Do you think it would be worth upgrading from my X2 560 chip to either an X4 960T or X6 1055T? I also have 4gb RAM and a 6850 VGA card. My Asus board will only support 95w tdp so I'm a bit limited if I continue using this same mainboard. In terms of gaming, would the x4 or x6 chips offer much better framerates over my current x2 560 or would my money be better spend in an other area of the system (ie a quicker vga card or more ram)? Ta
An X4 would offer better performance, provided you have powerful gpu. As an example, my 460 was bottlenecked severely when I tested it in my friends X2 250(running at 3.6GHz) to see if it was worth him upgrading graphics card or overhauling his PC for skyrim.
Which games? I expect more modern ones will definitely benefit from having 4 cores, 6 is overkill for the moment for gaming, more suited to rendering and video encoding.
1055t is 125w so that's out. 960t is a nice upgrade but if you're just looking for pure frame rate boosts you wont go far wrong with a 560ti. Personally I'd upgrade the GPU and start putting pennies away for a 2500k or keep on saving until IB although the GPU by its self will give you a good bump in frame rates.
As most games aren't optimised to run on 6 cores the slower clock would hit performance however with the faster clock on the X4 this would be a better choice!
Can you post the model of mainboard you have? Also, are you doing / do you intend to do any overclocking?
How about seeing if your chip can unlock the other 2 cores before considering upgrades? What motherboard do you have? A lot of AM3/AM3+ boards from Asus seem to support core unlocking so it's certainly worth a shot. Why pay for upgrades when they're there waiting to be used
