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Bit of advice

Jabbs

Jabbs

Jabbs

Soldato
Joined
6 Feb 2004
Posts
7,765
Location
Rugeley
HI I currently have a poor system below, with a GTX 560 Ti oc @ 950 on the core so well over the stock 830(ish), I have been out of the PC upgrade market for a while now so not sure what is good or not.
Q6600 @ 3.1 gig
4gb DDR2 1066,


Now I am running things in 3D vision and while the card does suprisingly good some games suffer as you can imagine, I have 2 choices either get a better up to date system I5/I7 etc or I could just throw a 580gtx in, which will offer the best results do you think.
 
Personally I woul update the system first, it would probably gain better in game performance than chucking in a 580 on your 6600, as it would definitely bottleneck that card.
 
A quick way to test if your bottleneck is your CPU or GPU is to raise or reduce graphical detail to see if FPS changes dramatically.

For example, if you are getting low FPS does dropping AA/AF levels in increments significantly raise FPS. If it does then you are GPU bottlenecked. If FPS stays fairly conistent (within a few FPS) then your CPU is the bottleneck.

Though having said that I would agree with the other posters. Your CPU is most likely the bottleneck, and if it isn't now it will be if you throw in a GTX 580.
 
Suprisingly this card I got now handles games pretty good finished Batman Assylum and it ran that fine on max apart from the physx part, BF3 just a case of lowering some of the options but it runs it great still, even metro 2033 it runs that ok suprisingly.

It certainly hasn't had the impact I was expecting running them in 3D vision, but its well worth it as its breathed life into gaming for me as it was getting pretty boring, don't think I could play them without it now but need a bit more power.
 
Most games will benefit from a GPU upgrade. The exception being games that heavily utilize the CPU, generally RTS type but the odd game from any genre has high CPU utilization. Your CPU for instance will probably perform withing a few FPS as my PII 940 or an i5 2500K in BF3 and I'll probably keep my CPU/MOBO/RAM combo for another few years yet.

You are very close to the next gen Nvidea, 3 or 4 months I think but some say Feb. If you can wait.
 
Wait if you can, if not then a GPU upgrade would still be more beneficial than cpu/mobo, especially as you're running 3d vision.
 
The Q6600 shouldn't bottleneck a 560ti that badly IMO.

It'll choke a 580 however.

So you're kind of in a conundrum really. As others have suggested I would do the rest first. At least the 560ti is a "modern part" and tbh most manufacturer built rigs these days around the £1k mark only come with a 560ti any way.

Plus DDR2 is old hat. When I stepped from my Phenom 2 X4 940 @3900mhz (I had to it was choking all my games :( ) with DDR2 to a I7 950 with DDR3 the difference really was remarkable.

Quite simply as the core technology in the I7, even the old ones, obliterates the old duos and quads.
 
I took the plunge today on a I5 2500k setup mob/ram/cpu so hope this helps can always add a second 560ti when they cheaper, plus will make some back on my Q6600 setup.
 
Got my I5 setup now and what a major difference, boosted my FPS on games really pleased with it.
 
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