My friends with i3's play it online. One is limited to 1680 res because of his monitor but the other plays at 1080 with textures set ultra and some other settings on high. I got him to turn on in-game fps indicator and he reports the online is smooth. i3 3225 I think, 8gb ram, EVGA 660 SC @ 1111mhz
the rest of your kit is of a good spec - I would look for an FX 6300 series my self and resell the fx4300 to help fund it
Well since I will probably be buying a new mobo at the same time with SATA III to support an SSD so stick with AMD or make the leap to intel and if so, which one?
If you gots the money for mobo change then I say go intel. I'm running i5 2500k at 4.9ghz. I didn't bother upgrading to IVY and was bit concerned about the heat issue but people seem to get 4.5ghz+ from them which isn't too bad.
you want realistically notice a huge (or any) improvement going with sata 3..... good news though is your current board does support vishera (FX6300) but if you want to spend £200 then get an i5 and a motherboard for it (1/2 of that ill get you the FX6300)
I've been reading into it and some people seem to think the motherboard BIOS may be outdated, could this cause the problems and is it difficult to update? http://www.msi.com/service/biosupdate/
Whilst the CPU will be a bottleneck it can't be *THAT* bad surely? I would do all of the usual things before going out to buy a new CPU: 1) Check Task Manager for anything running in the background that may be chewing up CPU resources or RAM. 2) Reduce startup programs so you just have the bare essentials to get up and running to play BF3. If this solves the problem start adding back the ones you want until you hit the current issue. This should be picked up as a resource hog in 1 though. 3) Check all of your system drivers are up to date. The MB bios is also worth looking at (which you have already mentioned). 4) Check to see that your GPU drivers are up to date or alternatively try out some of the recent drivers to see if they all give you the same problem. As you are running a 660TI select advanced and tick "clean install" when installing the drivers. 5) Perhaps run a virus sweep / crap cleaner - registry cleanup to ensure nothing is awry with your OS install (again this will probably be linked to point 1) Temps and other monitoring would be the next step but I would run through these first to give you a good start. The CPU might be the cause of the problems but I would be suprised if it was only the CPU at fault.
Pretty much all done except the BIOS, still feeling wary of that :S, have noticed an increase in FPS and is definitely running more smoothly.
