Upgrades

[Mike.c]

Hi Guys,

I'm starting to get the urge to upgrade my gaming pc - mianly due to the soon to be release Total War: Shogun 2 (STW2). My current setup is as follows:

CPU: Intel Q6600 @ 2.4GHz
Motherboard: Asus P5K
GPU: Geforce GTX 275
Memory: 4 GB PC2-6400

I think the Q6600 will struggle slightly with STW2 (especially when zoomed in) and I was looking at upgrading this to one of the new i7's. I've got a tight budget of below £400 and this means I won't have the money to upgrade the GPU as well. So my main concern is that even if I do upgrade to an i7, the GTX 275 will be too much of a bottle neck to make it all worth while. Do you think this would be the case or am I just underestimating the GPU, and would still see a benefit of changing to an i7?

What I've been looking at specically is as follows:

Intel CPU Core i7 2600 Sandy Bridge
MSI P67A-GD55 Intel P67 Express
Corsair Memory XMS3 4GB DDR3 1600 MHz CAS 9 XMP Dual Channel

The idea is that I won't have to upgrade the CPU, motherboard and RAM for a long while and can then focus on saving up for a new graphics card.

I'm not completely up to date on the new hardware available, so I would be open to alternative options - as long as they were sub £400.

Thanks,

Mike.

[dirky]

Do you know what the spec is for TW? What resolution do you game at?
You could OC your Q6600 and upgrade your GPU

[Pob255]

I'd agree with dirky here, depends on resolution, but your q6600 should still have plenty of legs esp if you overclock it a bit, just pushing it up to 3ghz should give you a nice bump in performance.

[Behemoth]

I'd keep the Q6600 and grab a new GFX card and perhaps grab some more DDR2 ram before the price goes any higher.

[Domestic_Ginger]

PCgameshardware have done a number of articles regarding performance in ETW and NTW. S2 should be fixed but many of the option seem remarkably similar. Some of the early reports state it is dual core limited; this was fixed with a leter release.

Unfortunately until the games released it going to be difficult to determine which is going to make the most difference. The demo for ETW had little bearing on th release title.

[MSIC]

Hey Mike.c.
I have to say that i'm also of the strong opinion that your graphics card, not your CPU, is your current bottleneck in gaming, and that you'll get more immediate benefit from upgrading that. Overclocking the CPU (something like 3.0Ghz should be very easy unless you have an unlucky CPU) will also help.
That said, I can understand your logic in wanting to upgrade the CPU etc first, and am happy to recommend something now provided that you understand that you will see relatively little benefit in gaming today.

[Also, i'd very seriously wait for the new 'B3' stock to come in before ordering any motherboards right now].
Motherboard: MSI P67A-GD55 £110.
CPU: Core i5 2500K OEM £162.
CPU HSF: Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 £20.
RAM: 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1600 MHz 1.50V £87
Total = £379. A bit of wiggle room if people have a certain preference for a slightly better CPU HSF, or a different motherboard, however that is pretty much what I would buy in your shoes.