Motherboard: Asus P6T Video: EVGA Nividia 550 TI Memory. 6gb DDR3 Sound: Creative X-fi 7.1 Hard Drive: Western Digital 650gb 7200RPM sata
I also have a 850w power supply.
I have no idea on how much $ I will be able to spend, it is basically what ever my wife allows me to spend after she is done with the tax refund. What would tied me over for at least another year. I keep thinking my HD is my biggest bottle kneck. So, should I get maybe a SSD and a faster HD? Will this video card last me another year? I know my motherboard and CPU are a bit dated, no USB 3 and only sata 2. It comes down to the amount I get, but I decided to ask what do the poeple here think should be my main focus? I can run everything fine now at 1920X1080 usually no AA, but it never bothered me. Have not tried anything that has been released since nov 2012 so no idea how this machine will hold up with say Crysis 3. Ok, I am babbling just need to know what would get me through the next year.
There's no point in upgrading your HDD until you have upgraded your motherboard really. As for gaming, there is not much difference at all between a HDD and an SDD as most of it is loaded in RAM.
well you COULD upgrade your motherboard, but given the fact that socket 1366 has been left to rot by the wayside, I would likely recommend you lose a couple of cores and go with a socket 1155 based system, as there are very few things that make a marked improvement from an overclocked i7 3770k. And by that I mean besides benchmarking tools, which don't REALLY matter, because you will be gaming and using your computer for everyday tasks not, say, self flagellating by running synthetic benchmarks every single day to prove to yourself why all that money had to be spent on the absolute best intel processor.
If you decide to upgrade to socket 1155 and a core i7 3770k, may I recommend the ASRock Z77 Fatal1ty Performance board? It is only really worth it if you don't intend on sticking a second graphics card into it for SLI (it only has one full x16 PCI-e 3.0 slot), but it offers lots of really nice features for the money.
And in talking about the graphics card, if you can scrape together some money for one (say, about $240) you can get one of the best performance per dollar cards on the market today: the AMD Radeon HD 7870 XT. Also, I have no idea what to say about your RAM as I don't know if it is triple-channel. I would probably just recommend getting 8 GB of Patriot Viper 3, since it is really cheap. I like the 2133 MHz flavor myself.
About SSD's, they help tremendously to speed up your day-to-day usage of the computer, but have no particular benefit in most games. If you do want one, though, I would probably recommend A-data's XPG SX900 series. They are fast and relatively inexpensive. I like the 128 GB flavor there, because it is enough that windows won't be able to chew through more than half of it, so you can actually benefit in a few games by storing them on the C:\ drive.
I'd upgrade the GPU, like a 660ti. you'll experience a tiny bottleneck but you'll get more performance that what you alreay have, then eventually upgrade everything else. then the bottleneck will go away