upgrade from a e6300

[bru]

OK my sons machine is currently running a Intel Pentium e6300 overclocked to 3.6 Ghz on a p31 ds3l motherboard with 4 Gb of DDR2 ram and a Nv260gtx (was a NV8800gs)

He plays loads of various games, including a lot of WOW and D3. Also half life 2 deathmatch, LFDead2, LOL and minecraft. Now he was complaining of very low FPS in D3, LOL and minecraft and yet WOW was OK, so I upgraded his previous Nv 8800gs to his currant 260GTX. Frame rates improved slightly but not to a point that made D3 any more playable.

Now I was thinking of a new CPU board and memory, something like....

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Pentium G620 2.60GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £49.99
1 x ASRock H61M-GS Intel H61 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Micro Motherboard £38.99
1 x TeamGroup Elite 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TED38192M1600HC11DC) £29.99
Total : £118.97 (includes shipping : FREE).



but I'm not totally convinced that it will be a significant step forward if one at all judging by this.... (note this doesn't take into account the overclock)

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/406?vs=94

Any comments or suggestions welcome.

 

[bru]

If its D3 your looking to improve the money you were thinking of spending will snag a HD7770 OC, which will give a much bigger boost in D3 than the new CPU/mobo/ram (in fact as that CPU can't be overclocked the loss of 1ghz per core may even hurt D3)

I really don't think that spending £120 on a another graphics card is really a good idea especially one that isn't really that much quicker than the 260GTx that Ive just paid £40 for.

But I do agree that the CPU probably isn't a big enough step up to make much difference.

 

[bru]

For MC more RAM seems to help, but you can actually gain a massive performance boost from using optimine and java 1.7 beta. It practically doubled the FPS on my laptop and the game didn't look any different.

Ill have to look into optimine, cheers for the suggestion.

 

[bru]

but a q6600 will only be better in games that utilize more than 2 cores, for anything else it will be very similar to the [email protected]

 

[bru]

Well my wifes machine has a q6600 in it also running at 3.6Ghz and I can tell you now when I upgraded her machine from the e6300 to the q6600 both running at 3.6Ghz there was next to no difference in most things, as at that time next to nothing used more than 2 cores and even now the games my son plays still don't utilise multi core CPU's particularly well.

Furthermore going from a running a q6600 ( 65nm kentsfield CPU 95/105w) at 3.6Ghz will definitely require a much better heat sink and fan than the artic cooling freezer 7 pro that he currently has on his E6300 (45nm wolfdale CPU 65w) at 3.6Ghz which will mean another £20 or £30 on top of the £60 for the q6600. So thats £80 to £90 on an upgrade that will still leave him with only 4Gb of ram on an ageing socket 775 system which isn't going to actually give much better performance than his currant system in the games he actually plays.

but thank you for the comments anyway.

 

[bru]

Thank you all for your comments.

It would seem that a CPU/MB upgrade that will fit within the sort of budget I was thinking (£120) isn't going to solve his D3 performance issues judging by what has been said above, also after reading this review. Maybe its a memory issue as he is always running several things at once including skype, steam and sometimes even league of legends as well as D3, I will have to check.

 

[bru]

Yes I have told him hundreds of times to close down stuff he isn't using, and I haven't seen a 17 year old yet that actually listens to their parents, but with all that aside I have tested his machine myself and it runs D3 fairly poorly, even though i haven't tested it on inferno difficulty which is where he says hes getting the worst slowdowns.

I wasn't saying that he always runs two or more games/programs at once but I have seen him do that before. I will have to get a log of the memory usage over a typical nights gaming to see if more memory might help.
Suggestions as the best way to check memory usage that will log it to a file so I can see if more memory will help?

 

[bru]

Heat is a good point, ill have to check.
As for resource monitor it only show memory usage at that moment in time I really need something that will log it so I can look at it latter.