What to upgrade....

[thegeek574]

Hello everyone.
I was wondering what the forums opinion of what to upgrade would be. I want to play starcraft 2, and i have all my settings on low, medium, or off. i can see 3 main things that would need to be upgraded. it would either be moving from a dual core to a quad core, from just a single 4650 to that and a 4850 in crossfire, or from 4-6 gigs of ram. I am on an extremley limited budget, and i wanted the expert's opinions. there are two catches, though. if i was to get the 4850, i would need to get another power supply, and that could get expensive. the other scary thing is that when i built the computer, i did not thing i would need more than a 32 bit operating system, so that's what i got. I do not know what frame rates i am getting, but i would love to be able to see explosions.
thanks,
Steven

[Pehu]

Your PSU should be able to support at least a HD5750 (or even a 5770), so you could look into those. The addition of memory from 4 to 6Gigs would probably do absolutely nothing for you. A faster processor likely would, but your graphics card is certainly holding you back probably the most and any other upgrade would likely mean a full upgrade (as in basically a totally new computer).
...and forget about crossfire, just ditch the old card (=sell it, reuse it, whatever).

[RatboyX]

Not going to be able to crossfire the 4650 with a 4850 you would need both to be the same. I’m not sure what your budget is but I would consider an Nvidia 460 even one with 768 Mb as opposed to the 1 Gb version would be better than the 4850 and you could get that for a decent enough price.

[thegeek574]

I have a budget of about 75-100 dollars. that rules out the GTX 460, but another nvidia card would not be a problem. i have never used a nvidia card before, and frankly i find the number schemes kind of confusing, so any help would be appreciated.

[JSLEnterprises]

I would save up just a little more until you have $200 and a little bit, and get a Phenom II x6 1055t, your board supports it since bios 2004 (current bios available is 2101 which was released on the 17th of this month)

you can then sell your current processor on craigs list or kijiji for like $50
recouping some of your expenditures.

[Pehu]

I would save up just a little more until you have $200 and a little bit, and get a Phenom II x6 1055t, your board supports it since bios 2004 (current bios available is 2101 which was released on the 17th of this month)

you can then sell your current processor on craigs list or kijiji for like $50
recouping some of your expenditures.

Would still be stuck with the 4650, which is certainly the biggest bottleneck in that system (even if it usually is quite CPU limited).

[Lenny]

This is a good analysis of CPU & GPU performance with Starcraft II.

http://www.techspot.com/review/305-s...2-performance/

Apparently it will use at most 2 cores (see page 13) which is odd for a brand new game. It's difficult to say if you are Athlon X2 will be adequate for the game. I had an X2 at 2.6 Ghz and it worked fine for everything until I bought Bad Company 2 which was very CPU limited on the X2. I upgraded to the X6 1055T and BC2 opened right up.

I would suggest spending your money on a video card, maybe the 5750 or 5770 if you can catch a deal on newegg. If performance is still poor then save for a Phenom II X2. Those are fast dual cores for $100 or less. And if you board supports unlocking you might get an X3 or X4 out of the deal even though SC II won't use the extra cores but other games will.

[xiz0r]

if you can spend a 'lil more you could get a hd 5770 with a $15 mir rebate
so end cost with shipping $135 +tx.

IMHO its the best upgrade you can get for the $$ and you could always sell the 4650.

[Lenny]

The 5770 was actually the card I had my eye on until I was offered a good deal on a used 4870 which I think performs similar to a 5750. Btw, lots of used cards out there like on ebay and sometimes here in the Trading forum.

[thegeek574]

I will most likely end up getting a 5750, and then building a new system when my old one goes kaput.

[JSLEnterprises]

upgrading the vid card to a 5750 or a 5770, his rosewill 450watt power supply will probably not be able to deliver the adequate power demands. See if there is a review of your specific model first, and see if they were able to pull the amount of wattage as the sticker states. If not, then you're looking to buy a new power supply with that video card.

[Lenny]

Not sure of the quality of the Rosewill but just based on wattage 450w should be plenty for the 5770, assuming the PSU has at least one 6-pin PCI-E connector. Most reviews show the 5770 running with a modern Intel CPU consuming under 300w at load.

[Lenny]

I just found this site where can compare just about any two modern video cards. Some comparisons include a few gaming benchmarks while others are compared only based on the specs of each card. I thought this might be helpful to you.

http://www.hwcompare.com/graphics/

[amd5150]

use this

http://cyri.systemrequirementslab.com/CYRI/