Looking to upgrade again!

It's been a while, but I think it's time to see what kind of upgrades I can make to the ol' gaming machine. You folk were enormous helps the past two times - so let's have another go at it to mark a third!

As usual, I'm more interested in 'cost-effective workhorse' over 'newest, shiniest, brand-name component'. Looking at it, the parts I've currently had the longest are the hard drive, the sound card, and the graphics card - so those might be places to peek.

Here's my current build:

Monitor: 28" HNC @ 1920 x 1200
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 275 896MB
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0 Gb/s
RAM: 2 x 2GB Corsair DDR3 / 2 x Kingstom HyperX 2GB DDR3
Processor: Intel Core i5-750 2.66 Gig (OC'd at 3.40)
Motherboard: MSI Intel P55 ATX Motherboard
Sound: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer
Cooling: Cooler Master 212 "Heatpipe Direct Contact" + 2x 250mm side fans, 2x 120mm fans on the Heatpipe, 1x 120mm fan in the back.

For the most part, I'm just eking out better performance for CoX at the higher settings (About the only settings that bog me down currently are high FSAA and Ambient Occlusion with Color Bleed - so I avoid those); especially while recording (which has been a non-issue, now that I reduce my resolution to whatever aspect ratio I intend to record with).

Building a new box or recycling some of the old one?

Here's a rough sketch, because it's late.

CPU - 3.3GHz i5-2500K;
Motherboard - Either a P67 or Z68 to allow overclocking of the K series CPU;
Memory - DDR3-1600 looks to be the sweet spot in pricing, around $10 a GB;
Video - I would say the GTX 560Ti has pretty good bang for the buck (around 30% faster).

No less than 1 GB for that size monitor, 2 would be better if you can swing the price diff. Check to make sure your power supply can handle the new one. FatherXmas has ya on the right track.

That power supply should be just fine. Upgrade the video card and see if thats enough of an upgrade for what ya want.

If not, then upgrade the processor/mb/ram. Those will need to be done all together for the most part, so its a bit of an outlay. The sound card and hard drive are fine unless you need more data storage space.

Yes the PSU is fine. The GTX 560 Ti actually uses less power than your current GTX 275.

As for the question about 1 or 2GB, pay close attention to type and clock speed of the video memory. In the past a lot of cards that doubled the memory from the nVidia reference standard were able to do so by downgrading the memory.

In benchmarks I've seen testing 1 and 2 GB HD 6950 cards showed little if no performance difference at 1920x1200 and only a few games at 2560x1600. Also in the case of AMD, the original HD 6950 had 2GB and the 1GB came about just to lower the price slightly to match up with the GTX 560Ti, not the other way around.

The i5-2500K is around $220 at NewEgg. Quad core, no hyperthreading. The K at the end signifies that the CPU has an unlocked multiplier (the only way to significantly overclock Sandy Bridge based CPUs as base clock tweaking is pretty much gone) only when used on a motherboard with either the P67 or Z68 chipset. The i7-2600K is the current top end, costs around $100 more but gives you an extra 2MB of L2 Cache, hyperthreading of the four cores, slightly higher base clock speed and slightly faster turbo boost when only using 1 or 2 cores which is pretty much the same difference between your i5-750 and the i7-8xx series. The i5-2xxx series is around 10% faster at the same clock speed than the older i5-7xx series.

The major differences with the Z68 over the P67 are the ability to use the integrated graphics side of the CPU to accelerate certain applications like video transcoding; a variation on the RAID driver to allow the use of a small SSD (under 64GB) to automatically cache often used files from the larger conventional hard drives in the system; and on most Z68 motherboards, output of the integrated graphics.