Looking for the best upgrade options for my PC

[bgordon00]

Hi all,
Thank you for allowing me to post here for some help.
I want to upgrade my PC as it's"slow"..  I ran a benchmark on my PC and I'm more confused.  Looking for some help in what to upgrade.  CPU, Graphics card, memory? My PC is generally used for average daily tasks & the only game I love to play is Left 4 Dead.  My specs are below.  Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Motherboard - A88M-G/3.1
AMD A10-7860K APU
AMD Radeon R7 Graphics
Toshiba P300 1TB
Seagate Expansion+ Desk 3TB
Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600 C10 1x8GB

[camerongray]

When you say slow, do you mean in terms of just loading things and general use or are do you mean that you are getting poor performance such as low frame rates in games?  If you mean the former, I'd strongly recommend getting an SSD to hold your OS and programs and then use the hard drive for storing large files. This will provide a massive boost to the general "snappiness" of the machine. If you're getting poor performance in games, you'd probably be looking at a new graphics card however that comes down largely to your budget. At any rate, I'd say an SSD is an essential upgrade to virtually any machine.

[DaveLembke]

I also suggest a SSD upgrade. Also if able to upgrade to more than 8GB RAM that may help too, however an SSD handing the swap space of paging memory may be all you need as superfetch memory service likes to load up system RAM heavy on Windows 7 and newer OS which then relies on paging with swap space "Virtual Memory" where the hard drive or solid state drive acts as additional memory. So I would hold off on upgrade of 8 to 16 until after you see how it behaves with the SSD upgrade which replaces the HDD.

I'd add a R9 or better AMD -or- GTX 780 or better video card and not run on the R7 Integrated Graphics that are part of the APU. Look at benchmark results before buying video cards to see which is better for your money. ( You may have to upgrade the power supply to handle the load of a good gaming video card depending on its watt rating and quality/brand. )

APU's are really just entry level gaming for GPU performance. If you add a decent video card to the system it will give much better video response and higher framerates.

[bgordon00]

Yeah, slow as in, slow to boot, sometimes slow when browsing (I use Firefox with about 10-15 tabs open)  I do the whole windows updates, defrag, uninstall unwanted apps,etc. as for gaming I really olny use Left 4 Dead, I find it runs ok.. it's doable.. 99% of what i do is general browsing/music. I was thinking memory, then I read CPU, but what you say about the SSD makes some sense.  I'll checkout out some pricing.  Again, thanks for the quick replies, it's much appreciated.