Worthwhile upgrades for my PC.

[Kiro-San]

With Deus Ex coming soon and the Witcher 2 freshly installed (and BF3 not too far away) I've been looking at upgrading my PC. Now I don't want to install Windows again and I'm pretty sure my current CPU won't need upgrading given a decent overclock. So realistically it leaves me looking at adding more RAM or upgrading the graphics card. Unfortunately I've not really been paying attention to the latest hardware cycles so I'm not sure if any of the current crop of graphic cards will actually provide a decent boost in performance for the money so here I am, asking for advice. Budget is around £300 and I'll playing on a single monitor at 1920x1200.

[Pob255]

Are you overclocking atm?

4gb of ram is still no form of bottle neck and apart from higher possible overclocks running the ram faster than a 1:1 ratio does very little for a socket775 system.

Your 5870 is still far from a slow card, you're going to have to go to a gtx580 or 6970 to get any real boost in performance

note:the 6950 is only a couple of % faster than the 5870

The gtx580 is around £370 and the 6970 is around £270

[Kiro-San]

I've been experimenting this afternoon but without a great deal of success. So far I've stuck to just overclocking using the multiplier and leaving the FSB at 266Mhz and memory at 400Mhz (2:3 divider). Currently sitting at 2.93Ghz at 1.3125v. I've tried taking it up to 3.2Ghz but just can't get it stable, the machine will just shut down when running Intel Burn Test. It's just passed a 10 cycle IBT on high at the current overclock.

To be honest I was thinking that I'd have to spend quite a bit to get a decent performance boost but looking at that graph I don't think any of the current crop of graphic cards provide a decent return. Any indications on when AMD/nVidia will be releasing their next crop of cards?

[Kiro-San]

Now up to 9 x 333 and stable (5:6 divider). It hit 79°C on two of the cores but the ambient temp is pretty high in my room and the PC needs a clean which it'll get tomorrow.

[Wakinglimb]

I would hold off the upgrade for now,no huge benefits available to you.

[Kiro-San]

Yeh seems there isn't any point in me spending money on my rig at the moment, not going to see any tangible benefits. Cheers guys.

[watercooled]

AMD 7000 series should be out by the end of the year, Nvidia says their next line will be 2012. But for now I don't think it's worth upgrading your GPU.

[Kiro-San]

Thanks for the info, I guess I know what I'll be getting for Christmas then. The 7xxx series should provide a big boost from the 5xxx series... Hopefully.