Best upgrade for performance.

I have been an AMD disciple all my life but I went i3570k, so I'm not gonna slag this and slag that. My i5 3570k overclocked, its only 4 cores but suits DCS well, coupled with a gtx980ti its stonking. My mate had an amd FX-9590 4.70GHz (5.00GHz Turbo) Socket AM3

on test and said do you want to try it, I was ok, hopefully won't take an activation, anyway we sorted that. Bottom line it was good for certain applications, shit for DCS, ran hotter than a whores heart, would never hit 5.00GHz as advertised. In all honesty, it's down to your interpretation of what is acceptable. Ask Skate he runs his AMD at mental speeds, he runs 5 monitors I think, I found something eventually in Intel that in my opinion for DCS was better value for money. :thumbup:

OP Like many others have already said your best upgrade here is going to be the CPU, AMD just doesnt even compare to intel when it comes to single threaded performance and since ED have said they wont be supporting multithreading with edge its a no brainer.

Even in the current engine you will see a performance increase, as i used to have an almost identical build to you with an 8320 OC to 4.5ghz and 280x, I upgraded to a 4690k and even at stock performance almost doubled in DCS (most apparent at busy airfields and heavy combat areas).

After the CPU upgrade and the release of edge then I would start thinking about a possible GPU upgrade but the 280x is still a decent card.

Things like an SSD and extra ram are great but should be afterthoughts to a CPU or GPU upgrade.

As many have suggested here I would recommend to wait for DCS 1.5 with the EDGE DX11 engine which should be only in a month or so. The move from the current DCS graphics engine which is DX9 and up to DX11 will transition the balance of power from the CPU and to the graphics card. I would also strongly recommend to watch the Matt Wagner DCS2/Nevada map Twitch feeds (also on YouTube). In particular the first few reveal quite a bit about what is coming with the new engine. See how your current system runs with DCS 1.5. My guess is that the AMD CPU is holding you back but worth waiting to see what impact EDGE makes.

I say hold off after just removing my ancient GTX460 1GB card this afternoon for a shiny new Gigabyte GTX970 G1 Gaming card. :smilewink: I feel the GTX970 is a good value fit for my Dell 27" 2560 x 1440 @ 60hz display. Also with DCS 1.5 the new engine should support SLI and this might be worth my while down the track. But for now the GTX970 keeps me happy. Only thing is I am going to have to consider a platform upgrade come start of 2016 as the X58 based system and i7-950, albeit o/c to 4.2ghz, is getting a bit long in the tooth. :(

My best 2 upgrades for performance was from 6Gb to 12 Gb RAM which really boosted the ability to use external views and spam F2 in MP. Next upgrade was SSD this really increased my load times but never gave a graphical performance boost that I noticed.

Then rebuilding my watercooling loop I got my o/c up to 3.5 and again noticed an increase in framerate.

I can now fly SP with lots of eye candy etc and on MP can tweak my settings and remove mods for a stable high FPS experience.

Next upgrade is going to be a GPU with more Vram

Hope this helps because your system seems on paper to be a very nice gaming rig:)

I have a a 3570k OC'd at 4.5. Would I see much of a difference with a 4790k also at 4.5?

I always thought since DCS doesn't use hyperthreading, as long the clock speeds are the same, performance should be the same regardless of which CPU you are using.

Overclock & SSD = :)

Fully right and to be more precise, overclocking is needed for the cpu not gpu....

Overclock = :)

:D