Is it time to upgrade?

andythelandy · 7 Mar 2010 at 19:19

My current setup is:
[email protected]
4gb ddr800
ati 5850

But since getting the 5850 I have had a feeling it is being held back by the cpu and I'm thinking it might be time to upgrade. I have a budget of £300 and I can get a phenom 965 4gb of ram and a decent mother board in the budget (I will be intending to overclock)

I use the computer mostly for gaming and the very occasional video conversion, but is this going to be a worthwhile upgrade, how much gain do you recon i will get in games?

Thanks in advance

IIGAZI360II · 7 Mar 2010 at 20:14

The e7300 is a pretty good dual core, and as you have overclocked it already, you should be seeing some good fps.

However if you still wish to upgrade to a quad core, or a faster dual core, of course it will improve your overall performance, especially as you have a 5850.

If you wanted to go for a high end dual core, i'd suggest the phenom 550 black edition , its an amazing overclocker (can hit nearly 4GHz on an after market cooler, and as most of the current games are programmed to use 2 cores primarily, you will see brilliant performance. Also the 550 can be unlocked to become a quad core, when on the correct motherboard. See this video for info on how to unlock it, and what motherboards are compatible.

On the other hand if you wanted to get a quad core up and running out of the box, the black edition 955 looks pretty good, and is fairly overclockable.

I'd suggest sticking to the 4GB of ram, there isn't the need for any more than that if your just generally gaming.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 7 Mar 2010 at 20:17

It maybe also worth looking at a secondhand Q9550

andythelandy · 7 Mar 2010 at 20:39

If i do upgrade I am wanting a quad i see getting a dual core again more of a sidestep than an upgrade, i have thought about getting a q9550 to save upgrading everything else but from what ive seen we're talking £150+ for a used one:S