Specs Intel C2D E6300 @ 2.8-3.1ghz Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P 2x2GB OCZ ddr2 1066 5-5-5-13 HIS HD 4890 7200rpm hdd i use the comp for gaming, mostly WoW and the occasional TF2/CnC3/CSS im thinking of either getting a better proc or a 2nd 4890. my buget is about $300 or about 200 pounds. lemme know what u think (im looking to boost my fps in wow, any increase in fps in other games is appreciated tho )
Well... on the one hand, I don't really want to recommend a second 4890 because I'd be concerned about your E6300 potentially bottlenecking your system. On the other hand, I don't really want to recommend a Core 2 Quad because you'd be blowing a few hundred dollars on a part that's rapidly reaching end of life. If I were you, I'd wait out buying anything until Lynnfield comes around. Even if you don't want to do a full (or nearly full) upgrade at that point, Core 2 prices will plummet, so you would probably be able to pick up a Quad for very little money. But of course that's just my opinion. - Diosjenin -
+1 bob must be really behind the times, that 4890 is nice. do you really need a bump in WOW framereates, that 4890 must be running it fine at the moment.
The games you have mentioned don't require a lot of power... hell... Ion can run WoW... and my two+ year old Asus G1 can run anything based on source like a champ. Personally... I would upgrade to the i7 920 right now... but seeing as how your budget doesn't allow for the CPU and a new board... you should probably wait. Come August you will have more options and your current rig should have plenty of power to tide you over till then. In short... listen to Diosjenin.
i may be catching up again on hardware but i just dont see y to get ati other than budget builds ill admit they are good but with nvidia u also get physx and cuda
Firstly, he says he already has one and is considering a second. Selling off an existing card to get a mostly equivalent nvidia card doesn't make a lot of sense, and he can't run both an nvidia card and an ati card in the same system. And he can't sell the ati and get two nvidia cards without also replacing the motherboard. Secondly, the 4890 is a great card both in terms of price per performance and just in pure performance. physx and cuda are nice, but at this point mostly gimmicks. i'm not going to say it's better than what nvidia's offering, but it's not worse either. Thirdly, use your words. you're not texting here.
Suggesting that Crazyglue switch to Nvidia when he already has a very nice ATI card would be a waste of money. Anything short of a GTX285 or better would barely see a performance increase... and he would be asking the same question about SLI. What he should be focusing on is finding a good plan of action for upgrading his CPU in the near future. Don't get me wrong. I'm a fan of Nvidia. But in this case... favoritism doesn't enter into it.
You could buy an e8400 or q9400 and pretty much any cooler you want, you wouldn't see a huge boost in WoW with a new graphics card, the CPU will help you a bit more overall. The 4890 is no slouch. You might want to add 4GB more RAM, just for the hell of it. I love having 8GB, you can setup an actual good RAMdisk, or you can enjoy running all of your software at once, or whatever. I would go for the e8400 and a Corsair H50 cooler, personally. They look pretty nifty. Buy a new game or something? PS: I drove through Elmhurst today. I live up in Lincolnshire.
well, my system currently has problems maintaining atleast 30fps in 25man raids and i get 10-15fps in dalaran. ive pretty much determined that the reason i get such low fps is because of my cpu cache size (2MB) or my hdd is too slow. in addition (since im a raid leader and officer of my guild) i need to record progression videos and sometimes stream video over xfire. i wouldnt mind switching to core i7 but at this point it would just cost way too much. 920 is $230ish, another 200 for a decent mobo, another 100+ for 6gb triple channel and then another 50-100 for the proper water block (not to mention the work to drain the system and switch out the blocks/tops). so id like to see the 920s and mobos come down in price before i decide to make the switch. (money is tight atm) any way i could load wow onto my ram to run it (if i were to upgrade to 8gb) id be down for a bit-tech chicago area lan party :O
I find that WoW responds better to a CPU upgrade than a GPU upgrade... in fact, I don't even think it's threaded. Even with my GTX295 I couldn't run everything on max in Wow when my i7 was at stock speeds, but when I overclocked to 3.8GHz, I could. I'd upgrade to the fastest CPU possible, and don't get too fussy about GPU.
If you're only getting 10-15FPS during raids... There's no way it's the 4890's problem; the 4890 should be screaming. It should also be noted that your hard drive speed has much more to do with loading times than with frame rates. The only time you'll ever seen hard drive speed impact active game performance is when the video card can't keep enough of the game's actively used textures in its memory (not a problem for you by a long shot). So that basically leaves your E6300. The E8400 is probably your safest bet at this point. It's the cheapest Core 2 Duo with 6MB L2 cache and it's relatively cheap at $165. You could shoot for a Q9550 if you wanted, but that's another $100 being spent on an end of life part; given that you really only need to remove the bottleneck on your 4890, I wouldn't bother. Also, I would totally be up for a Chicago-area bit-tech LAN. I know modsquad lives in Chicago, so maybe we could get him in on it too... - Diosjenin -
very cool guys, thanks for all the responses. i think that i will just go with a Q9400, its under $200, and i will probably need the extra 2 cores for recording with fraps/xfire/other stuff during raids. appreciate the help guys Me and a few friends are gonna probably attend: http://www.platinumgaminggroup.com/index.php?option=com_mls_events&task=details&eventid=7&Itemid=139 i will be there atleast unless i get into this summer college program thing, heh.
