Upgrade or not?

[Guinny]

I have been running an ASUS P5B for nearly three years now and have upgraded the CPU to a Q945 2.66ghz a year ago.

I am considereing a whole new upgrade to an i7 Core and faster ram (mine is only at 400mhz).

Would I see a masive improvement in gamming and music production?

 

[95thrifles]

not massive no, whats your upgrade budget and whats the rest of your system?
Re Gaming it tends to be GPU liite rather than CPU, so that may be a better bet for an upgrade, it depends on what resolution you game at too though

 

[Guinny]

not massive no, whats your upgrade budget and whats the rest of your system?
Re Gaming it tends to be GPU liite rather than CPU, so that may be a better bet for an upgrade, it depends on what resolution you game at too though

My system also has a 4970 512ram and I run at 1920 x 1200.

Would faster ram be a possible upgrade as I can see other options in the bios like 667mhz?

I ahve quite a high budget and have considered a new Gfx card like an Nvidia gtx275/285.

I just don't want the hassle and expense of completley rebuilding if the CPU won't make that much difference.

Sorry for my lack of knowledge...it's been a while!

 

[95thrifles]

Yeah according to info the board suppports upto 1066 so Id recomend RAM, its a nice cheap upgrade and I think youd see a reasonable improvement, especially in your general desktop usage, look at banging in some of this
Re gfx card do you mean 4870? or 4890? Either way it should be fine really, try the RAM and see how it goes

 

[Guinny]

Sorry -I meant 4870 512.

Would i need to change the memory settings in the Bios or would the correct speed be automatically set?

Thanks for the advice!

 

[95thrifles]

maybe, sometimes they default to 800 and you might have to set the multiplier/divider to make it 1066, just wait n see