I posted a thread about this on the Electronic Arts forum, but not really having much luck, people are just saying buy a whole new system, well we all know that, but we don't all have £100's to spend on a new system. So I'd like to know what graphics card I could get to play Battlefield 3 on higher settings rather than low. My specs are: Q6600 stock 3Gb Ram 8800GT win 7 32bit My res is only 1400x900 though, so i thought along the line of a GTX 460 or HD 6850/70 but would they be bottlenecked (perhaps the hd 6870 might)? I have thought about overclocking the cpu but I'm not really overly confident as I've never done it before! Cheers
I can't see anything really being bottle-necked by a Q6600. Especially if you OC it a bit. Also I'd go up to 4GiB of RAM and get a 64bit copy of windows. My 460 seemed to play the BETA alright at high settings. A 560 might be a better option as its a bit newer.
Also what cooler have you got on the Q6600? is it stock? if so might want to spend a few £'s on better cooling when going down OC route
Yeah I've heard the hyper 212+ is a great cooler. But when overclocking how are you supposed to know when to up the voltage?
When it starts BSOD'ing out the ass . Or crashing, general instability. If you cant achieve such a thing on certain settings and voltage is the thing you have left to change then you go with that.
God i hate people. Since when did a q6600 become a bad chip?! I know its not the newest tech, but clocked @ 3.2ghz - 4ghz they are still reasonable.
If you haven't already, read a few guides (preferably ones written buy an actual site, not by some random forum user somewhere) - these will give you a rough estimate of what voltages you can/should use and what to aim for. From there you just need to have a little bit of a play around really, see if you can find a sweet spot and what you are comfortable with when it comes to temperatures.
A reasonable OC on the Q6600 should be quite easy to achieve - I wouldn't go for a record-breaker because that will quite dramatically decrease the life expectancy of your chip. A new 4gb kit will cost you £25, an 8gb kit £45 - it's up to you, personally I would get the 8gb kit as it's a small expense that makes a dramatic difference. Finally, as you say, a 6850/70 willl do the job at that resolution quite happily I think. If you're not planning on getting a new screen any time soon, then get the 6850; if you think you might get a 1080p screen in the future then perhaps a 6870 would be better.
I used to have one of those. Weak memory controller, never managed to get decent stable overclocks with an E6850 on that board + 4x1Gb sticks without upping the memory voltage a bit, but it was fine with 2 at stock voltage.
Don't think I've ever heard a good word said about the Asus P5N motherboards, If your concerned with voltages, you could always just not touch them. Then just OC to what you can with stock voltage, you should still be able to get a fair bit out of it. Is it a G0 stepping one? My 3.2GHz OC is running at essentially stock voltage, although I've got a high VID chip so the voltage is high to start with at 1.325V. I just had to enable load line calibration to reduce vdroop.
Overclock the snot out of that Q6600, the best advice that can be given here imho. I got my Q6700 to 3.475ghz. Bad Company 2 appreciated that ALOT. Frostbite 1.5/2 is a VERY cpu cycle-hungry engine.