Will spending £150 on a gfx card give me a significant upgrade, or should I wait and change rest of

growse

growse

growse

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I've got a slightly ageing Q6600 on an Asus P5E3-WS-Pro and a Radeon HD4890 gfx card, and 8GB of memory. The problem is that games such as Saints Row 3 look awful at a playable framerate, so I'm thinking about upgrading.

At the moment, I have about £150 to spend on something. What I don't know is whether I'd see a substantial performance improvement if I spent that on a new gfx card now, or whether I should save up more and replace the CPU/motherboard.

Looking around, £150 will roughly get me an AMD HD7850, but I've not been following the market enough to know whether this will be worth getting over the 4890 I've currently got.
 
It will be a vast upgrade from the 4890. I just did a similar thing from an AMD 5770 to a 7850 and that was a huge difference. Yours will be even more so. You start to reach the "limit" as it were, of the q6600 being an older architecture CPU and less efficient (fast) as modern day Intel i series CPUs.

This - people will tell you - will cause a significant bottleneck and cause the GPU to be hindered by the poor CPU performance. This is almost always massively over exagerrated since games are mostly very GPU dependant even today. The bottleneck will be lessened by overclocking the q6600 to as high as you can. This should be first on your list. It should easily do 3200ghz. I run a q9450 at 3400ghz with a 7850 and all the latest games run fine at high res 1920 x 1200. I have not however, tried something like Battlefield 3 online 64man servers, which I am told are heavily CPU dependant and can demand more CPU power.
 
The Q6600 isn't clocked, simply because I never actually got around to it....

I've heard that some games like GTA4 are more CPU-bound, so this was my concern about getting a gfx upgrade, but if the difference is going to be huge, then I might just invest now, and then get something like an i5/i7 in the future.
 
Yeah. I would go for it. Definitely overclock the q6600 though. Most do 3ghz on stock volts, and easily upto around 3.2ghz with some basic tweaking.
 
Will have a tinker with the clockspeed and see what I can do. Biggest concern will be cooling and the memory.
 
The Q6600 is pretty much guaranteed to clock to 3gHz on stock cooling and voltage, there were only ever a handful that didn't and they were usually running with cheap motherboard/memory or dreadful cooling. You might want a bit more cooling now that the CPU is a little older, to give it a bit more breathing room, but you should still easily be able to overclock it.

Add something like the 7850 to the clock boost and you should keep going for a while longer yet before you start hitting CPU/memory bandwidth barriers in a year or two (depending on what games you play), at which point you can start looking at an upgrade to CPU/MB/RAM
 
Ive got my sons Q6600 overclocked to 3.4 and with 8gb ram and a 7850 it runs most games pretty well, ive tried sleeping dogs, borderlands 2, farcry 3 and Battlefield 3 and they all play nicely.
Get a decent cooler on the CPU and overclock it.
 
Audigex said:
The Q6600 is pretty much guaranteed to clock to 3gHz on stock cooling and voltage, there were only ever a handful that didn't and they were usually running with cheap motherboard/memory or dreadful cooling. You might want a bit more cooling now that the CPU is a little older, to give it a bit more breathing room, but you should still easily be able to overclock it.

Add something like the 7850 to the clock boost and you should keep going for a while longer yet before you start hitting CPU/memory bandwidth barriers in a year or two (depending on what games you play), at which point you can start looking at an upgrade to CPU/MB/RAM
Click to expand...

Ah, good to know it'll probably do well on stock. I'll have a play. My initial instinct was to just 'throw more memory in', as it's more of a work/development machine than a gaming box. But then I figured out that my motherboard only takes 8GB RAM :(

wazza300 said:
a nice ssd would improve your system aswell if you dont already have one
Click to expand...

Already have an SSD, although it is a 2nd Gen Intel X25 80GB...
 
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