Quad core cpus

[TrojanWhore]

if you can bag a q6600 for less than about £80, then I think your onto a winner. you should notice a pretty big jump in performance. I've never played Arma2, but a quick search indicates its way more CPU than GPU hungry, and well coded to use as many cores as it can.
also, how much RAM do you have? I have a q6600 and noticed a massive improvement moving from 2gb to 4gb.
4870 should be about on par with my old nV 260gtx, and that could play everything at 1920x1200 (except crysis on max), so unless you you can find a 4870 for around £50-60, then I think you'll be better off moving to a single newer card.
On no account should you Xfire without upgrading your CPU, as the CPU will have to work a bit more than twice as hard sending the GPU instructions- your framerates will likely drop drastically!

 

[Carl_Bennetts]

I would go to the bay for those chips

 

[Evil^]

I'd say jumping from your E5200 to a Quad, especially if you apply a moderate overclock to it would be a good decision.

+1 on this
I was running an E5200 @ 3.0 until yesterday when i got a Q6600, sat at 3.0 quite nicely and there's certainly some difference between the two XD

 

[narcolepsy]

Just to close this, I got a 6600 for 80 squid on ebay (read about some MM place - what is the website for it?) and its running fine, just going to get a new cooler for a bit of gentle upspeeding.

Cheers for the help guys.

 

[doodah]

MM = Market place here at OcUK but you need 250 posts before you can use it. For future use, you should be able to get better deals with second hand computer components in MM.