Advice with upgrading

[Notsogosu]

Hi, I my brother has an Intel E8400 CPU with an Intel motherboard. He plays SC2 pretty much 5 or 6 hours a day. He notices that when he is in an intense battle hes FPS just drop. He asked me for advice on what to do but I am not sure if i should tell him to get a different motherboard so he can OC or just upgrade to an i3 Sandybridge or 1556 socket(which i don't recommend because its EOL). Its just difficult to recommend spending 100 on a good MB and 24 on CM Hyper212(when about 200 gets you i3 2100 and MB) to over clock and wish that it solves the problem and does not studder and the time he needs it most.

Basically what I want to know is if He goes the OC route i will be worth it.

The rest of the PC

20 inch Monitor @1600x900
CM550w power supply
Nvidia 8800gt (he plays @low settings don't need upgrade)
2x2GB memory

EDIT: i forgot he also would have to buy ddr3 memory

 

[Denithor]

i3 isn't much faster than e8400, in some games the new architecture is actually slower. Full upgrade just to another dual core is not worth it.

http://www.techspot.com/review/305-starcraft2-performance/page13.html

SC2 appears to like high clockspeed, hands down, over core count. The PhII X2 chip delivers about the same performance as the X4 chip when speeds are set the same, meaning that this game doesn't benefit appreciably from quad-core processors.

Your best bet is probably to find a cheap overclocking motherboard and just ramp up that e8400 to 4GHz. Look in the FS/FT forums, many people are selling off those kind of boards as they upgrade to Sandy Bridge...

 

[richierich1212]

you should mention his budget

 

[Notsogosu]

Not an exact budget, Im just trying to figure out what is the best option price/performance wise. What i know is that he will not go all out and spend 500 on a new system, so i would say probably 250-300 if going a new proccesor route.

@Denithor
Thanks for the info great chart you provided been looking at every chart out there trying to get good info.
From what your telling me (and what i kind of suspected and hoped) is that going the OC route would be the best option, could it reach 4.0Ghz easyly?

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

could it reach 4.0Ghz easyly?

Depends on how good the ram is, if it is stable at 400Mhz, than you can potentially reach 3.6Ghz - also depends on the motherboard and it's circuitry + northbridge - the Gigabyte UD3P or R P45 board is a phenomenal 775LGA board. Probably the best overclocking 775 board out there. But most times an overclock fails is because of the RAM, no matter how many different times it passes however many RAM stability tests, its more than likely the RAM.