Upgrading my video card! Need some suggestions/help! :)

not tested it since . decided that I play it on new videocard (even after some years) on high with no compromises, not heard any big news about performance improvements, theoreticaly it may be directx 12 version (rumored), but practically some games (new Hitman) run worse on dx12

960 is the same size die as 760 AFAIK. Without the ease of being able to shoehorn more performance per cycle into a product via a nice shrink, a newer product should just net you better support for existing features, some new features, as well as a design that improves a little to be more efficient. That is, if the previous generation was already good. Which is was in your example.

Every so often design/feature implementation/optimization offers a vast improvement, but this isn't the old days where each new iteration offers a real increase in clock speed; or in the case of the most recent old days, increases in performance due to core increases.

Especially with mid- and high-end desktop CPUs, there's just no need to squeeze that hard to put out that much more performance at the expense of margins, especially since the desktop market is slowly contracting since everyone who doesn't game can get more than enough zip out of mobile products (including laptops). Anyway, GPUs are the bottleneck. If they weren't, AMD FX processors wouldn't be valid choices for a mid/high-end gaming rig.

On the GPU side, regardless of fanboyism, the competition is much more even and both AMD and Nvidia do pretty well (getting almost as much as they can out of their hardware without lagging too far behind their competitor). When one of them trounces the other in a game benchmark featuring peer products it usually has more to do with how the game is coded/optimized than real differences between their hardware.

The upcoming die shrinks for everything but Intel CPUs should net some nice gains--though neither Nvidia nor AMD (GPU) need big leaps. AMD (CPU) does, though.

I've done four major builds/upgrades since my first build in 2004.

1. AMD Athlon XP 2500+
2. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+
3. AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition
4. Intel Core i5-6500

I couldn't wait for Zen. Sorry, AMD. Get your shit together.

I was just being thorough in my response to darkhosis. I wasn't recommending you invest in the chipset you have.

I don't know about that PSU. I got my PSU off the PSU tier list. https://community.newegg.com/eggxpert/computer_hardware/f/135081/t/45344.aspx

I have an i5-6500, I have a Z170 motherboard.

If it's already gonna be June or July I'd see what is going on with the next generation of GPUs before I throw down for a 960.

And that RAM... 8GB is fine. But RAM is inexpensive.

I used to have 6GB of DDR2 in my last build (Phenom II X2 that was no longer stable at X4) I made sure to exit my browser for any game that wanted to creep toward a gig and a half of RAM as modern browsers eat up RAM even if you have them set up to unload idle tabs. I had 8GB in this current build briefly, before going to 16GB...

16GB means I never ever need to close anything* to ensure that my computer doesn't start hammering the page file at all if I launch a game. So I recommend getting 16GB.

• Not quite 100% true. It's difficult for me to run 5+ virtual machines of Windows 7 because I will run out of RAM.

That's a solid gaming build imho, but like HBH said, I'd go with 16GB RAM - it's cheap as dirt, and you can never have too much.

I'm not terribly fond of Cooler Master PSU's either, but others I know have had success with them. I prefer Corsair or Seasonic myself (though my current PSU is EVGA - but it was a sponsored build, so I had to use it ...)