You my have seen a few threads as regards to minor'ish upgrades i have been undertaking and the fact that if my gf even knew what i was thinking she would prob kill me lol. up until a week or two ago i was running: Q6600 @ stock 2.4 MSI P7N SLI platinum 4x1gb ddr2 ram 800mhz 1gb gigabyte 460gtx 10000rpm raptor vista 64bit just added a second 460gtx, 64GB M4 SSD, Windows 7 pro 64bit and a LG ISP23 monitor with all intentions of running the next crop of games at full hd ultra/maximum settings mainly BF3 for now. I have actually been running the game last night and had to drop it down from ultra to high to get it running smooth now im unsure if its because its a new game servers and over crowded etc but it did feel like fps lag and not high ping. Now i have not yet overclocked the cpu but i have had it at 3ghz easy before its got a arctic freezer pro on it so im sure it could handle that again or maybe abit more. But how does this setup compare too if maybe i added a I5 2500K, half decent mobo and 8-16gb of DD3 obviously its gonna cost me about 400 quid but feel i could get about 150-200 for old hardware on ebay so the upgrade could cost around 200-250. Performance wise is what im asking tbh would it be slight or huge difference, also bearing in mind i used to upgrade every two years its been 3 and half since i got the q6600 etc. p.s. sorry for big post :/
Jumping to the i5 would give you a decent increase in frame rate. Don't get 16GB memory either, just get 8 and spend the extra money on a better board or something Put some prices together on Scan for you. Linky. I even added a Corsair H60 cooler just because it was in budget and it's a very good cooler lol
IMHO you'll have trouble shifting your current setup for £150-£200, Q6600 = £50, Board = £30, RAM £20 (though it is DDR2). Maybe a little more on ebay, but then they'll take ~10% of your profit. Also, I'd say if you already have a Arctic Cooler on that Q6600 clock it up to 3.2Ghz - as that seems to be the sweet spot for BF3 and it won't be too hard to achieve on that CPU. On the RAM side, 4GB is more than enough. If you want more fps, you'd be far far better off either adding an other GTX 460 (if your PSU is up to it) or buying a 560/570.
Upgrading your GPU and overclocking your CPU should give you a massive boost in performance. As Parge said, your current components won't sell for that much and OC'ing will give you some free performance .
Thanks for the quick replys and advice guys. the shopping list looks nice might pass that around its my 30th in a few weeks and if people are struggling what to get me then this could come in handy. how do i check both cores? atm everything is running at stock like i mentioned i still need to dabble in overclocking the cpu and also the two 460's are just slightly different variants and i was advised to use MSI afterburn to tweak them on an even par could this be an issue? I did two different 3dmarks11 test before and after before score = 3200 afterwards adding ssd, windows7, second 460gtx score = 4600 was expecting maybe more but then again i would not know looking at my rig does that score reflect my hardware setup?
You have a quad core cpu not a dual lol And I run core temp with its little sidebar gadget to see load. Using Afterburner was a good shout, it'll mean the slower card will run at the faster card's speed, rather than the other way round. There shouldn't be any problem doing this As for the 3dmark scores, no idea, never run it so I really couldn't advise.
Run play claw, shows gpu and cpu uage in a overlay. If your cpu is maxed out on all cores and ur gpu not you know ur cpu limited
Well checking your CPU usage is a simple as ctrl+alt+del=task manager When on the performance section go into the view menu>cpu history one graph per cpu. My bet is your CPU limited. SLI 460's is roughly equivalent to a 580 as long as the SLI profile is good and I would guess Nvidia have worked long and hard on perfecting the battlefield one and I'm sure it will continue to be tweaked.
I've never seen my RAM use go past 2.5GB of RAM. Give an example of game that require more than 4GB. Also, to the OP: sorry, didn't see you'd already added a second 460. Definitely get that CPU OC'd though, right now that is probably your bottleneck.
once again some great advice guys many thanks, i will not start writing my list to santa just yet. Will start tonight with overclocking the cpu and installing MSI Afterburn hopefully it squeeze some much needed power and get those ultra settings rocking and running smooth.
That's you personally. 8GB just gives extra breathing room in case you have a number of programs open and you don't want to close them while gaming.
Are you seriously using the ability to play that game as an argument for buying more than 4GB or RAM? Off-Topic - I just noticed that mousing over reputation gives a text descriptions, and 'yassarikhan786 is a splendid one to behold' made me lol hard
No I am not using that particular game as an argument to buy 8GB of RAM. Parge asked us to name a game that used more than 4GB, so I did 8GB should not need to be argued for as RAM prices are ridiculously low at the moment, it's just logical to get 8GB for the prices difference over 4. And lol you see, if you were famous, you would have already known that
Well, sorry for being the new guy . On topic, the 2500K is a fantastic processor that likes to overclock well. I would suggest squeezing every last bit of performance out of the Q6600 for now, because when LGA2011 hits it'll probably bring the older generation of hardware down in price. And for what it is, the Q6600 is still a very good processor.