Thinking about a minor upgrade

[Fangman]

Hey all,

It's been about 2 years since i upgraded anything in my PC besides the fans and graphics card and think the processor needs a bit of a lift.

Gigabyte S3 Rev 3.3
C2D E6300.

The motherboard supports a wide range of processors despite it's age:

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/CPUSupport_Model.aspx?ProductID=2457

SOO the decision is either the cheaper E5300 or E7400. They are different classes but a £40 difference for a extra 0.2 GHZ. I am struggling to find any up-to-date CPU benchmarks that allow me to compare them. I will be using it for gaming on Vista x64. Also it seems going Quadcore is pretty usless atm so i don't want to fork out more money for something which is not WORTH that extra money. Just to note the MB doesn't support ram beyond DDR6400 so it's not worth going for the higher FSB just for that.

Another thing i want to quickly ask, is it worth going from 2gig to 4gig ram? RAM isn't expensive now so I might just do it anyway, but any input would be encouraging.

Thank you.

 

[kppanic]

in all honesty it will be better to get 4gb of ram and a new videocard. Your CPU is still good enough to pull through especially when you are comparing them with E5/7xxx.

 

[Fangman]

Well the graphics card is a 8800GT which isn't such a bad peice of kit, and by the sounds of it the 9800 GT is almost identical.

 

[kppanic]

Well the graphics card is a 8800GT which isn't such a bad peice of kit, and by the sounds of it the 9800 GT is almost identical.

In this case then 4GB will help you the most. Then clock the butt out of that CPU!