Help Me Upgrade My PC

[Pemalite]

Soleron said:

Squilliam said:

...

It may be CPU bound but that doesn't mean that a more modern GPU won't help things a lot. If you're CPU limited 50% of the time and GPU limited 50% of the time then upgrading the GPU to being 3 times faster means you can render each frame in 66% of the time or 1/3rd faster. That 1/3rd could be the difference between running something smoothly and running a juddering mess and this example is quite extreme as it is.

I run SC2 on a similar setup (4850/E8400 [2x3GHz]) and don't experience slowdown in 4v4. SC2 only uses 2 cores afaik.

I do think SC2 is CPU-bound essentially all of the time.

A Core 2 Duo has better single threaded performance than an Athlon 2 or Phenom 2, untill you overclock the North Bridge that is.
But you are correct StarCraft 2 is very processor demanding on only 2 threads.

However with that said, I have an Athlon 2 x4 620 in my brothers gaming machine that I built him and if you go into the BIOS and turn on "Advance Clock Calibration" - You may win the lottery like I did and unlock the L3 cache on that processor and turn it into a Phenom 2 x4.

Now he already has a Socket AM3 compatible motherboard so if we can find the model of his motherboard *hint hint* he may just be able to buy something like a Phenom 2 x6 or Phenom 2 x4 for cheap.
Something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103727

Then drop in a Radeon 7850 (Or better) and overclock the processor and maybe upgrade the Ram to 8gb and it should be more than enough for StarCraft 2 without breaking the bank to much.
Should run pretty much any game fine really.

Regardless of what you do though, I would advise getting a decent Power Supply (You sure it's an Anandtech brand? It's a popular tech website, never knew there was an Anandtech branded PSU!), Something like Corsair, Enermax, Seasonic, Antec Neo Eco etc' too.