Non-Sandy Bridge Gaming upgrade?

[GullyFoyle]

My friend is going to buy a new hard drive and install it in his PC (disconnecting the current C drive), to test whether a fresh install of Win 7 64 bit will run his AutoDesk Revit Architecture software stably.

If so, perhaps buy a new video card now and wait for Sandy Bridge to return.
We shall see.

Thanks for all of your input so far.

 

[simonizor]

Sandy bridge chips give a good 10-15% performance boost over the old i7 chips. Going from a Q9550 to a regular i7 chip wouldn't really be a big enough jump to justify building a whole new rig, but a Sandy bridge i7 chip might be.

If your friend doesn't want to wait for Sandy bridge, just have him upgrade his video card, download a copy (or he might be able to call MS and have them ship him a copy if he doesn't want to pirate) of Win 7 x64 and use his current key to activate it, and upgrade RAM to 6GB for now. I would suggest getting 8GB, but he's probably still using DDR2 RAM if he's got a Q9550 so he wouldn't be able to use that RAM if he decided to upgrade his CPU and mobo later this year or something.. With a better video card and at least 4GB RAM (6GB would be ideal), his computer should max out everything except for Crysis and a couple of others.