Help with upgrade choices...

SixTwoSix · 24 Oct 2011 at 18:20

I'm looking to upgrade my system, purely so i'm able to play Battlefield 3 and B: Arkham City at fairly high settings...2 games i've waited all year for.

I currently have the following in my system:

AMD Phenom II X3 720 2.8Ghz, running at 3.42Ghz
ATI Radeon 4870 1GB Graphics Card
4GB DDR3 10,666 Ram.

I game at 1650x1080 resolution and I have about £250 to spend.

My first instinct is just to upgrade the graphics card to a 2GB 6950.

However i've read a lot about BF3 being heavily CPU dependant so my next thought was to upgrade to a Phenom II Quad Core and a 6850 card.

I've already got 3 cores however, i'm not sure how much benefit i'm going to get with the extra core, I can't imagine BF3 being optimised too much for a hex core.

I'm really torn at the moment, do I get a nice new 6950 and future proof my graphics for a while to come, then in 6 months or so upgrade my CPU as well or do I get both upgraded now and have a slightly lesser graphics card.

Please help, my brain is fried

95thrifles · 24 Oct 2011 at 18:32

Go for as good a gfx as you can now, then when you can afford to swap over to Intel

SixTwoSix · 24 Oct 2011 at 18:33

95thrifles said:
Go for as good a gfx as you can now, then when you. An afford to swap over to Intel

If I had the cash, i'd go intel/nvidia but in terms of performance for money, i'll be sticking with ATI/AMD.

SixTwoSix · 25 Oct 2011 at 17:54

Anyone help me out with this...really not sure which route to take

95thrifles · 25 Oct 2011 at 18:38

ATi/NVidia are fairly equal in terms of performance, but AMD has been a massive fail past couple years, they still offer reasonable performance at low end, but even mid range now Intel whoops them, for only marginally more cost you get much more performance
So as I said before, get best gfx you can afford now, whether it be ATi or NVidia, and save up so you can switch to intel and get decent performance

Subzero85 · 25 Oct 2011 at 20:32

If i was you i would get a nice new 2gb 6950, thats what i bought recently along with a new power supply and an extra 4 gigs of ddr 3 ram, and i have a phenom 2 X4 quad core at 3.40 ghz, then you can always go ivy bridge next year when it comes out and possibly crossfire your graphics