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slight upgrade before new system purchase, what to get?

M

Maverick2002

Diamond Member
Here's my current setup:

C2D 1.8 E4300 @ 2.165 or something
4GB G.Skill DDR2-800 @ 799
eVGA 7900GS @ stock

I'm going to be building a new ~$1500 the end of this year, but I'd like to know if I can do a minor upgrade to what I have now until then. I really only play CS:S now (waiting patiently for SC2 and someday D3) and want to get some decent frame rates. With what I have now I get ~35-65fps at 1280x800 at medium settings, no AA. 35fps is definitely hurting my game, but any lower resolution looks like poo on a 24" screen.

I'm open to overclocking the system more, but I'm not sure how far above 800mhz the G.Skill RAM will go. I was told overclocking the video card won't do much.

I'd love to get 60fps minimum at 1440x900, medium settings, maybe even 2xAA. That would hold me over until the new system. Can I achieve that with the current system, and if so, what would it take (severe OC, CPU or vid card upgrade?)

I'd like to keep it under $100 if I need to buy something.

I still don't get how games treat CPU vs. video cards are bottlenecks, and I'm under the assumption most don't benefit from multiple cores?
 
For CS, I would think the current limit is your GPU. CS:S is a fairly old game, so I don't believe a CPU upgrade would do much. Get a midrange video card, I would think a 4830/50 (which should be under 80) would do you very well. Maybe even something smaller.
 
I'm running Vista Ultimate 64bit. cl_showfps 1 reports frame rates on dust2 between 35-65fps, and they're in red (not sure if that color means anything).
 
4770 (if you can find one) or 4850 (around $100 after MIR)

EDIT: And you should be able to easily push that e4300 a bit higher, say 2.5GHz or so.
 
Thanks for the tip. I actually figured out what the problem was causing my dismal framerates - I had 4x MSAA antialiasing set by default. I bumped it down to 2x and am now getting 55fps minimum, with jumps up to over 100.
 
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