Of everything listed, none of the listed upgrades will improve the loading time of Empire: TW. The only way to probably really improve that would be to get a second HDD and setup up striping.

Your current rig doesn't have issues playing Empire: TW, so upgrading a CPU, RAM, Video card or audio card will NOT improve the loading times, IMO.

And I was a few seconds too slow, I guess I fail at helping :(

Ah. Get an SSD.

Much faster for loading times than even 10000rpm drives in RAID 0, I can back that up with benchmarks if I must.

I missed out the '2', thought you had 2GB. 4GB is plenty.

SSD huh? I'll look into that

I'm not doubting your claim, as SSD hard drives would really only be limited by throughput of SATA, but I would like to see some benchmarks on this.

@prof,

Getting a second HDD and setting up RAID0 will require a format reinstall (unless some RAID0 magic has been created).  Although getting a second HDD that is an SSD, and then installing your games to that HDD would be faster and not require a reinstall of your OS.

My personal opinion would be to wait for a bit longer since prices are dropping on everything. If I were you I would chill for a month or two and then if you feel like a change I would go with the SSD. Its the only thing that will directly affect loading times. If you get one, do your research and get a newer one since the older ones run into TRIM issues.

I would chill a bit longer though


I guess if you really felt like it you could try Windows 7 x64 bit version and bump up to 8 GB of RAM and then load the game on one of the RAM sticks. This way everytime you start the game, it just loads it right from the stick. I've heard of this working in the past but I would have to google how to do it again ;)

Here is a very very detailed guide about the new SSDs and how they work and what to look for. Best resource available but kinda wordy, you should be able to skim through the pages to find the info you want/need :

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631

:)

Nope it won't.

I installed ETW on SSD drive (Patriot Warp v2) and there were no noticable gains (i was checking with stop watch).

As for op question:

get

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835185093

or other good cooler and overclock your cpu at least to 2.8Ghz and upgrade GPU to radeon 5850 as suggested before.

For <300$ you will have very decent machine.

Err, the Raptor is not solid state.  Plus, you said nothing about RAID 0.  I have 2 of these drives installed in RAID0 and it super fast.  I have not used SSD but I know they can be really fast also but inorder to get the speed you have to pay a hefty price. And really you should buy 2 for the best performance.

Also, if your going to install a heat sink, make sure it is all copper and not just the heat pipes. Don't forget the Artic Silver!!

For and under $300 upgrade I say go with 2 Raptors and RAID0 them.  This is going to give you your biggest bang for your buck.  The rest of you system look really good.

Sorry to post again but I would suggest reading the link I put in my last post.
From the research I did awhile ago, good SSDs are better than even raid setup raptors.

If the game is loading from the HD, then yes a SSD should help speed up the loading.
Some games use large files or play with the files which can slow things down but if the code is good then the game will load faster. Just the loading, not gameplay. Just google SSD improve game load. The only thing faster than SSD right now is your RAM which you can write to using RAMdisk. However I am not sure if games work but they probably do.

Also overclocking your CPU will not help much with load times, unless you really crank it which I wouldn't suggest, it may take a couple seconds off. Finally a better GPU is definitely not going to help with loading either and those prices are dropping so I would wait on that. Your mobo doesn't support quad cores so you may want to just wait. I think ur system looks fine but if its killing you, start looking into SSDs. The harddrive is the smallest bottleneck of any system, especially when large apps like games can't write everything to the RAM.

I personally don't like getting into RAID but if you don't mind it, then 2 raptors would give you a bump but not as good as an SSD which is of course more expensive ;)