Need Processor Help!!!! Please

[Garcian Smith]

sega4life said:

No, this is the only PC I have now, and it plays Star Trek Online Nice, and BF:BC2 Good, and ALL my Steam games amazingly, so it's a perfect gaming rig for me.

The Processor will give it the power I need to push Star Trek Online to Great and BF:BC2 to Nice.

That's your prerogative, though I find it hard to believe that an old dual core and a Radeon 4650 can run BF:BC2 at anything besides low settings at a playable framreate. That game brings modern mid-range rigs to their knees at high settings.

Seriously though: You're running a 32-bit OS with DDR2-533 RAM, an old (hot) dual-core CPU on an obsolete chipset, a video card that wasn't any good for gaming even when it was released back in 2008, a slow 320GB HDD (at best), and an underpowered PSU. Right now you're being bottlenecked at least as much by your GPU and RAM (not only because DDR2-533 is slow and obsolete, but also because 32-bit OSes need to share 4 GB RAM between system and VRAM) as you are by your CPU. A new copy of Windows 7 Home Premium plus a Radeon 4850 and a new PSU will set you back $250+ right off the bat, and then you'll still be bottlenecked by your old CPU, so you'll need a decent Socket AM3 CPU and complementary mobo, and then you might as well upgrade your RAM too... and suddenly you need a new system entirely. See where I'm going with this?

So you can either spend $150 now on a new CPU + HSF + PSU to keep an old system on life support for maybe another year at most while playing your games at low settings and then be forced to upgrade anyway, or you can invest $600ish now into a new midrange rig that'll blow that one away and let you enjoy your games at pretty high settings without worry of unplayable framerates.

@ jefforange89: I doubt the mobo is Socket AM2+, so he'll be limited to older Phenoms at best.