I am currently running an old socket 939 system with an AMD Athlon X2 3800 and 2GB of low latency RAM, and for the most part it serves me well. I get 60fps in games like Mass Effect and Unreal Tournament 3, yet my framerate absolutely blows in games like World of Warcraft even though I am running these games from a Western Digital Raptor drive, which has significantly boosted my loading times and even gave me a framerate improvement.
When the framerate tanks on me, I hear my hard drive go nuts, like its trying to cache as much data as quickly as possible, which I think is causing my system to freeze up and sometimes BSOD. And upon observing the system conditions via monitoring software while running problem games like WoW, I find that while the system temperatures are well within the normal operating conditions, the CPU seems to have a tremendous load on it when the framerate drops hit and the ram goes above 80% used.
What I want to know is this: Is it prudent to throw out $300 on a socket AM2+ upgrade ( AMD Phenom X4 9950, 4GB RAM, AM2+ mobo), or would a solution to the issue be found elsewhere?
When the framerate tanks on me, I hear my hard drive go nuts, like its trying to cache as much data as quickly as possible, which I think is causing my system to freeze up and sometimes BSOD. And upon observing the system conditions via monitoring software while running problem games like WoW, I find that while the system temperatures are well within the normal operating conditions, the CPU seems to have a tremendous load on it when the framerate drops hit and the ram goes above 80% used.
What I want to know is this: Is it prudent to throw out $300 on a socket AM2+ upgrade ( AMD Phenom X4 9950, 4GB RAM, AM2+ mobo), or would a solution to the issue be found elsewhere?