General upgrade advice pls

mrsly · 12 Jan 2009 at 17:27

Hello Gents,
I've been foolish enough to try and play FC2 on my PC...
I thought a new HD4870 or GTX280 would do it but I'm not
so sure anymore. It's all pretty dated. I cant afford a
completely new rig. Any advice on where to start upgrading?

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3
Radeon X1900XT
Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C5 TwinX
Western Digital Caviar 250GB SATA-II
Syncmaster 19" monotor

95thrifles · 12 Jan 2009 at 18:26

you could add another 2 gig of RAM and OC your CPU and with the new gfx card you should be ok, you've only get a 19" monitor so your resolution isnt going to be too high which means you can turn on more of the eye candy without stressing it too much. TBH if you're not upgrading the mnitor anytime soon theres no need for a 280, a 260 would do, and the 512mb 4870 over the 1gig - a 1gig 4870 or 280 would be overkill on that monitor/resolution

pastymuncher · 12 Jan 2009 at 19:18

Hi and welcome to the forums. Is your cpu at stock speed? That will hold you back with any new graphics card. Your motherboard is a good clocker, i used to have one, and should get your cpu to 3-3.2Ghz at least. You will need a decent cooler for it so investing £12.64 in a Akasa AK-965 would be a good move if you are only using the Intel stock cooler.

If you have never overclocked before there is a good guide in the overclocking section and there is also a massive thread about the 965P-DS3 series in the motherboard section. There are also loads of us here willing to help.

mrsly · 12 Jan 2009 at 19:53

Thanks to the forum I got the CPU to 3Ghz with the stock cooler and better timing on the RAM. Cheers for the advice, I'll add another 2 gigs of ram, a better cpu cooler and a gtx260 - all seem to be dirt cheap @ OCUK. I guess I might as well get a better sound card while I'm at it. I'm must be the only person in the world still using a SB live 24bit.