Little help for an old guy upgrading his PC

Your Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 motherboard supports a maximum of 16 GB(4 GB x 4) of DDR3-1600 MHz RAM, so you do have the option of adding more.

Its Intel Core i5-760 current processor does not have the horsepower to play current games, so an upgrade is needed.
PassMark - Intel Core i5-760 @ 2.80GHz - Price performance comparison

The Intel Core i7-875K processor appears to be the best one it can be upgraded to.
PassMark - Intel Core i7-875K @ 2.93GHz - Price performance comparison

Unfortunately, even if you upgrade the processor and max it out with RAM and switch to a solid state drive, your computer still is not going to have the horsepower to play current games.

I am not a hardware expert nor a gamer, so my advice to you is limited.
I will leave it to those here who are to advise you further.
Good luck.

hepme said:

The Intel Core i7-875K is way too much $ for me. Looking like between $400- and $500. I figured mine is so old that even something much better would be considered old and be available cheap. Thats a good 4 times what i would think of paying. Gotta be something thats a substantial upgrade thats no where near that much. This is a 15 year old PC at least. I would think my cpu is ancient tech and could be doubled in power cheaply and that would still be old tech. No? As to running current games, i'm not that far off which is why i thing doubling ram and improving the cpu bu 30-50% should be fine for most anything because i can run many current games NOW perfectly.

You're pretty much at a CPU dead end with that motherboard.

I would try something like this... (assuming you have a discrete video card)

System Builder - Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core - PCPartPicker <---- much, much better




THEN, later on, if you decide to upgrade... you'll be able to.


For example... these are all the CPUs that will be compatible with that motherboard...
Choose A CPU - PCPartPicker

hepme said:

Unfortunately it's not about looking for a better upgradable board or any of that. It's about not having the money to do that. So it's either what i'm asking about or nothing. What i'm asking is whether theres a cpu and ram i can upgrade to cheaply. If theres not thats fine, but if there is i'd like to see what the cheapest options are and decide if i can afford it. I like social security check to social security check. I'm pretty much poverty level. So it's not a choice for me, it's a matter of seeing what i'd have to put out to get enough of a performance boost to help take these games from stutter to little or none. If it can't be done thats fine, just want to know and see if it can.

The setup you have is so old... that any parts for it, are NOW... extremely overpriced.

Here's the CPUs that will go into your current motherboard.
Choose A CPU - PCPartPicker

@flavallee already showed you the best upgrade CPU for your board.



Aside from all that... you're in a dead end CPU line as well.
The cheaper CPUs today are way faster, have more cores, and are multi threaded as well.

I tried to make a cheap Intel build, for you... but couldn't get anywhere near as low a price of an AMD build.



/edit

That AMD build I made for you, is cheap but has great parts.
It'll fit your case, and work with all your other gear, you have currently.

hepme said:

Ok, well i guess it's not possible. Thanks for the help tho.

It's possible. It's $524. You mentioned $400-$500...and that's the best I can do.
Maybe, take some time and think about it. Come up with an extra $50-75, and you're in like Flint.

Remember too... you can sell the old motherboard, CPU and RAM on ebay.

hepme said:

I just figured old tech ram and cpu would be dirt cheap. I didn't realize thats not the case. $500 is a lot more then i expected.

Once the parts start getting "rare" on the store shelves... the retailers start raising the prices. :/