PSU help

stulid said:
no.

GPU and PSU first, the 9600GT will be a massive bottleneck.
Click to expand...

Absolutely right. There are quite a few on here who still have Q6600's. With the right graphics card there are very few games where it will be the limiting factor. A good overclock helps too.
 
Blue160 said:
Absolutely right. There are quite a few on here who still have Q6600's. With the right graphics card there are very few games where it will be the limiting factor. A good overclock helps too.
Click to expand...

+1

This page shows CPU scaling in crysis 2 when there is no graphics bottleneck - the stock Q6600 at 2.4GHz kicks out a healthy 41FPS (using extreme quality settings) - if you overclocked it to 3.0 GHz (which most Q6600s will do) then I would expect this to be closer to 50FPS.

If your current board doesn't overclock at all and you want to give overclocking a go - then It would be decent option to spend ~£40 on a second-hand P45 board like the ASUS P5Q, as these boards overclock quad cores extremely well and are well built. If you do decide to overclock - then you will need to buy a new CPU cooler. It would be a good idea to buy one which has a wide range of supported sockets - so you can reuse it when you next upgrade your system.

If you have no intention to overclock then simply don't buy another motherboard - a newer P45 board running a stock Q6600 will not be any faster than your current board - even if it is using DDR3 RAM. The two models mentioned above are both quality units and will work great with that system.

Also, absolutely make sure you get a new PSU - that really should be priority number 1, especially if you want to install a high power GPU like the 5850.
 
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