Upgrade help and advice

bjd

Any advice appreciated. It's a long time since I used to read PC Pro and be on top of the latest tech to squeeze every ounce of performance out of a system. I don’t game any more, but my youngest daughter does. Currently she has
Intel quad Q9650
8Gb Ram
Gtx 970 4Gb
SSd drives.
She plays games like Skyrim, Dragonage Sims 4 etc.
Pc seems fast enough and seems to play smoothly at 1900x1080 with most options set pretty high.
Now, the SSDs are in a sata 3gb/s board, so are underperforming.
The Ram is DDR2
While the 970 is a pretty fast card imo, it's a bit long in the tooth nowadays.
As I said, I think all the games run very smoothly, but load-times can be slow. So I wondered how much difference a sata 6gb/s board would make along with ddr3/4 Ram and obviously a faster cpu. Something like an i5 8600 with 16gb DDR4.
A noticeable upgrade, particularly as regards loading times, or money spent for little difference?
Thanks in advance.

EndlessWaves

It's been a while since I've seen it tested but from what I remember SATA II only has a minor impact on performance. Halving sequential performance and even less than that for most operations.

So say the load times will end up 2/3 to 3/4 of what they are now with an SATA 6Gbps add-on board in the current system.

CPU and memory bandwidth will have a much bigger impact on in-game performance:
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                A Decade Later: Does the Q6600 Still Have Game in 2017?                                                                                                        Released about 10 years ago, we thought it would be interesting to see how the Q6600 holds up in 2017 while playing today's games on modern GPUs. In other words, what would happen if you paired a trusty old PC with a GeForce GTX 1060 or GTX 1070.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                www.techspot.com                                                                               
Whether they'll have such an impact on loading times I'm not sure, but if they're that long now it's a reasonable bet.

Although a fairly high end CPU like an 8600/9600 may be over the top, especially with memory prices fairly cheap these days. It's worth looking at the more mainstream alternatives like a 2200G and 9100F.

techquest

It might help if we had the complete picture with your mobo model.

bjd

From memory I think it's this one:

                                                                                                                                                                                                        GA-EP35-DS3R (rev. 2.1) | Motherboard - GIGABYTE U.K.                                                                                                        Supports ® Core™ 2 multi-core and Intel 45nm processorsSupports DDR2 1200(OC)* memory for outstanding system performance.Revolution energy saving design wit...                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                www.gigabyte.com

Zoea

Don't discount a 16 thread AMD Ryzen. You can still get a 2nd gen and perhaps an X470 and upgraded to 32 threads later!

You still get SATA3, DDR4 support for your 8*2 gigs and the system runs nice and snappy. I am on an r7 1700 now very happy with it generally - used to have a 6600k (4 threads similar arch to the 8600) felt much slower even at 4.9 GHz.

techquest

Sorry should have asked what budget do you have?

bjd

Budget not really an issue, but I don't want to spend five or six hundred pounds on mb/cpu/ram, then be bottlenecked by gpu and have to buy a new one too...and still end up with gaming performance that, in the real world as opposed to benchmarks, isn't greatly improved.

Zoea

My previous post was not necessarily in terms of pure gaming performance. Benchmarks and day to day use can tell a different story. Both the systems we are pen-on-paper-planning will be fast ish.

I don't play many games any more but I do have a Vega 56 if the need arises.

mdbarber

The 970 is well ahead of the rest of your system as far as bottlenecks go, adding a sata6gbs card is a waste of time as the pcie system on that board will not handle that throughput.
new cpu,mb, ram is the only way forward.
Consider the ryzen 5 first gen with a board that will later upgrade to a ryzen 7 3rd gen?