What part to upgrade. Been having issues previously. - Hardware & Software

Recently I have been having some programs to stop responding on me. The computer is pretty laggy with programs and games freezing n' stuff and I am new to computer building and I don't know what to do. [img]http://puu.sh/6p7Um.png[/img] From Speccy, also if you could advise on what else to upgrade because I'll put it on my list.

When it gets slow, have a look in task manager and see what resources are being used and what is using them. If your cpu usage is maxed you might wanna look into upgrading to an 8320 or something.

Do you have a budget?

I'd like to upgrade 1 thing right now to fix the issue I'm having but I could probably go up to around $400.

Well, if you really just want to upgrade one thing, you could get a 8320 or an 8350, but since you could go up to $400 I would suggest a 4670K and an MSI Z87 G43 Gaming motherboard if you want to overclock or just get the 4670 and either a B85 or H87 chipset motherboard if you do not want to overclock. Then a little later down the road upgrade the graphics card. Oh and if you go with the overclockable one make sure to get an aftermarket cooler.

Freezing in games and programs usually happen due to RAM shortages leading to pagefile use(writing to disk instead of RAM), harddrive bottlenecks, or processor bottlenecks. Since your RAM is fine and your harddrive is good, it's probably your processor. Even if the processor is advertised as quad-core, it's really just a dual-core with the ability to process two threads on one core. It's also piss-poor at performance with a single thread, like every processor in the FX series, so your games will be severely limited. I'd upgrade to an intel 4670K processor alongside a Gigabyte (U)D3H or MSI G45 Gaming motherboard. This is the best gaming processor available right now, alongside a very good motherboard. There's no reason to upgrade to a better AMD processor as they're terrible at games, so it'll just be a waste. [url]http://pcpartpicker.com/p/14Qwm[/url] I've included a cooler in this build, assuming you'll be doing light-moderate overclocking. If you're not going to overclock at all, you can downgrade to a 4670 alongside a MSI G41 and not buy a cooler, which'll save you some money. I know you only want to upgrade one thing, but your budget would allow you to get a 120GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD which should speed up your system significantly, as long as you can bother formatting and reinstalling your OS onto the SSD. I'd still recommend overclocking capability, but it's up to you. If you don't want an SSD, you might as well save the extra 100$ of your budget. Non-overclockable: [url]http://pcpartpicker.com/p/27Rbu[/url]