance.

One thing to bear in mind is that the GTX 1060 3gb doesn't have a super future-proof amount of VRAM. It's fine for now especially if you're buying a fresh budget gaming build. But if you're buying a GPU as an upgrade for an existing system, and you might replace your system soon-ish anyway and put your newly acquired GPU into that, you might want something more like an RX 480gb or GTX 1060 6gb (which in addition to having more VRAM also perform a bit better than their siblings due to things like faster memory or more cores) which will just last you that bit longer before you want to swap it out again.

You'd certainly benefit from a GPU upgrade even with the weaker CPU ofc, you just may well not get the full benefit.

 

[mishra]

Looks like you are in similar boat as I am. Phenom's are (were) great CPUs at a time but they're just not up to task nowadays.
I think GTX 1060 will bottleneck your Phenom at least in games which depend on CPU heavily. You could overclock your Phenom, as it's a black edition, that will buy you some time but effectively you need to upgrade your CPU/mobo/RAM at some point.
AMD ZEN is just round the corner so if you want to wait a bit we you can see if it's worth the hype, if not well... overpriced Intel it will have to be.