Upgrading my PC... any tips?

Question

I have the following PC:

Core2 Extreme QX9650 (4 X 3.0GHz) 1333MHz FSB/12MB Cache

4GB CORSAIR DOMINATOR 1066MHz

ASUS maximus extreme motherboard

ASUS 768mb geForce 8800 ULTRA

2 x 500GB HDD 16mb cache (7200rpm)

I get good top setting performance from this pc on pretty much every game, however with CRYSIS it struggles when all settings are on 'very high', and i am sure it will with some of the excellent releases coming soon.

What would be the best direction to go as far as increasing the performance of this machine?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

new graphics card?

Answer 2

If your HDD's aren't SATA, change them to SATA. After that, your RAM FSB doesn't match the CPU's FSB, and that can slow the transfer of information, which may cause Crysis to lag, although I'm not sure how bad it would make it lag. So you can make your ram run at 667mhz so it can run on par with the CPU (because 667mhz doubled equals 1334mhz, that 1mhz won't ruin anything).

Answer 3

Get a 10,000x 350G HDD and ditch the slower 7200 Hdd and go with DDR2 RAM.

Possibly a Pentium Extreme motherboard or a high end Gigabyte board will help a lot, also, a Powercolor Graphics card would improve things quite a lot.

Answer 4

DEFINITELY the video card.

The 8800 Ultra isn't slow but it is the bottleneck of the system. You'll see this most in Crysis, since it is heavily video intensive. As technology stands, no video card is really capable of running Crysis smoothly at higher resolutions, so if you want to run at a higher resolution I'd suggest waiting a while for the next line up of solutions from ATI or NVIDIA.

If you really want to see a significant improvement over your current setup, you're going to have to fork out. An AMD 4870 would see you some extra frame rates, as would the GTX 280 from NVIDIA, but the AMD 4870X2 would really get things moving.

As to where you shop, well, it really depends on where you live. I'm in the UK, and I would buy from either www.scan.co.uk, or www.overclockers.co.uk. Elsewhere, I'm honestly not sure.

Hope I helped.

Answer 5

The best I can suggest is a mac.... trust me it will ork out in the long run...